Beyond Us and Them: Finding the Third in a Divided America

In the therapy room, one of the most challenging dynamics a couple can face is polarization. Each partner becomes entrenched in their perspective, convinced the other is wrong, or worse, that the other is dangerous. They stop seeing each other and start seeing symbols. Battles over dishes or discipline become proxies for deeper existential threats. It becomes you or me. Someone has to win. Someone has to lose. This is the “us vs. them” trap. And right now, America is caught in it too.

Whether it’s political parties, racial identities, gender dynamics, or social class, we are explicitly and implicitly being told to divide the world into opposing camps. You’re either for or against. Woke or asleep. Patriot or traitor. Citizen or stranger. There is no space for nuance, no room for complexity. No one gets to be uncertain, evolving, or contradictory. And in this binary, empathy dies.

But there are different ways to understand conflict than just binary. When a couple is gridlocked in an all blame and no curiosity split, what we look for is the third.

The third isn’t a person. It’s a space. A possibility. A perspective that arises between the two and because of the two. It’s the “us” that can hold both “me” and “you.” It is not compromise, but a transformative process of witnessing, imagining, and integrating. The third doesn’t mean agreement. It means recognition. It’s the space between, or in other words, a heart big enough to hold difference without annihilation.

In a marriage, cultivating the third means slowing down, asking questions, tolerating discomfort, and recognizing how each partner’s position might be protecting something deeply vulnerable. In a country, it might look like listening to someone’s story without needing to immediately agree or dismantle it. It might look like being curious about the fear underneath the rage, or naming the pain that gets masked by righteousness. Or even allowing yourself to see the humanity, or pieces of you, in the other.

The third is hard to hold when you’ve been hurt, threatened, or marginalized. It’s not about false equivalency or forced unity. It doesn’t mean we excuse harm or pretend everyone’s reality is the same. But it does mean we challenge ourselves to see more than caricatures. To resist the pull toward totalizing narratives that keep us locked in cycles of retaliation and dehumanization.

Right now, the U.S. is in a psychological splitting. And in that splitting, we lose not only each other, we also lose parts of ourselves. The third reminds us that we are more than this fight. That every “them” is a person with a story. That democracy, like a relationship, requires the capacity to hold competing truths without collapsing.

It’s not easy. The pull to simplify, to divide, to scapegoat, is seductive. Especially in times of fear. But if we want to build something different, we have to reclaim the third.

Not just tolerance. Not just opposition.

But the radical, difficult work of metallization and relational imagination.

That’s where healing begins.