Allison Briscoe-Smith

Yeah. I hear often, if I talk to that person, am I subject to violence? That's clinical psychologist Allison Briscoe-Smith. I am not inviting people to have a conversation with people that are violent towards you or dehumanizing towards you. That's not a requirement. Like, actually, your humanness is there. We can all kind of discern.

And bridging differences actually doesn't require or ask us to do that. So that's kind of like step zero.

Can you slow this down just a little bit so you can kind of come back into yourself, your body? Can you take a breath and then align with the intention?

I'm not talking about persuasion, debate. I'm not even talking about having my mind changed. When I talk about bridging differences, I mean about the mere connection with another person and the space around seeing that person as a human.

Joy told me, these people were not... pretending. They were not like debaters that take, you know, a negative side and a positive side.

And her working hypothesis for what this means is... The sharing of information involves higher levels of communication, that people are learning, so that there's a consensus there. of what is being shared, what's going on.

The amount of territory that the brain has devoted to disagreement was astonishing to me. And this is beyond the data. The observation that so much neural energy is consumed by disagreement, and there are so many areas that are coordinated during disagreement, that tells me that this is a very important Huh. Others might have other interpretations.

Yeah. I hear often, if I talk to that person, am I subject to violence? That's clinical psychologist Allison Briscoe-Smith. I am not inviting people to have a conversation with people that are violent towards you or dehumanizing towards you. That's not a requirement. Like, actually, your humanness is there. We can all kind of discern.

And bridging differences actually doesn't require or ask us to do that.

Can you take a breath? Yeah. Can you slow this down just a little bit so you can kind of come back into yourself, your body? Can you take a breath and then align with the intention?

I'm not talking about persuasion, debate. I'm not even talking about having my mind changed. When I talk about bridging differences, I mean about the mere connection with another person and the space around seeing that person as a human.