When we are focusing on how we disagree with someone, we often limit our thinking about that person to just the part we disagree with. The topic we are concerned about becomes the only thing we think about.

We now have come to live in bubbles, with people just like us in many ways. Often, we don’t talk to people who disagree with us, because we just don’t see them very often. Or we may have deliberately cut them out of our lives.

We hear about the other side from news reports and social media. But both the general media and social media don’t represent the full individuality of people and the full spectrum of opinions; they focus on the more extreme exceptions. The news becomes the news because it stands out.

The research shows that the opposite side holds fewer extreme attitudes and is less interested in violence than those on the other side think. That’s because most of us are in the middle.

But the middle, the normal people, never gets paid attention to. That’s both on the media and on our humanness. You see, we humans are programmed to pay attention to the unusual and the extreme. That’s how our species survived. Our fight or flight response saved our lives. We learned to pay attention to subtle cues and were able to get out of the way of the lion. But the news and social media thrive by hijacking that normal response, continually hijacking that belief that the rustle in the grass is a lion stalking us, so that we pay attention to them. That means that we pay attention to a threat that isn’t there, and we live in a heightened sense of fear and alarm.

The other side become caricatures, not real people. They become one-dimensional.

This came up in a discussion that I had with a friend of mine who supported a different presidential candidate than I did. What she said to me is that she gets lumped in with the crazies. She is tired of it.

People like my friend have become the victims of the impulse to see the crazies everywhere, to see everything as a threat. The rustle in the grass that actually was a graceful gazelle gets the same treatment as the lion that would eat us. We lump the extremes together with the middle because we don’t know each other.

That makes us all the victims. We live in anxiety, a heightened sense of danger. How can we get out of this?

We can make an effort to see others as real people. To see them as whole, to see their entire tapestry.

People are complex and nuanced. The fabric of our lives has multiple layers: our personal lives, our work lives, our hobbies, our spiritual lives, and our favorite activities. Most people have inconsistencies. Almost everyone on the planet has something about them that we can admire. They may help old ladies cross the street, donate to worthy causes, do home repairs for those who can’t afford them, love their children, and play with their grandchildren.

When we reduce the other to one aspect, we lose the complexity, the full tapestry, that makes them human. That’s an error on our part. And it can contribute to further conflict.

I think about a neighbor I had a difficult conversation with. I wasn’t thinking about this at the time, but I now can remember that she has a daughter with a developmental disability whom she loves and cares for, a husband who is struggling with cancer, and she herself had a recent bout with a serious illness. She is a multidimensional real person and I need to remember that.

In her book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, journalist Amanda Ripley uses the story of Gary Friedman, known as the grandfather of mediation, to illustrate this point. Gary got involved in local politics and forgot this principle. He fumed about the others and their conflicts. After he realized what he was doing, he deliberately worked to get himself out of this state of mind. He started thinking about the other aspects of the person. He started to ask about the person’s health, or their garden. This helped to him to see the multidimensional aspects of the others; they became his neighbors instead of his enemies.

Stop reducing the person just to the part you disagree with. Look for the various aspects of this person’s life that make them the complex human they are. Get a feel for their entirety. And appreciate them.

And when you spend time with them, ask them about the fullness of their life.