Matthias Roberts is a queer  psychotherapist (in Washington State) and the author of both "Holy Runaways:

Rediscovering Faith After Being Burned by Religion" and "Beyond Shame: Creating a Healthy Sex Life on Your Own Terms". He is one of my favorite friends I met in graduate school, a human deeply committed to connection and curiosity,  and someone who I deeply admire. With Matthias, I feel a sense of belonging and openness to understanding the world and holding space for that curiosity which is so threatening elsewhere.

Rebecca W. Walston is an African American lawyer, who also holds a MA Counseling, an all around boss babe. Rebecca runs a Law Practice and serves as General Legal Counsel for The Impact Movement, Inc.  She is someone who fiercely advocates for others freedom and healing. She is a dear friend and colleague, who anyone would be lucky to spend a dinner with talking about almost anything.

Trigger Warning: Proceed only if you are comfortable with potentially sensitive topics.

This is not psychological advice, service, or prescriptive treatment for anxiety or depression. The content related to descriptions of depression, anxiety, or despair may be upsetting or triggering, but are clearly not exhaustive. If you should feel symptoms of depression and/or anxiety, please seek professional mental health services, or contact (in Kitsap County) Kitsap Mobile Crisis Team at  1-888-910-0416. The line is staffed by professionals who are trained to determine the level of crisis services needed. Depending on the need, this may include dispatching the KMHS Mobile Crisis Outreach Team for emergency assessment. 

Speaker 1 (00:18 ):

Welcome to the Rise podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, and spirituality. Today we're continuing our conversation on election humanity and politics. I have two guests today. I'm very excited about it. Matthias Roberts, who's a queer psychotherapist in Washington State, and the author of both Holy Runaways and Beyond Shame. Actually, he's one of my favorite friends I met in graduate school. I don't know if he knows that he's a human, deeply committed to connection and curiosity and someone I deeply admire with Matthias. I've always felt this sense of belonging and openness to understanding the world and holding space for that actual curiosity, which has seems so threatening elsewhere. So I want to thank Matthias for joining me and taking time out of his morning. And Rebecca Wheeler Walstead holds an MA in counseling an all around boss babe. Rebecca runs a law practice and serves as general legal counsel for the Impact movement, and she is someone who fiercely advocates for others freedom and healing. She's a dear friend, obviously she's a colleague and she's someone that anybody would be lucky to spend a dinner with talking about almost anything. So thank you, Rebecca, for joining me today.

(01:40 ):

I can say that for myself in my own experience, my anxiety is heightened overall and feelings that I can keep at bay with regular normal coping mechanisms such as exercise. It takes to me a little bit more and I have to offer myself a lot more grace in the process. I encourage you no matter where you are, to engage these topics with grace towards your own self, towards your neighbor, towards your family, and towards whoever's in your proximity. We won't get things done overnight no matter who we are, and we will get them done if we become more aligned and care more for those in our proximity, that means our neighbor. So if you're feeling or experiencing anxiety around the election or family or other triggers, I want you to encourage you to seek out and find someone to speak with. Maybe you need a mental health professional, maybe you need a spiritual advisor. Maybe it's your coach and it's something related to business. Maybe you need to go see your doctor for aches and pains you've been having. I don't know what it might be for you, but don't hesitate to reach out and get the help you need. We're going to jump into the conversation and voices from across the country. We are all different and we're not meant to be the same. I hope you find pieces of you in each of their stories. Hey, Rebecca. Hey, Matthias. Thanks for being with me today.

Speaker 2 (03:06 ):

Daniel, thanks for having

Speaker 1 (03:07 ):

Us. I just thought we would talk about this really amazing subject of politics and humanness because we're so good at it in the United States. Yeah, right. Y'all thoughts on that? Even as I say that, just politics and being human, what comes to mind?

Speaker 2 (03:34 ):

For me, there's almost a dual process happening. I think about my first thought was, well, politics are, but then I also thought about how when we separate institutions out from people, especially in the way that corporations tend to separate out how they become anti-human so quickly, and not that politics is necessarily a corporation, but I think there's a form of it. There's something corporate about it. And so I think about that juxtaposition and maybe the dichotomy there between, yeah, it's human, but I think it's also anti-human in the ways that it has to, I think almost by definition, separate from maybe these places of deep feeling or nuance in order to collapse all of that experience into something that people can rally on.

Speaker 3 (04:51 ):

I think there's something dehumanizing about our current politics, but I think that that is about power. I think when politics becomes about the consolidation of power or the perpetuation of power or the hanging on to it sort of desperately, then it no longer is about the people that the institutions and the country was built to serve and protect. And so I think there are all these ideals in our politics that on paper and in theory sound amazing, but when people in their humanness or maybe in the worst of our humanness step away from other people and not just people as sort of this collective generalized, but the actual person in front of you, the actual person in front of you and the story that they have and the life that they live, and how decisions and theories and ideals will impact the actual person in front of you. And when politics becomes about collecting power and maintaining that power at all costs, then it's no longer about people. It's no longer about lives. It's no longer about stories, and all those things become expendable in the name of the consolidation and the maintenance of power. And I think that at its heart is a human question. It's a question of selfishness and self-serving and maybe even self idolatry.

Speaker 1 (06:49 ):

I think that I agree, Matthias, I've been thinking a lot about, because in my family it's been a lot of comments like, well, we shouldn't talk about politics because we're family. I'm like, wait a minute, wait just a minute. Because the very politic that is being said from one angle is hurting the humanity of this other particular family member. How do we make sense of that? How do we say politics isn't a very human, the impact is meant to impact humans. The power is meant to impact humans, so the political sphere has become so toxic to us.

Speaker 3 (07:40 ):

Yeah, I think that sentence, we shouldn't talk about politics because we're family. It says more about maybe our fragility as a culture in this moment and our inability to have hard conversations without feeling like the difficulty of them fractures, relationships and familial bonds in ways that cannot be repaired or restored in any way. And I think it is also a statement about the toxicity of our politics that we have allowed it to get to a place where it actually threatens those kinds of familial bonds in some sense, you want go back to, you remember that book that was big in the nineties? All I ever learned about life I learned in kindergarten, right? All I ever needed to know, it reminds me of that because raising kids, I would raise my kids to say, there isn't anything on this earth that should fracture your bond as siblings. I raised them to believe that. I insisted that they engage the world from this vantage point that come hell or high water do or die is you and your sister. That's it. And it doesn't matter what happens in this world, there should never be a scenario in which that isn't true. And we have arrived at this place where people honestly believe that your political affiliation somehow threatens that.

(09:19 ):

That's sad and sad feels like a word that's not heavy enough to articulate. There's something wrong, really wrong if that's where we are,

Speaker 2 (09:35 ):

I think it speaks perhaps to our inability to do conflict well, and I'm the first, I don't do this all with my family at all. I'm terrible at conflict with my family, at least in the arena of politics. But I think about, I wonder if some of the fracturing that we say, I don't think it's all of it by any means, but is that reality of, because we can't have these conversations in our immediate family, it's getting projected into the wider, I mean, it has to play out somewhat. It is going to, that's the nature of it. So because we can't do it locally, it is having to play out on this grand scale. Rebecca, as you said, sad. I think it's horrifying too.

Speaker 1 (10:44 ):

It's what?

Speaker 2 (10:45 ):

Horrifying.

Speaker 1 (10:46 ):

Yes. It's very dangerous to be honest.

Speaker 2 (10:54 ):

It's very, yeah, those bonds, we have the familial bonds. Those are protective in some ways when we remove that, we remove those protections.

Speaker 1 (11:11 ):

I think we've been practicing at a society, and I'm talking particularly about the United States at way