I heard a new phrase the other day that instantly grabbed my attention and moral imagination: truth to pain.

Where truth to power confronts the people and systems causing harm, I learned truth to pain turns toward the wound underneath: the one in the people we most want to change, and often the one in ourselves. The idea is to meet the wound first. Not instead of the hard truth, but so the hard truth has a chance to land.

Most of us are familiar with “truth to power.” It has become an important touchstone in relational life, in advocacy, and in social justice. Speaking truth to power usually means openly confronting people with authority or influence with truths they’d rather not hear, especially about injustice, harm, or the abuse of power. In activist circles, it’s a rallying cry for justice. It’s a concept I have great respect for and a phrase I use often. It also has deep roots in the peace movement. The phrase is often credited to Bayard Rustin, and in 1955 it became the title of a Quaker pamphlet, Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence.

But in the hyper-charged, divisive age we’re living through, this empowering idea can also be misused. Like any moral idea, it can also be wielded in ways that reproduce some of the dynamics it was meant to challenge: punishment rather than transformation, humiliation rather than persuasion. For those of us who have a hard time speaking up and speaking out, calling on it can be a real help. But some of us use it more to merely punish and shame our opponents (sometimes as the end goal) rather than to practice the subtle art of changing hearts and minds for the long-term good. I think this latter dynamic can drive much of our cultural divide, and likely many of our interpersonal divides too.

I’m not writing this from the outside. I’ve spent decades in advocacy work trying to speak out for justice. Too often, I led with anger. The anger was often justified. Leading with it rarely was. Anger can be a cheap, fast-burning fuel that leaves even more divide in its wake. And most importantly, I rarely made real connection with the people I wanted to influence. It drove us further apart.

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Part of the issue is what we mean by “power.” There is power over, and there is power with. Far too often, power means power over: domination, coercion, controlling others, whether through systems or individually. Power with is relational: the capacity we create together through cooperation, mutuality, shared purpose, and collective action. At its highest, truth to power is a counterweight to injustice and coercion. So I want to be clear: I’m not critiquing the concept or its important use. I’m calling out important nuances in how it can sometimes be held and wielded. We can oppose domination while unconsciously adopting its logic. Without something like truth to pain, we can easily slip into the very patterns of domination and coercion we’re trying to overturn.

This is where truth to pain comes in. I was drawn into both the contrast between the two ideas and the beautiful fellowship they could carry for and with each other.

Truth to pain adds a whole new layer to the equation, one that could be a helpful counterbalance to our over-reliance on a punitive kind of power. Speaking truth to pain means naming hard truths in a way that first recognizes and makes room for the hurt, fear, or trauma that may be shaping how someone sees the world (and who among us doesn’t carry at least some of this). So much pain and suffering is on the surface right now, and us-versus-them dynamics dominate so much of social and political advocacy. In that climate, this feels like a missing piece of the puzzle. If we want real change and transformation, that is. We have to better understand the underlying currents that sustain injustice—and the ones that make transformation possible.

We can see this interpersonally too. Many of us lash out at others when we feel or see harm. But that often breeds more toxic shame instead of connection, and it closes off the chance to understand harm and then transform it. When we feel seen and heard, we’re more open to hearing and learning. That feels like the real key to the kingdom.

As I’ve explored and researched the idea, five components seem to define it:

1. Recognize the pain (and often fear) as real. You don’t begin by arguing somebody out of their suffering.

2. Distinguish the pain from the story built around it. A person’s suffering or fear can be entirely genuine while their explanation of who caused it, why it happened, or what will cure it is wrong.

3. Don’t confuse validation with agreement. “I see why you’re hurting” is not the same as “everything you believe because you’re hurting is true.”

4. Tell the difficult truth without contempt. The aim isn’t to win an argument or prove moral superiority. It’s to get close enough to the wound that something might actually change.

5. Look beneath the symptoms toward the causes. What someone instinctively does to protect a wound can sometimes keep it from being treated. That medical lens is where this idea first reached me. I heard the phrase truth to pain from Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a physician now running for U.S. Senate in Michigan, who learned the practice in medicine and now carries it into politics.

We see power over dominating so many aspects of life and culture, and I think much of it is born of pain. Holding that complexity is such an important thing to add to our cultural conversations and how we hold them. I’d love to see these ideas flourish in the work of social change. It seems far more sustainable, and ultimately more nourishing. That doesn’t mean we stop calling out injustice or harm, at times even fiercely. It means we go deeper, to its heart and its roots.

Truth to pain doesn’t weaken truth to power. It may be what keeps truth to power from becoming another form of power over. Maybe truth to pain isn’t a new idea at all, but a way back to what truth to power was meant to be.

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Matthew Albracht is the Board Chair of The Peace Alliance (www.peacealliance.org), a U.S. based NGO which advocates for domestic and international peacebuilding priorities. His writing has appeared on CNN, Newsweek, Salon and HuffPost, where he contributed regularly, among other outlets.

His Substack writings explore how we heal—from the inside out and the bottom up—personally, politically, and culturally—with a particular focus on the intersections between them all. Weaving together politics, psychology, and personal growth, grounded in systems thinking and trauma-awareness.

Follow Matthew on: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Tik Tok

If you pay attention to your body while you read the news, you can feel it.

The tightening in the chest. The shallow breath. The reflex to roll your eyes, clench your jaw, pick a side, and brace for impact. That’s not an intellectual response. That’s your nervous system deciding the world isn’t safe.

And the truth is, a lot of our politics is not just “heated debate.” It’s mass dysregulation — a state where the nervous system is so flooded with threat and stress that clear thinking, empathy, and genuine deliberation become nearly impossible. Chronic activation. A culture caught in a stress response so constant it becomes hard to imagine there could be anything healthier outside the bubble it has created.

Our political ecosystem has become a machine for this. Leaders provoke. Audiences react. Media amplifies. Algorithms reward whatever spikes emotion fastest. Fundraising follows the outrage. The whole cycle trains us into a narrower and narrower state, where nuance feels like weakness and contempt passes for conviction.

In that environment, politics stops being an arena where we deliberate for the common good. It becomes a stage where we reenact our oldest survival patterns: fight, flight, freeze, and the desperate scramble for belonging.

What we’re living through isn’t only a policy crisis. It’s an emotional maturity crisis. A co-regulation crisis. A crisis of whether anyone in power can stay steady enough under pressure to help the rest of us widen, rather than collapse. It’s a game we seem to be losing.

We don’t just need smarter policy platforms (though we certainly do). We need leaders who can carry conflict without turning it into annihilation. Leaders who can tell the truth without contempt. Leaders who can model real adulthood in public. This would do more to open up our capacity for the positive change most of us long for than just about anything. But it’s a tall order given the limiting system we live within, and with the pool of leadership we currently have before us. Far too often modeling the worst of us, not the best of us.

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The hidden loop we are stuck in

Here is the toxic loop as I see it.

Provocation gets attention. Attention gets amplified. Amplification triggers the crowd. The crowd rewards escalation. That reward trains leaders to escalate again.

A dysregulated leader dysregulates the room. The room dysregulates the country.

That is the trap. We spiral inside it, mistaking intensity for strength and cruelty for clarity or justice.

And if we wonder why whole and healthy arguments rarely break through, this is a big part of the answer. When already stressed and dysregulated people get activated, they can’t reliably take in nuance. They narrow. They sort the world into friend and foe. They may seek belonging through shared enemies. They reach for certainty, not complexity. In that state, politics becomes less about solving problems and more about managing fear.

A nation stuck in trauma response

Look at our political landscape honestly and what you see, underneath all the noise, is a lot of people acting from unprocessed psychological and developmental wounding. This is true of voters. And it is deeply true of many of our leaders.

When politicians attack and humiliate, when they perform constant public rage, when they govern through grievance and keep their followers in a permanent state of threat, they do more than model destructive behavior. They trigger the collective nervous system.

If someone experiences the world as hostile, maybe because they have spent parts of their lives feeling unseen, attacked, abused, oppressed, or not loved enough, they can gravitate toward leaders who feel familiar inside that hostility, even if those leaders intensify the very conditions that keep them trapped. It isn’t rational. It’s somatic. It happens below the level of conscious thought.

The allure of a deregulating leader isn’t always about the policies they promise. Sometimes it’s about the relief of being mirrored. The feeling that someone finally understands your anger. The camaraderie of shared grievance. The familiarity of chaos can feel safer than the unfamiliarity of calm, especially if calm has never lasted.

This may not be most people. But it is enough people to shape elections and dominate news cycles. And the more our political environment amplifies dysregulation, the harder it becomes for anyone, on any side, to respond from their best self.

We are spinning. We keep spinning. And a lot of us are exhausted.

Most People Know It When They See It

Here’s what gives me hope: you don’t need to have had a great therapist, a secure childhood, or an intact support network to recognize groundedness when it’s standing in front of you. Most of us haven’t had those things as deeply as we need them. But something in us still responds — to warmth, steadiness, and the sense that the person speaking actually means what they say.

We know it when we see it. We feel it in our bodies before we can explain it with our words.

This matters politically because it means the opportunity isn’t only for the already-healed. A well-regulated leader can help a dysregulated audience hear things they couldn’t hear before — not because the argument improved, but because the nervous system settled enough to let it in. The message hasn’t changed; the container for it has. And that changes things.

Most of us are longing for this, even those of us who can’t name it. We’re longing for connection. For someone to model what calm, introspective leadership actually looks like. For a sense that the adults are in the room.

I don’t mean bland. I don’t mean passive. I don’t mean “above the fray” in a way that excuses injustice or dodges righteous anger. I mean a leader who can carry conflict without turning it into all out annihilation.

Someone who can tell the truth without contempt.

Someone who can oppose policies without dehumanizing individual people.

Someone who can admit mistakes without collapsing into shame or doubling down in aggression.

Someone who does not need to perform dominance to feel powerful.

It is startling how rare this is now.

What We’re Really Voting For

There’s a version of this argument that says: voters should be smarter, more policy-literate, more rational. And sure, in an ideal world... But that framing misses something essential about what it means to be human.

We are social creatures whose nervous systems were built for small tribes and clear hierarchies. We look to our leaders not just for ideas but for cues about whether the world is safe, whether things are going to be okay, whether we are going to be okay. We look for healthy modeling. We always have. The question is whether we’re going to consciously work with that reality or keep pretending it doesn’t exist.

Here’s my theory: if more leaders modeled regulation, love, restraint, and accountability, our politics would not simply become nicer. It would become far more functional. People would be more able to listen. More able to tolerate difference. More able to update their beliefs without feeling humiliated. More able to stay in relationship while still advocating fiercely for what they believe.

In other words, we could begin to exit the trauma loop.

We cannot heal a traumatized society solely through better policy, though policy matters enormously. We also have to address the culture’s emotional operating system. And leadership is one of the fastest ways a society learns what is normal — what is possible — what it’s allowed to feel and do and become.

If we want a different political order — and I believe most people, across the spectrum, are hungry for one — then part of what we need to do is recognize and elevate the leaders who have done some personal work. Who aren’t playing the gotcha demonization game. Who can be a steady presence under pressure. Who aren’t just performing values but actually practicing them. Who make us feel, in our bodies, like things might be okay.

The work, for all of us, is learning to recognize what we’re looking for — and supporting it when it shows up. The system, of course, doesn’t make this easy — gerrymandering, donor capture, party corruption, an outrage-driven media, etc. all select for exactly the opposite. Which is why recognizing and actively supporting this kind of leadership, when it appears, matters more than ever.

The future depends, in no small part, on whether we keep multiplying dysregulation or finally decide to multiply the leaders who can model something better. That might be one of the most important political acts available to us — if we can find more of them.

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Have thoughts on this? We’d love to hear who else you see modeling this kind of leadership — locally, nationally, anywhere.

Matthew Albracht is the Board Chair of The Peace Alliance (www.peacealliance.org), a U.S. based NGO which advocates for domestic and international peacebuilding priorities. His writings have appeared on CNN, Newsweek, Salon, HuffPost and other outlets. In addition to At The Root, he also writes on his own Substack, check it out!

Follow Matthew on: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Tik Tok