Vaccine Hesitation, Dialogue, Compassion, and Self-Regulation

(note: TDC is a fully vaccinated company)

With people dying of treatable ailments (like gallstones) because hospitals are filled with unvaccinated COVID patients, it is easy to leave behind the compassion-based orientation toward other people that is the core of the dialogic process. Thus, if there are people in your circle who are unvaccinated, if you find yourself frustrated or angry with them, and if you want to engage them at the right time, you may want to practice some self-management strategies that will be of service to you when the time comes for a conversation.

At a recent staff meeting when we discussed the challenges of staying with an attitude of compassion, one strategy a teammate highlighted was remembering that even though the unvaccinated are making an intentional choice, it is important to place their perspective in the context of larger social ecosystems which are arguably very dysfunctional. One of those ecosystems concerns information and misinformation. Given the prevalence of social media silos created by the profit-motivated algorithms of social media companies, it is easy for people to primarily hear information that confirms anti-vaccine impulses. To explore this, you can ask yourself: to what extent do my social media feeds contain information presented as true that contradict my perspective about the vaccine? Our vaccine-hesitant or vaccine-resistant comrades are experiencing at least as much information segregation as we are, which means they are being bombarded with opinions that we find problematic or ridiculous. Of course, this same dynamic is true on other issues as well. It is useful to let our awareness affect our choices about how much compassion within ourselves to consciously stoke.

As depressing as the reality of our information ecosystems are, the reality of the culture wars in America might be even more dispiriting. Sadly, the battle between those who focus on controlling COVID and those who emphasize personal freedom has become another reflection of the culture wars that America has been fighting for decades, even though this iteration of the battle has played a role in the death of more than 650,000 of our fellow Americans. It is not crazy to see the anti-vax/anti-mask crowd as victims of this war, which was around before many of them were even born. Many of us have lamented these ideological/cultural wars and their accompanying polarization, and the way they have calcified our political systems – and this is just one of the many prices we have paid for these wars over identity and social behavior. But few among us thought that this war would lead to widespread death from illness.

When we think about people with treatable ailments dying because they are turned away from hospitals overflowing with COVID patients, it is easy to let our justified anger morph into a lack of compassion. Nevertheless, if there are people we might actually talk to about their vaccine hesitancy, it is important to take active measures to try to stoke that fire of compassion within us, since compassion is the core of effective dialogue, and compassionate strategic dialogue is the thing that gives you the best chance of affecting their opinion. Seeing your vaccine hesitant colleague as a victim of larger dysfunctional systems might be helpful to you.