Dear Progressive friends,
Your team lost a lot in this election. Perhaps spend a day morning, but then let go of the stress. It’s time to calm down. Relax and be strategic.

End the stress. Be calm and rational

What happened happened. While there are all sorts of meanings we can add to it, they are all optional. There’s no point adding them unless they help in some way.

One problem I see is that Americans didn’t think well in the election. There was a lot of exaggeration of the negative (also known as “magnifying” or “catastrophizing“), a lot of jumping to conclusions, personalization, emotional reasoning and negative filtering. These are all errors of thought, or in jargon, “cognitive distortions.”

An aside: Hillary promised “evidence-based mental health care” for all. Luckily, some of this currently exists, for free! These kinds of cognitive distortions are at the heart of many mood and behavioral problems, such as depression and eating disorders. The only proven therapy for this is Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT). And you can get free CBT treatment online at MoodGym. (While it’s not yet FDA approved, it’s widely used in the UK and Australia. If your problems are severe, seek in-person therapy as well.) So let’s not continue these errors- let’s move on.

Stop criticizing Trump’s character

I see no way for continued criticism of Trump’s character to help. In fact, it’ll just make him react and fight back more. He’s very comfortable fighting, Though it leads to worse decisions, t’s a strong suit for him. If he’s getting a powerful, constant din of negativity from the left, he’ll learn to ignore you.

Please conserve your energy and pick your battles. If you support him doing good things, he can get used to being accepted as president. Then, if you criticize just the bad, that’ll be heard- it’ll be a contrast.

Maybe it won’t be so bad

A wall won’t be that bad. It’ll put people to work, whether they’re American or Mexicans. It won’t be as good as fixing America’s infrastructure, but maybe we can find ways of making it work. Perhaps it can be tilted a bit and lined with solar panels, as a compromise. Though Trump has said he doesn’t believe in climate change, solar power also helps make America energy independent.

And he wants to stop the TPP, which Republicans support and many Democrats oppose.

He wants to replace Obamacare. Some Republicans would like to be able to participate in the health-insurance provided to federal employees. Or perhaps Americans could pay premiums to join medicare. If this were a possibility, it could help lower US health care costs. A compromise could be an expansion of medicaid. Trump loves to win. If you compromise, he could put pressure on the Republicans to participate.

Don’t fear the worst, prevent it

Remember that the Republican leadership is leery of him, too. They will try to curb the worst decisions.They just saw him as access to power, which they couldn’t resist. And remember that Americans never agreed on gay marriage- the Supreme Court found banning it to be unconstitutional. There’s a good chance even a newly appointed judge would respect that decision.

A preschool teacher’s basic lesson: “You get what you and you don’t get upset.” Stress is the biggest killer. Let it go. The less stress you all have, the stronger you’ll be when you need to act.

And, if you want a real solution to partisan politics, contact PeopleCount.org. Without help, I haven’t been able to launch yet. But with help, we could quickly make American government serve the people instead of party extremists.