The Politics of Safety: What I’m Seeing in the Therapy Room
After nearly two decades of working with couples, I have seen almost every kind of fracture: betrayal, grief, trauma, and loss of trust. But what I am seeing now is different.
Politics is no longer just creating tension at the dinner table. It is tearing families apart.
Couples who have been together for twenty or thirty years, who once valued each other’s differences, are now finding those same differences unbearable. Parents and children stop speaking. Siblings avoid holidays. Relationships that once felt unbreakable are dissolving under the weight of political identity.
This is not simply about left and right. It is about what happens when our nervous systems can no longer tell the difference between disagreement and danger.
The Protective Brain and the Loss of Coherence
The human brain is not designed for neutrality. It is designed for coherence, the sense that the world makes sense and that our beliefs match what we see around us.
When that coherence breaks, the brain detects what neuroscientists call a prediction error. Heart rate rises. Muscles tighten. Stress hormones flood the system. That discomfort is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance: two truths that cannot exist comfortably together.
Because coherence once meant survival, the brain will do almost anything to restore it. It will argue, rationalize, dismiss, or withdraw.
In therapy, I see this in real time. One partner shares a belief, and before the words have even landed, the other’s body goes rigid. They are not rejecting each other as people. Their nervous systems are reacting to the threat of incoherence. To the primitive brain, being “wrong” feels unsafe.
The Stories We Use to Stay Safe
Every person lives inside a story. That story gives meaning to experience and helps the brain predict what will happen next.
When a partner’s worldview challenges that story, the brain does not rush to integrate new information. It rushes to protect what it already knows. It leans on shortcuts known as heuristics and biases.
Confirmation bias gathers proof for what we already believe. Negativity bias amplifies whatever feels threatening. Attribution bias turns disagreement into defect. These are not moral flaws. They are survival strategies that keep uncertainty at bay.
But when these protective patterns take over, partners stop listening to understand. They listen to defend. The story becomes more important than the connection, and emotional safety begins to erode.
The Brain Under Threat
When our core beliefs are challenged, the limbic system activates as if we are under attack. The amygdala prepares for defense while the prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for empathy and reasoning, temporarily goes offline.
In that state, we cannot think clearly. The body is in survival mode, not curiosity. That is why data, facts, and logic rarely repair political rifts. Until the body feels safe, empathy is not available.
We are not debating ideas anymore. We are negotiating safety.
Two Different Maps of Safety
From an evolutionary standpoint, the political spectrum reflects two ways the brain defines safety.
People who lean left tend to regulate safety through empathy, inclusion, and fairness. Their nervous systems are more sensitive to cues of exclusion or inequity. People who lean right have historically regulated safety through order, structure, and loyalty, through maintaining predictability in the face of chaos.
In a balanced system, both instincts are essential. Empathy protects the vulnerable. Order protects the group. But when fear becomes the organizing force, the right’s instinct for order can harden into control, and loyalty can replace moral reasoning.
What we are seeing now is not the loss of morality but its distortion. The wiring that once kept groups cohesive has been hijacked by chronic fear. When protection becomes the only goal, empathy collapses. Loyalty replaces integrity.
Inside relationships, that distortion looks like widening emotional distance. One partner protects through inclusion, the other through control. What used to be dialogue becomes defense.
Attachment and Belonging Under Threat
In couples work, I remind people that we regulate through connection. Our sense of safety depends on being able to predict how those we love will respond.
When partners start living in different moral worlds, that predictability breaks down. The body begins scanning for signs of misalignment such as tone, expression, or silence, and each cue becomes evidence of danger.
The prehistoric brain still follows a simple rule: belonging equals survival. When political difference feels like a threat to belonging, the body responds as though it is being exiled from the tribe. The fear may be symbolic, but the nervous system treats it as real.
Why It Feels Different Now
For most of my career, couples could disagree politically and still stay close. They trusted that they shared a moral foundation. That is no longer the case.
Politics has stopped being about ideas and has become about identity. Parties no longer ask, “What should we do?” but “Who are we?” and “Who threatens us?”
When belonging fuses with political identity, any challenge feels like betrayal. Studies show that criticism of one’s political group activates the same brain regions that register physical danger.
Politics has also become moralized. Each side views the other not only as wrong but as dangerous. Once belief becomes a moral boundary, compromise feels like contamination. A vote becomes a test of virtue.
Both sides have also learned to use fear as fuel. Political and media systems rely on outrage to keep people emotionally engaged. Outrage triggers dopamine and adrenaline, chemicals that make us feel powerful for a moment while keeping our nervous systems in chronic threat mode.
Over time, the body learns to associate outrage with safety. Calm starts to feel vulnerable. Agreement starts to feel risky. We become conditioned to experience difference as danger.
The result is that couples who once disagreed respectfully now live in completely different emotional climates. They are not just seeing different news or hearing different messages. They are being trained by repetition and emotional intensity to read each other’s values as threat signals.
When the World Stops Feeling Predictable
The wider world plays a role too. The pandemic, social unrest, and cultural instability have created background anxiety that never fully quiets.
Social media amplifies it. Every scroll brings another crisis or moral argument. Over time, vigilance becomes a habit. We regulate through outrage instead of rest. Political identity starts functioning like an emotional anchor, a way to organize fear.
When that identity is challenged inside a relationship, it can feel as if the last safe place is being pulled away.
Finding a Path Back
Healing begins when partners understand that they are not fighting each other. They are fighting a system that constantly keeps them in survival mode.
Reason does not work when the body feels unsafe. Regulation has to come first. Slowing the conversation, noticing what is happening in the body, or pausing can help the nervous system re-establish safety. Once the body settles, the prefrontal cortex, which governs empathy and perspective, comes back online.
From there, couples can start to talk from values instead of positions. Values create space for meaning. Positions close it. The most powerful shift I see in therapy happens when a partner asks, “What does that belief protect for you?” instead of “How can you believe that?”
That one question moves the conversation from judgment to understanding. Beneath every conviction is a nervous system trying to stay safe.
The Real Divide
What I see in my office is not just political conflict. It is the collision of biology, identity, and conditioning. The same wiring that once kept humans loyal to the tribe now struggles in a world where tribes are monetized and moral outrage is a business model.
The real work of love today is to create safety that does not depend on sameness. Connection does not require agreement. It requires awareness, the ability to see that beneath every conviction is a nervous system protecting itself the only way it knows how.
Each time we pause before reacting, each time we breathe instead of attacking, we teach the brain that difference is survivable. That is how safety returns. That is how love begins to heal what fear has torn apart.
If you want to understand more about how our prehistoric brain shapes modern relationships, belonging, and behavior, I will include a link below to my book The Prehistoric Brain in the Modern World. It explores the neuroscience behind these protective patterns and offers a path toward genuine connection in an age of division.
Written by Kira Kayler, LMFT
Therapist and author of The Prehistoric Brain in the Modern World, exploring how ancient wiring shapes modern experiences and behavior.