What Happened to You

interpersonal rupture and repair is good for building resilience.

The irony is that all human communication is characterized by moments of miscommunication and getting out of sync, but then repairing things. As my good friend Ed Tronick, a pioneer in developmental psychology, teaches us, interpersonal rupture and repair is good for building resilience. These ruptures are perfect doses of moderate, controllable stress.

Conversation, for example, promotes resilience; discussions and arguments over family dinners and mildly heated conversations with friends are—as long as there is repair—resilience-building and
empathy-growing experiences. We shouldn’t be walking away from a conversation in a rage; we should regulate ourselves. Repair the ruptures. Reconnect and grow. When you walk away, everybody loses. We all need to get better at listening, regulating, reflecting. This requires the capacity to forgive, to be patient. Mature human interactions involve efforts to understand people who are different from you. But if we don’t have family meals, don’t go out with friends for long, in-person conversations, and communicate only via text or Twitter, then we can’t create that positive, healthy back-and-forth pattern of human connection.

Implicit bias is much more difficult. You may truly believe that racism is bad, that all people are equal. But those beliefs are in the intellectual part of your brain, and your implicit biases, which are in the lower part of your brain, will still play out every day—in the way you interact with others, the jokes you laugh at, the things you say.