The Braver Angels Moorestown Alliance held a workshop on skills to politically depolarize friend groups, family and community at the township library earlier this month.
“This workshop that we’re offering, its goal is to help us as individuals learn about our own behaviors and how we contribute to political polarization, especially when we’re talking with likeminded people,” explained Moorestown resident Karen Reiner, who’s involved in the nonprofit. “ … Within Braver Angels, we offer many different ways of learning to communicate effectively and positively with people who vote differently than you or have different political beliefs than you …
“This particular workshop is aimed at studying within: ‘What am I personally doing to contribute to this divide and what are some of my friends doing to contribute to this divide, and how can I help to depolarize from within my group?’”
According to its website, the mission of Braver Angels is to help Americans bridge the partisan divide. It envisions a country with respectful embracing of political disagreements, where civic friendship flourishes and competing perspectives strengthen the country. Another goal of the nonprofit is not to change people’s views of issues, but to change their views of each other.
“We can depolarize ourselves, but part of this challenge is really not reacting and saying, ‘You know what, I need to put myself on pause. I want to be a better listener. I want to hear the information. I want to be a more objective thinker.’ … And then responding appropriately, either with a statement or asking a question,” said township resident Richelle Rabenou, who’s also involved in the nonprofit.
“ … It’s about listening, being more objective and then internalizing all that to help yourself depolarize and have a more productive, thoughtful conversation with someone.”
According to the library website, the workshop taught attendees how to be more aware of their own “inner polarizer”; how to be critical without demonizing, dismissing or stereotyping large swaths of the population; and how to constructively intervene in polarizing social conversations with likeminded people.
The workshop was offered to anyone interested in examining their own inner polarization and learning strategies to disagree without condemning or ridiculing others.
“I think that this skill is important not just for political reasons, but for other issues that can come up that are not political,” Rabenou noted. “Learning to be a good listener and an objective thinker and to ask questions is kind of a basic staple to being, I think, a successful person, and to have more thoughtful conversations, whether it’s about politics or maybe something that’s not politically based.
“This Braver Angels session, I think the hope is to expand it out so that you embrace this in your life to carry through to other areas,” she added.
Reiner is hopeful that people who attended the workshop take away an awareness of how they’ve been thinking about people who vote differently from them, how they’ve been behaving around that and to maybe rethink those behaviors.
“The workshop provides a lot of opportunity for introspection and just an opportunity for you to reframe your thoughts and your behaviors,” she pointed out, “so that’s what I would hope people would take from it,” Reiner said.
“These are just really good life communication skills that return us to good, basic values or good, basic habits of proper social etiquette,” Rabenou said. “It’s really learning how to speak to each other in an appropriate manner and do some fact-finding and have more constructive conversations, but just kind of returning us to good, basic social methods of communication.”
For more information on Braver Angels, visit www.braverangels.org.
