Acknowledgement

Standard / by Rick Bellingham / April 10, 2025 / 1 Comment

“You can’t heal what you don’t acknowledge.” Jack Cornfield

“When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.” Bayard Rustin, organizer of 1963 March on Washington for Civil Rights

“A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.” Mark Twain

“The defining characteristic of love is specificity. To be seen accurately in all our freakish particularity – to be loved for and despite it.” Jennifer Haigh, Rabbit Moon

I spent a good share of my career conducting interviews. On some days, I had as many as 14 one-hour sessions. I can’t imagine doing that now with anything close to the amount of energy I was able to bring to each interview when I was younger.

In those 10,000 hours + of interviewing, I discovered what Jennifer Haigh captured in a single sentence: what people want is “to be seen accurately and specifically.” I can also confirm what Jack Cornfield already knew: “you can’t heal what you don’t acknowledge.” As a result of that experience, I pay close attention to the interviewing skills of people on television and in podcasts and how they “acknowledge” another’s point of view. Fortunately, I have found many to emulate. On TV, the classic interviewers were people like Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, and Barbara Walters. Some of the outstanding contemporary interviewers include Oprah, Anderson Cooper, Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert, and Trevor Noah. And, to me, PBS has always had terrific interviewers starting with Jim Leher and Robert MacNeil, followed by Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodward, and now distinguished by Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett. As for great podcast interviewers, I think of Terry Gross, Ezra Klein, Krista Tippitt, Michael Barbaro, Lulu Garcia Navarro, and Kelly Corrigan. Surely, you have your own favorites.

What I look for in exceptional interviewer are several “Do’s” and “Don’ts.” On the “Do” side, I appreciate interviewers who:

Give their full attention to the person being interviewed – no distracting screens or gadgets, strong eye contact, and leaning into the interview.
Listen deeply and thoroughly – letting people finish their thoughts and picking up on key words.
Ask open, probing questions – making inquiries that help the person dig a little deeper and maybe think about a little longer (a lingering impact)
Ask follow-up questions – demonstrating that the original question is more than perfunctory or performative
Notice non-verbal cues – pointing out body language signals, pace, tone, and volume when they are out of sync with the content.
Gently guide the flow – steering the conversation in a meaningful direction instead of following a forever filibuster to nowhere.
Respond accurately to feelings, values, and meaning – not parroting responses that only repeat the content.
Welcome surprising changes – going with the flow of unexpected disclosures that may lead to something significant.
Provide their point of view – sharing their perspective on an area in which they have experience or expertise.

On the “Don’t side, I respect interviewers who don’t:

Make it all about themselves – just use the stimulus as an excuse to bring the conversation back to themselves.
Let people go on forever – refuse to step in when the person being interview consumes all the “air-time.”
Ask mostly direct questions – encourage people to respond with yes or no answers without giving the question much thought.
Force the flow – ask leading questions which are designed to advance the interviewer’s agenda.
Repeat verbatim everything the person says – come across as using a technique when there is no need for verification, instead of being authentically engaged.
Hesitate to challenge, confront, or ask provocative questions assuming he or she has laid a base of understanding and have earned the right to initiate.

With all that all background, let me get to the point of this post. Given all the polarization in the world, it seems to me that the only chance for bridging divides is to first acknowledge the other person’s point of view – much like what the exemplary interviewers mentioned above do so well. I want to emphasize that acknowledgement does not mean agreement or capitulation. It simply demonstrates to the other person that you see who they are and hear what they are saying “accurately and specifically.” Acknowledgement is the necessary, but not sufficient, step toward potential healing. Refusing to acknowledge the other person’s perspective, as Bayard Rustin suggests, takes away their dignity and fuels their protests and reactions.

I learned this lesson well when I worked in jails. Whenever I encountered a hostile or agitated inmate, I would listen carefully to their vociferous and voluminous complaints and try to summarize, as best I could, how they were feeling. For example, a person in his cell might say, “This place is closing in on me – I can’t stand it anymore.” I might respond, “You’re really feeling anxious because there is no room to move.” As a result, the person would visibly calm down and consider not expressing himself more violently. On the other hand, if I had used one of the standard clichés that many correctional offers might employ like, “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime,” I would only exacerbate the problem and create a more dangerous situation.

What I have found over the years is that one key for understanding what motivates another person’s feelings, beliefs, and behaviors is to pinpoint how people see their own identity. In the example above, the inmate saw himself as a victim of an unfair system in which his treatment was completely unjust. While there is often a lot of evidence to support that perception (think deportation horror stories), identifying as a victim can be problematic. And, as I have written about in a previous post, over-identification is even more problematic.

So, what do I mean by suggesting that identification is the key factor driving feelings and behaviors? Primarily, I am exploring how much religion, ethnicity, race, nationalism, classcism, and partisanship influence our worldviews – and how we live our life based on those views. I’m also wondering how fluid those views may be, if at all, and how they manifest in decision making. For me, one question that comes to mind is how much of conservative, republican anger is a result of feeling forced to pretend to care about social justice issues and “politically correct” speech.

My older daughter, Rebecca, just published a book through Heineman, Exploring Identity and Fostering Belonging. If you want to do a deep dive on identify and belonging, I shamelessly recommend this book. It’s an artful approach for helping people understand how their particular identities influence how they perceive themselves in the world and how they learn. She and her co-author, Veronica Scott, make accessible the idea of intersectionality – the notion that all of us have a variety of overlapping identities. The hard part is being able to accurately identity what they are and assign appropriate attribution to how much those identity factors influence us.

Mark Twain gets at how difficult this task can be in his confrontational and provocative quote, “A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.” To me, Twain is challenging us to be completely honest about who we are and to acknowledge how much our identity impacts our decisions, attitudes, and behaviors. How does that challenge apply to our current situation? Let me give it a quick shot.

If we look at all of the decisions and executive orders Trump has been making, and his loyal base has supported/defended, it is easy to see how racism, sexism, nationalism, classicism, and religion have played major roles. While it is difficult to make any exact attribution for how each of his decisions is influenced by a single factor or a combination of factors, I can envision a grid with all of his decisions on the vertical axis and all of the identification factors on the horizontal axis. It would then be possible to make guesses (and yes, that’s all they would be) on how much each factor weighed in on each decision. I’m not recommending you actually do this exercise, but you get the idea.

My point is that any hope for healing depends on our ability to acknowledge the reasons behind all the decisions. As much as I hate to say it, much of WHAT Trump thinks he is doing makes sense: We need to secure our borders, we need to encourage manufacturing, we need to establish fair trading practices, we need to improve efficiency, we need to focus more on outcomes and less on burdensome processes that unnecessarily slow down progress, we need to combat inflation and make housing, food and medicine affordable, etc. Where he runs off the rails are the WHY’s and HOW’s. Why are trade deficits such a bad thing? Why are immigrants being demonized? Why are people having a hard time paying rent and buying groceries? Why is income inequality growing? Why do deficits and debt keep expanding? How should we reform immigration policy? How should we go about reducing spending and increasing revenues? How should we relate to our allies? How can we create win-win relationships and grow-grow relationships? I could go on, but you may want to add your own list of why’s and how’s. The hard truth, however, is that we will never get to the why’s and how’s if we don’t respectfully acknowledge whatever “what’s” actually make sense. There will be no healing until both sides of any divide respectfully acknowledge whatever truth there is in what the other side is pushing.

Currently, “What” is trumping “Why” and “How.” In short, the only way forward is to acknowledge the what; before we inquire about the why and advocate for the how. That will require more people to adhere to the interviewing practices of the exemplars mentioned at the beginning of this post. My caveat is that the “What” must be based on verifiable facts, the “How” needs be based on commonly held principles, and the ”Why” needs to informed by a unifying purpose. Heather Cox Richardson brilliantly lays out those caveats in her 4/9/2025 letter. I highly recommend you read it.

I’m hoping both sides of the many divides will, at a minimum, acknowledge what the other side is saying and attempt to find some common ground on the need for change. I’m hoping that both sides will also inquire more deeply about why changes are needed and how they might be accomplished. Finally, I’m hoping that both sides articulate more clearly their vision and values for the future, so reasonable people can make evidence-based choices. May it be so.

Also published on Medium.