Enemy Images at the Dinner Table

My brother and I didn’t speak for seven months after Thanksgiving.

It wasn’t the topic that broke us. It was the moment I looked across the table and stopped seeing my brother. I saw a symbol. A representative of everything I thought was wrong with the country. He probably saw the same thing looking back at me.

That’s when the conversation ended, even though we kept talking for another twenty minutes.

The Fight Isn’t Really About Politics

Here’s what the research shows: 56% of Americans have stopped talking to someone they care about over politics. Not strangers. People they know and, in many cases, love.

That number keeps climbing. And the strange thing is, people aren’t fighting more. They’re retreating. Cutting off. Going quiet.

If political disagreement were the real problem, you’d expect more arguing. What you’re seeing instead is something closer to grief. The relationship becomes too costly to maintain, so people exit.

NVC has a name for what makes that exit feel necessary. It’s called an enemy image.

What an Enemy Image Actually Is

An enemy image isn’t a feeling. It’s not even a judgment, exactly. It’s a mental structure that converts a specific human being into a representative of something threatening.

The moment you stop arguing with your uncle and start arguing with “people like him,” you’ve built an enemy image. The person across the table disappears. You’re now in a conversation with a category.

Categories don’t have needs. Categories don’t have histories, fears, or children they lie awake worrying about at 2am. Categories are easy to dismiss, easy to dehumanize, and impossible to actually connect with.

Marshall Rosenberg, who developed NVC, worked with groups that had been in violent conflict for generations. Serbian and Croatian communities. Israeli-Palestinian groups. Inter-tribal conflicts in Nigeria. The consistent finding from that work: as long as people were talking to enemy images, nothing moved. When they could hear the unmet need underneath the position, something shifted.

He described participants, after nine days together, “singing each other’s songs and dancing each other’s dances.” That’s not a metaphor for tolerance. It’s what happened when enemy images dissolved.

Why You Built the Image (And So Did They)

Here’s something worth sitting with. Research from UC Berkeley found that both Democrats and Republicans dramatically overestimate how much the other side dehumanizes them, by an average of 32 to 55 points on a 100-point scale.

The enemy image you built is partly a response to an enemy image you imagined they built.

You showed up to dinner already half-defended. So did they. The conversation you were both dreading, and trying to avoid, had already happened inside each of you before anyone passed the potatoes.

This isn’t a reason to dismiss the real harm that’s happened in real relationships. It’s a reason to be curious about the structure of the problem before the next conversation.

The Work Happens Before You Sit Down

Most advice about political conversations focuses on what to do in the moment: ask questions, listen actively, avoid hot-button words. That advice isn’t wrong. It’s just downstream of the actual problem.

If you arrive at the table with enemy images already in place, no conversational technique is going to help much. You’ll be performing curiosity while feeling contempt. The other person will feel it. They’ll perform curiosity back, or they’ll get defensive, and within ten minutes you’ll both be back where you started.

The NVC approach inverts the sequence. The work is internal, and it comes first.

Before the next charged conversation, try this:

Name the image you’re carrying. What’s the label you’ve applied to this person? “Brainwashed,” “elitist,” “naive,” “heartless”? Don’t skip this step. You can’t dissolve an enemy image you haven’t acknowledged.

Get to the judgment underneath the label. What specifically do you believe they’ve done, supported, or failed to understand? Keep it concrete. “You voted for X” is more workable than “you’re part of the problem.”

Ask what need that judgment is protecting. Fear usually points to a need for safety. Anger at injustice usually points to a need for fairness, dignity, or belonging. Contempt is often grief that hasn’t found a voice yet.

This isn’t about excusing what someone believes. It’s about returning them to humanity before you walk into the room.

And Then Bring That Curiosity to Their Side

The harder move: do the same process for them.

What might they be afraid of? What need could that political position be serving, even badly? Not “what’s wrong with them,” but “what do they care about that I haven’t been able to hear through all the noise?”

This is the part that can feel like a moral concession. It isn’t. NVC is structurally non-aligned. All parties in a conflict have needs. That doesn’t mean all positions are equally valid, or that there’s no truth at stake. It means that dismissing the humanity of the person who holds a position you oppose has never, in the history of human conflict, made things better.

If it helps: you are not required to agree with someone to find the need behind their position. You’re required to look for it. Those are different things.

One Thing to Try at the Next Family Gathering

Not a framework. Not a five-step process. One thing.

Before you engage with someone whose politics have been building the enemy image in you, find one specific thing that is true about them that has nothing to do with politics. Not a caveat. An actual truth.

“She is a good mother.” “He has shown up for me every time I’ve been sick.” “She stayed up all night once when I was scared.”

Hold that alongside the disagreement. Not instead of the disagreement. Alongside.

You’re not minimizing. You’re refusing to let the category consume the person.

That refusal is where connection, and actual conversation, becomes possible again.

A Limitation Worth Naming

NVC at the dinner table matters. NVC at the level of power and policy is harder and also necessary.

The interpersonal work described here will not fix structural inequality, undo bad legislation, or change what any particular vote produced. Miki Kashtan, one of the most serious thinkers in the NVC world, has written clearly that personal practice alone cannot transform the structures that cause harm at scale.

So do the inner work. And stay in the larger fight. The two are not in conflict. But they’re not the same, and they shouldn’t be confused.

What My Brother and I Did

We didn’t resolve the political disagreement. We still disagree. Probably always will.

What we did, eventually, was stop having the conversation we were having and start having a different one. The one where he talked about what he was actually afraid of. The one where I said what I actually missed. The one where we were both, again, specific people instead of categories.

The seven months of silence was the enemy image doing its work.

The call we finally made was two people deciding to find out if there was still a brother behind the symbol.

There was.