Finding Our Shared Humanity: Reflections from the Clinic

September 16, 2025

In my clinic this morning, I placed my fingers on Mrs. Chen's wrist, feeling for the subtle rhythms that diagnostic traditions have mapped for millennia. Her pulse revealed what her words had not: the chronic activation of her sympathetic nervous system, the kind of sustained hypervigilance I've been seeing with increasing frequency. She spoke carefully about her grandson starting college, about the "difficulties" she sees in the news, about her uncertainty regarding the world he's inheriting. What she didn't say directly—but what her body expressed clearly—was her fear that we're losing the capacity for basic human recognition across difference.

After two decades practicing Chinese and naturopathic medicine, and about the same amount of time learning alongside indigenous and Native elders, I've developed what might be called professional skepticism toward easy answers. Yet I'm also trained to look for patterns, to read signs, to understand what bodies reveal about the larger systems they exist within. Today, as political polarization reaches levels that genuinely concern social scientists, I find myself examining the clinical evidence for something that feels increasingly fragile: our capacity to recognize shared humanity across ideological divides.

The Stubborn Persistence of Biology

Every morning, I practice Qi Gong, sometimes in the meadow next to our home, sometimes on Zoom with my students. As we move through ancient forms—"Clawing the Qi Back to Its Source," "Receiving the Sun and the Moon," "Upholding the Mountains"—I'm struck by something that no amount of political rhetoric can alter: the fundamental consistency of human physiology across all categories of difference.

The vagus nerve that regulates our capacity for connection and calm functions identically regardless of voting patterns. Cortisol responses to perceived threat follow the same biochemical pathways whether someone considers themselves progressive or conservative. The mirror neurons that allow us to empathically attune to others fire in consistent patterns across cultural, racial, and ideological lines.

This isn't sentimentality—it's neuroscience. In my practice, I've treated activists and business owners, religious fundamentalists and secular humanists, people whose worldviews couldn't be more different. What remains constant is how their autonomic nervous systems respond to genuine presence, how their bodies relax when they feel truly heard, how their healing accelerates when they experience authentic connection.

Yet I'd be naive to ignore what I'm also seeing: an epidemic of nervous system dysregulation that seems to worsen in direct proportion to our cultural fragmentation. Bodies that can't settle, immune systems compromised by chronic stress, sleep patterns disrupted by what feels like existential uncertainty about our collective future.

What Traditional Wisdom Reveals About Human Nature

The Indigenous elders who've shaped my understanding have offered perspectives that resist both cynicism and false optimism. One elder, whose teachings have stayed with me long after her passing, once told me something I initially dismissed as too simple: "People get sick when they forget they belong to something larger than their fears."

I've come to understand this as sophisticated systems thinking dressed in accessible language. Traditional healing modalities—whether Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, curanderismo, or Indigenous plant medicine traditions—all recognize something that Western medicine is only beginning to acknowledge: that individual pathology cannot be separated from collective dysfunction.

This understanding has practical implications. When communities fragment, when social trust erodes, when people lose faith in shared institutions and common narratives, we see predictable patterns: increased anxiety disorders, autoimmune conditions, addiction rates, and what we clinically term "diseases of disconnection."

The traditional healers I've learned from weren't naive about human capacity for both cooperation and destruction. They developed sophisticated frameworks for understanding how individual healing relates to community health, how personal trauma becomes intergenerational, how collective wounds manifest in individual bodies.

The Limits of Therapeutic Optimism

Last month, I attended a conference of integrative medicine practitioners where the prevailing sentiment was that if we could just get people to meditate more, eat better, and practice gratitude, our social problems would resolve themselves. This kind of therapeutic reductionism makes me deeply uncomfortable—not because these practices lack value, but because they can become ways of avoiding more complex systemic realities.

The truth is that some of what I'm seeing in my practice reflects genuine social pathology that won't be resolved through individual healing alone. When economic inequality reaches levels that undermine basic social cohesion, when information ecosystems become so fragmented that people literally inhabit different versions of reality, when democratic institutions lose legitimacy across broad swaths of the population—these are collective problems requiring collective solutions.

Yet within this complexity, I continue to find evidence of something that gives me what I'd call tempered hope: the persistent human capacity for recognition across difference when conditions allow for it.

Unexpected Moments of Connection

Two weeks ago, I had a day that illustrated both the challenges we face and the possibilities that remain. My morning patient was a progressive activist struggling with burnout and despair about the political climate. My afternoon patient was a conservative businessman dealing with anxiety about cultural changes he feels powerless to influence. Both were suffering from what I'd diagnose as the same condition: a sense of existential threat to their understanding of what America should be.

What struck me wasn't their ideological differences—which were profound—but their identical physiological responses to perceived loss of agency and belonging. Both had elevated inflammatory markers, disrupted sleep, and what Chinese medicine would recognize as "liver qi stagnation"—the frustration that comes from feeling blocked in pursuing what one believes to be right action.

In separate conversations, both expressed similar fears: that we're losing the capacity for civil discourse, that their children might inherit a broken society, that the "other side" had become so radical as to be unreachable. Neither recognized that they were describing the same underlying anxiety about social fragmentation.

I'm not suggesting that political differences are merely therapeutic issues to be resolved through better self-care. Real policy disagreements have real consequences. But I am noting that underneath these differences, I consistently observe shared human needs: for safety, belonging, meaning, and the sense that one's life contributes to something worthwhile.

The Evidence Bodies Provide

In naturopathic medicine, we're trained to look for root causes rather than just treating symptoms. Applying this lens to our current social moment, I see symptoms of collective trauma: widespread anxiety, polarized thinking, the kind of hypervigilance that makes complex problem-solving nearly impossible.

But I also see evidence of what trauma therapists call "post-traumatic growth"—the human capacity to develop greater resilience, deeper wisdom, and stronger connections in response to challenge. In my practice, I witness this regularly: people who've faced serious illness often develop more compassionate perspectives, stronger relationships, and clearer priorities.

The question is whether we can achieve this kind of growth collectively—whether we can use this period of intense stress as an opportunity to develop more sophisticated ways of living together across difference.

Practical Wisdom from Ancient Sources

The Chinese medicine concept of "yin and yang" is often misunderstood as suggesting that opposites are merely complementary. The deeper teaching is more useful: that dynamic tension between opposing forces can generate creative energy when held within a larger container of understanding.

Indigenous teachings about the "sacred hoop" or medicine wheel similarly recognize that healthy communities require the integration of different perspectives, different ways of knowing, different approaches to common challenges. These aren't feel-good platitudes but practical frameworks for managing complexity and conflict.

What these traditions understand—and what our current political discourse seems to have forgotten—is that diversity of thought and approach actually strengthens collective resilience, provided there's enough shared commitment to the whole to prevent fragmentation.

What I'm Learning from Plants

In my naturopathic work, I'm constantly reminded that plants have been adapting to stress for millions of years longer than humans have existed. They've developed sophisticated chemical responses to environmental challenges, ways of signaling to each other about threats and resources, methods of mutual support that allow entire ecosystems to thrive.

What plants can't do is choose their response based on ideology. They respond to actual conditions: available light, water, nutrients, threats to survival. Their "wisdom" is pragmatic, not philosophical.

There's something to learn here about how we might navigate our current challenges. Rather than starting with ideological positions and defending them regardless of evidence, we might learn to respond more like plants: assessing actual conditions, adapting our strategies based on what's actually working, supporting the health of the larger system we depend on for survival.

The Long View

As I write this, late afternoon light streams through my clinic window here in the Hudson Valley, just five minutes from the Hudson River. I can hear wind moving through the old oaks outside and the evening songs of cardinals and wrens. These same birds have been singing in these trees longer than our current political parties have existed. These same winds have been blowing across this landscape longer than our current forms of government have been in place.

This longer perspective doesn't minimize the seriousness of our current challenges, but it does provide context. Humans have faced existential threats before—wars, plagues, economic collapses, environmental disasters. We've survived not because we're naturally good or cooperative, but because we've occasionally managed to be smart enough to recognize when our survival depends on working together despite our differences.

In a few minutes, I'll lock the clinic door and walk upstairs to my family, where the transition from healer to parent and partner happens in just a few steps. Tonight, I'll help with homework, prepare dinner from food grown by farmers whose politics I may or may not share, tend to the ordinary business of family life that connects me to every parent who's ever worried about the world they're leaving their children.

This ordinariness itself is evidence of shared humanity—not the dramatic kind that makes inspiring stories, but the daily kind that actually sustains civilizations: the willingness to show up, to care for those entrusted to us, to keep doing the work of creating conditions where life can flourish.

Diagnosis and Prognosis

If I were to offer a clinical assessment of our current collective condition, I'd say we're experiencing acute symptoms of a chronic problem: the human tendency to organize around shared threats rather than shared aspirations. This creates a kind of cultural autoimmune response where we attack parts of our own social body as if they were foreign invaders.

The prognosis depends largely on whether we can learn to regulate our collective nervous system—to create enough safety and stability that we can engage with difference without triggering fight-or-flight responses that make complex thinking impossible.

This isn't work that happens in isolation. It requires what Indigenous traditions call "good relations"—the patient, ongoing practice of maintaining connection across difference, of holding space for disagreement without dehumanization, of remembering that we share a common fate on a small planet with limited resources.

The evidence for our capacity to do this work exists not in grand political gestures but in the daily, largely invisible acts of recognition that happen between people who take the time to see each other clearly: the pulse point where connection occurs, the moment when someone feels truly heard, the recognition that we're all trying to find our way home to something that feels like safety, meaning, and love.

Whether we can scale these individual moments of recognition into collective healing remains an open question. But the capacity itself—the stubborn, persistent human ability to see past surface differences to shared needs and longings—continues to show up in my clinic every day, offering what might be the only realistic hope we have: that we're not as different as we think we are, and not as powerless as we feel.

We're in this together,