Engage in emotional learning by actively naming and identifying your emotions. Practice feeling where these emotions manifest in your body to better understand and interact with them, as this changes how you process them and is crucial for personal well-being.
Offer empathy, compassion, and love to those in pain, even when their pain is expressed outwardly as rage or hatred. Seek to connect meaningfully with them, as this rehumanizes both the giver and receiver, allowing for the process of healing and disentrenchment from pain.
Consciously avoid dehumanizing others, whether through extreme hatred or everyday contempt for those with different views. Dehumanizing others causes psychic pain and harms your own humanity, making it difficult to build thriving communities.
Actively seek out and spend time with people who hold different beliefs and ideas than your own. Be vigilant about avoiding and breaking out of any echo chamber, even those that align with your current views, as immersion in diverse perspectives helps dismantle rigid ideologies and prevents radicalization.
In conversations with people you disagree with, remove the motivation to change their mind. Instead, aim to honor their humanity, see their full story, and find common ground in shared fears and fundamental needs, fostering connection and understanding without diminishing others.
Create space and take time to genuinely hear the personal stories behind people’s beliefs and where they’ve come from. Understanding individual journeys fosters empathy and helps generate functional solutions that are less likely to be harmful.
Learn and practice nonviolent communication skills in all areas of your life (work, family, online interactions). Develop a clear understanding of your personal boundaries and learn how to communicate and enforce them healthily to improve interpersonal relationships and foster healthy interactions.
Engage in activities that fully immerse you in your body, such as yoga, Qigong, or Hapkido. Focus on being anchored in your body, feeling emotions physically, and avoiding dissociation, as this is crucial for healing, especially from trauma, by creating new neural pathways.
Cultivate awareness of how your emotions (fear, anxiety, inadequacy, alienation) are constantly being targeted and manipulated by marketing, media, and political entities. This critical awareness helps you interact with information differently and changes your relationship to what you consume, preventing the exploitation of pain for division.
Teach children (and practice yourself) how to critically analyze marketing and media manipulation of emotions. This helps individuals interact with consumed information in a different way, changing their relationship to it and fostering healthier information input.
Actively engage in spaces that allow for dissent and disagreement, practicing collaborative engagement, co-empowerment, and consensus building in all areas of life. Seek to elevate and amplify diverse or marginalized voices to build genuinely thriving communities and more complex, functional power structures.
Use past negative experiences and trauma as a catalyst to actively seek better methods for parenting, personal growth, and cultivating thriving human beings. This transforms personal pain into a drive for positive change and skill development, leading to better outcomes for yourself and others.
When helping someone leave a restrictive or harmful environment, provide tangible support and resources (e.g., help with education, housing, practical tasks) rather than just advice. Tangible assistance creates the stability and practical means necessary for individuals to move their lives forward and engage in self-reflection.
If a family member is radicalized, empower their family by helping them identify potential toxicity in their relationship and gain emotional and communication skills. Families are hyper-local and best positioned to assist with de-radicalization when the individual is ready, as direct confrontation with entrenched individuals is often ineffective.
Recognize that effective de-radicalization and disengagement support is best provided at a hyper-local level by people already in an immediate adjacency to individuals’ lives (e.g., social workers, community members). Disengagement happens locally, and familiar support structures are more effective than external interventions in assisting individuals through their process.