Guilt after a political fight: what psychoanalysis says

Psychotherapy

Once the runoff is over, what's left is what was said in the heat of the campaign. On the guilt that brings people closer, the kind that only punishes, and why repair doesn't require changing your mind.

October 28, 20269 min read

Illustration for the article: Guilt after the fight: what was said in the heat of the campaign

The message has been written for two days now. It starts with “hi, Dad,” runs on for two lines, and stops without a period, because she still hasn’t decided how to end it. She has deleted and rewritten it about five times. In one version she apologized. In another she explained what she had meant. In the latest one, she just asked if he was okay, as if nothing had happened.

What happened was a lunch, a few weeks before Brazil’s runoff. She doesn’t quite remember how the conversation started. She clearly remembers the words she said at the end, louder than everything else, and his face as he heard them. He didn’t answer. He picked up his car keys a little earlier than usual and left.

The election came and went. The result came out on Sunday, the week went on, the group chats gradually went quiet. The words stayed.

This scene is playing out these days with the roles switched around: the son who told his mother what he shouldn’t have, the sister who was sarcastic to her brother in front of everyone, the son-in-law who went too far with his father-in-law. It happens on the side that won and on the side that lost, and maybe you recognized yourself somewhere in it. If so, it’s worth saying before anything else: the guilt showing up now is not, in itself, a bad sign. It may be exactly the opposite.

The heat fades, the words stay

During the campaign, the mood made everything feel urgent. Every conversation seemed decisive, every silence seemed like a concession, and things no one would say on an ordinary day seemed, in that moment, necessary. When the mood dissipates, you reread what you said with different eyes. And what usually brings shame isn’t the opinion. It’s the tone. The contempt in your voice, the remark aimed at the person instead of the idea, the quick pleasure of having hit where it hurt.

This shrinking of relationships after an election has actually been measured. A study by Chen and Rohla, published in the journal Science in 2018, looked at Thanksgiving dinners in the United States in 2016, a few weeks after a hard-fought presidential election: gatherings that brought together people from areas that had voted for opposing parties were 30 to 50 minutes shorter. Other researchers estimated a smaller effect, but the picture is recognizable. After an election, the table shrinks a little.

When the other person becomes whole again

To understand guilt after a political fight, it helps to look at what happened before it.

During a campaign, the world tends to split in two. On one side are those who think like us, and with them everything reasonable and good. On the other, those who think differently, and with them whatever is threatening. Melanie Klein described this way of functioning in Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms, from 1946, and called it the paranoid-schizoid position: the mind keeps good and bad in separate places and puts into the other person what it cannot bear in itself. In this state, attacking the other feels like defense, not aggression.

Back in 1935, in A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States, Klein had already described another way of functioning, which she named the depressive position. The name can be misleading: it isn’t about being depressed in the clinical sense. It refers to the moment when you can see the other person as a whole and realize that the person you attacked is the same one you love. The father who voted differently is the same one who used to pick his daughter up from school. The sarcastic sister is the same one who spent the night at the hospital by their mother’s side. When these images come together, guilt arises and, with it, the wish to repair.

Klein used the word “position,” not “phase,” on purpose. These aren’t stages you go through once in childhood and leave behind. They are ways of functioning that all of us move between throughout our lives, including the most level-headed adults, including during elections. Seen this way, the guilt of this late October may be a sign that the other person has become a person again, and not just a vote.

Two kinds of guilt that aren’t the same

Not all guilt leads somewhere, though. There are two forms of it that look alike from the outside and work in opposite ways.

The first is turned toward the other person. It asks how they’re doing, what those words did to them, what can still be done. It hurts, but it’s a pain you can carry, and it pushes you closer: toward the message, the phone call, the visit.

The second is turned toward oneself. It doesn’t ask about the other person; it accuses. What kind of person am I. I always ruin everything. It is cruel, repetitive, and, paradoxically, it keeps you away. Getting closer to the other would mean facing the accusation head-on, so you avoid it. Because the accusation is unbearable, it tends to alternate with the opposite move, self-justification: but he said things too, but I was right. You go back and forth between condemning and absolving yourself, and the other person, who was the reason for all of it, is left out of the conversation.

In Klein’s language, the first kind of guilt belongs to the depressive position: it is born of concern for someone you love. The second still carries a great deal of persecutory anxiety, in which what dominates is fear for oneself, the feeling of being under accusation. One repairs. The other only punishes, and punishing yourself, however much it may look like responsibility, gives nothing back to anyone.

Repair doesn’t mean changing your vote

In Love, Guilt and Reparation, from 1937, Klein described reparation as the effort to restore what we feel we have damaged in someone we love, and she saw in this movement one of the foundations of the capacity to love. It’s worth noting what she did not say. Repairing is not agreeing. It isn’t disowning what you think in order to buy peace.

Here lies one of the most common knots after an election. Many people put off reparation because they fear that apologizing means conceding the other person was right. Since they aren’t willing to do that, and shouldn’t be if they don’t agree, they stay stuck. But these are different things. A political position still belongs to whoever holds it. What gets repaired is the bond: the tone, the contempt, the humiliation, the remark aimed at the person. Repairing, in this sense, means separating the two: the idea, which still stands, and the way it was said, which can be regretted.

There are also two kinds of repair that look like repair and aren’t. One is pretending nothing happened, the “everything okay over there?” that buries the subject without touching it and leaves the words intact right where they landed. The other is capitulation, saying “you were right” without believing it, just to make the discomfort go away. It buys a few months of peace and usually comes back as resentment, because whoever gave in feels they paid a price they didn’t owe.

Repair also happens on the inside

The other person isn’t always ready. Sometimes the message is sent and no reply comes, or a curt one does. Sometimes the one who owes the bigger apology is the other person, and repairing first feels unfair. Sometimes the relationship was already wounded before the election, and the political fight was only the latest form of the same wound.

Klein gave weight to something that helps at times like these: reparation doesn’t depend only on what happens between two people. It also happens in the internal world, in the image each of us keeps of the other. Putting back together, inside, the figure of the father, the sister, the friend, giving them back the wholeness the campaign took away, is already a work of reparation, even before any conversation. And it’s this work that makes it possible, when the conversation does come, for it not to be just another round of the fight.

It’s also legitimate to recognize that, in some relationships, there’s no going back right now. Repair doesn’t require anyone to expose themselves to someone who keeps hurting them. Sometimes it just means no longer feeding the hatred, and waiting.

When guilt won’t budge

For most people, this guilt finds somewhere to go in the coming weeks: a conversation, a gesture, or simply time. But there are cases in which it doesn’t move.

When it goes around in circles for weeks, always the same, taking over your nights. When it seems out of proportion to what happened, as if the words at that lunch had awakened a much older debt. When you start avoiding the whole family so you don’t have to face anyone. When self-accusation spreads to other areas and the distress starts taking over the day.

At those moments, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy offers something of its own: a place to think about guilt instead of just feeling it. Who it is really aimed at. What old story it repeats. What is real responsibility, which calls for reparation, and what is punishment, which only calls for more punishment. All of this without the rush to absolve or the rush to condemn, which are, each in its own way, ways of ending the conversation too soon.

Repair doesn’t erase what was said. It only keeps it from being the last thing said.