A client of mine was abused as a child by a relative several years older. When he told his parents, they did not believe him, and they accused him of lying. There are many ways to learn that other people are not safe, and most of them involve trust betrayed: by a caregiver, a friend, a partner, a colleague, a stranger, or an institution.
Despite their unique circumstances, many of the children and adults I’ve worked with over three decades share one common trait, regardless of their personal histories. They learned the world was not safe. The experience of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, or neglect, frequently haunted their days and nights. Often, the people who hurt them were caregivers who betrayed their children by victimizing them. My clients developed varied, creative survival strategies, sometimes ingenious, but they almost always came at a high personal cost. Some became aggressive, pushing relationships to the breaking point to avoid further hurt. Others became invisible, effacing themselves so thoroughly that no one, including themselves, could genuinely connect with them. Still others oscillated between the two, impulsively reacting one moment and then shutting down and disappearing the next.
Healing came more often than I expected. When it did, it looked less like getting rid of those strategies and more like recognizing the value they had provided and that they were no longer necessary. What made the difference was almost never a technique. It was a relationship: sustained, honest, and willing to be present with the full weight of what each person carried, validating their experience, not disavowing or explaining it away, and not trying to solve it. They came to believe, against all prior evidence, that genuine contact was possible. Once that conviction was established, even tentatively, it changed everything.
For over a decade, I have asked myself whether what I witnessed in those consulting rooms and residential treatment centers says anything about what I see unfolding in the culture. My answer, which I hold with increasing conviction, is: more than I initially thought, and in ways that go far beyond metaphor.
Consider the political fragmentation we live in: the retreat into defended identity, the inability to engage with genuine difference without seeing it as a threat, and the preference for an echo chamber over an argument. Disagreement turns into grievance, and grievance into a false, protective identity. These patterns resemble what I have seen in many of the children and adults I have known in therapy, scaled up to civilizational proportions. I mean more than an analogy. I think the same underlying logic is at work, in different circumstances and on a far greater scale.
Martin Buber, the twentieth-century philosopher whose work has deeply shaped my thinking, offered the word for what I am trying to describe. He called it “the between”: what happens when two people meet as persons. For a genuine dialogue to occur, Buber wrote, each must “regard his partner as the very one he is,” be aware that he is “different, essentially different from myself,” and accept the person he sees. As I read him, that space is where the most important moments in human life happen: in small daily encounters with other people, nature, and art. It is where growth and healing occur and where genuine community becomes possible. In the deepest register, it is where we become ourselves.
I think of what happens next as the between closing. When fear, pain, or the accumulated weight of past injury leads a person to stop risking genuine contact, the consequences are profound and, if left unaddressed, self-reinforcing. The closed person cannot encounter difference without experiencing it as threat. That person cannot be wrong without experiencing it as annihilation, or revise a belief without feeling the self dissolve. These adaptations are more than character failures. They answer a world that has increasingly proven unsafe.
The book I am writing, Distracted by Difference, traces that logic across scales. It moves from the individual to the clinical relationship, then to the philosophical account of what makes genuine encounter possible, then to the cultural and political crisis we are living through, and finally to what healing, at every level, requires. It is a long book. It draws on psychology, philosophical theology, cultural criticism, and the contemplative tradition. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton, whom I have read since graduate school, appears often.
I have been writing it in various forms for more than twenty years. Some of that time was necessary: the argument needed to mature, and the connections needed to deepen and clarify. Some of that time came from fear or the ordinary human tendency to avoid. Sharing one’s innermost thoughts and questions is risky. The discipline of this site is, among other things, a discipline imposed to counter that avoidance.
I will write here about ideas from the manuscript, in essays on the questions the book seeks to address rather than chapter summaries. I will write about the thinkers who have shaped the argument. I will write about what people like Martin Buber and Thomas Merton have taught me, what the writing process itself is teaching me, and, more importantly, what I continue to learn from my clients. I will write every other week or so. When I do, I will try to make it worth your time.
Distracted by Difference is a nonfiction manuscript in progress, expected for completion in late 2027.