Lessons for a Stuck Society

Beyond the Abortion Debate

Laura Chasin was watching TV when the idea struck. The televised debate resembled nothing so much as a family mired in chronic, ritualistic battle. As a family therapist, she thought she and her colleagues had some skills that might lead idealogical warriors to more productive exchange. Thus was born The Conversation Project.

After nearly two years of bringing together intractable adversaries, Chasin has come up with a model for movement on such polarized political and social issues as tax propositions, gun control, euthanasia, environmental action, homosexuality, and the all-time ideological storm-maker--abortion. She believes it has value for bogged-down boards of directors of companies and institutions as well.

The debate on abortion and other overheated issues has nearly melted down the whole political process with it. The way out, find Chasin and her colleagues at the Family Institute of Cambridge in Watertown, Massachusetts, is to personalize the political.

Essentially, they invite combatants to recast their beliefs as personal stories and experience. That gets people curious enough to listen to each other and find shared concerns.Out of this, they believe, new answers will naturally emerge.

Borrowing a technique from strategic family therapy, the team first phones, then mails a letter of invitation to people on both sides of an issue. It validates their personal experience, arouses their curiosity about opponents' perspectives, and jump-starts them thinking about a context wider than their own.

It also acknowledges their anxiety about opening up to the other side and sets ground rifles for dialogue rather than debate. "People tell us it helps them block reflexive patterns," reports Chasin. "They wind up needing little reminding."

At the time of discussion, the team throws out a series of related questions, starting with, "What's your personal relationship with this issue?" Switching the focus from fixed ideas to personal accounts almost automatically highlights similarities between sides rather than differences.

Opponents discover they're struggling with the same human values, the same complexities, same uncertainties. Though the world winds up looking a lot less black and white, it feels a lot less hostile, too. The "enemy" is humanized-the necessary prelude to a collaborative mindset.

So far, "only two or three" people have turned down an invitation. "But even those who decline get educated about alternatives," Chasin reports.

She says her team's work has implications for all family therapists, trained as they are in systems thinking. "This is an invitation to apply the skills to public problems. We have something to offer our country."

Illustration: (PATRICK CORRIGAN)