A civil rights lawyer by training, Dayna Cunningham is used to cross-examining people, ferreting out inconsistencies in their testimony so she can win her case. As well-honed as those skills are, she does not use them at Thanksgiving dinner, even when confronted with an in-law with an opposing political view. 

“You can’t win,” she said, because even if you make a flawless, fact-filled argument, you have little chance of changing someone’s mind that way. 

Instead, the dean of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life dives into her extended family’s sometimes uproarious conversations with no goal of victory. And to help everyone keep perspective, she said, “We always start the conversation with, ‘We really love each other,’ because we do.”

Whether the election this month left you feeling deflated or energized, you may be girding yourself for antagonistic encounters when you meet up with family over the holidays. Do you have a responsibility to tell your MAGA-hat-wearing uncle how wrong he is? Do you have to fight back when your liberal sisters chastise you for not supporting Kamala?

No and no, says Jonathan Tirrell, director of Tisch College’s Generous Listening and Dialogue Initiative. A holiday gathering is not a debate stage. “Debate is to win an argument,” he said. “Discussion is to reach a consensus. Still, that’s not dialogue. Dialogue is just to reach understanding.” 

Are You Ready for This?

While understanding the other side may be the last thing you feel like doing, both Cunningham and Tirrell say it’s the first step to breaking an impasse, whether over the dining table or in national politics. 

But before you speak, take stock.

“The first listening is to yourself,” Tirrell said. “Are you in a mental place where you can engage in this dialogue with that uncle? Are you attuned to your thoughts and emotions?” If not, maybe you change the topic to football or excuse yourself to check on the gravy. 

If you’re ready to listen, Tirrell says, go in with “openness and curiosity and humility and empathy.” That may seem like a tall order—letting someone whose politics you hate have the floor. But there’s a potential return on that investment.

Tirrell explains: “When you are listening to someone and they’re really spinning, and you say, ‘It sounds like you’re hurting, it sounds like you’re really upset,’ just naming that inevitably invites a pause, like, ‘You’re right, I am.’ That gives an affirmation. Those steps of reflecting back, paraphrasing, asking, ‘Do I understand you correctly?’, tend to open that seeing and hearing from the other side as well.”

If you then get a chance to present your views, don’t bring out news articles and charts to bolster your argument. 

“You can never win a duel of facts, because everybody’s got facts to support their viewpoints,” Cunningham said. 

Instead, tell something personal. About how inflation has affected your food budget. About your experience as a nurse providing abortion care. 

“It’s an invitation,” Cunningham said. “When you open that little window onto yourself, you welcome the other person to open a window, and it just makes for a better human connection.”

While your instinct may be to fight for your cause, it’s not your job to set people straight. 

“Sometimes it’s really infuriating to feel somebody is missing a point that seems so essential to who you are,” said Cunningham. “But it’s not about beating them down. It’s about really understanding their perspective. I don’t mean that in any sort of sanctimonious way. I just mean that for me personally, it helps me get through the day. I actually have a self-interest in believing that everyone is doing the best they can. And my task is not to put them on the path I think is right for them. It is to understand them better so I can have a better connection to them as a human.”

Find Your Curiosity

She doesn’t have to fake her interest. She’s eager to find out why more Black and Latino voters, and more women, voted for Donald Trump this time. 

“I am actually endlessly curious about what’s happening,” she said. “For me, I go through almost a physical exercise of recognizing the worry and the ire and locating it to the side—and then welcoming in the curiosity: ‘I’m really interested to know why you think that.’ It’s almost a self-soothing exercise, to simply replace that anger and anxiety with curiosity about what people are facing.” 

And if your efforts at being open and curious leave you just as angry? Tirrell says to try hard to find something that you can appreciate about the other person. “Yeah, you may disagree with their values, but you notice that they care really well for their pet,” he said. “Find these tender moments of humanity.”

Tirrell talked about one student who was furious with her landlord, who, among other things, brought potential tenants in to see her apartment unannounced. “She was so upset and was spiraling about it,” Tirrell said. When she revealed that she went on online to find pictures of the landlord with his family, Tirrell was concerned. But her motive wasn’t nefarious: “I just needed to see him as a human,” she explained. 

While such strategies could help keep your holidays a little less acrimonious, does it help break down the walls between red and blue? Tirrell says all these interpersonal exchanges have the potential to trickle up. 

“As Desmond Tutu said, the quality of human life on our planet is nothing more than the sum total of our daily interactions with one another,” Tirrell quoted. 

If you can listen generously to your not-so-like-minded relatives and still enjoy your meal, maybe you can take those skills to a post on your school committee or your local neighborhood association. Who knows? You could go from passing the cranberries to passing laws.