The Cost of Living Inside Unresolved Conflict
How moral dissonance & chronic incoherence fracture the nervous system
We tend to think of political unrest as something that happens in headlines, courtrooms, streets, speeches. But the deeper impact happens quietly, internally, and often invisibly. It happens in bodies.
What we’re living through right now isn’t just disagreement or polarization. It’s prolonged exposure to unresolved conflict, contradictory authority, and repeated harm without repair. From a behavioral science perspective, that combination is uniquely destabilizing not because people are fragile, but because human nervous systems depend on coherence to function.
And coherence is exactly what’s breaking down.
Why This Feels Different Than “Just Another Hard Time”
Humans can tolerate hardship remarkably well when three conditions are present:
Predictability – a sense of what comes next
Legibility – an understanding of why things are happening
Repair – evidence that harm is acknowledged and addressed
Political unrest becomes psychologically corrosive when those conditions disappear.
Right now, many people are living in environments where:
Rules shift depending on who holds power
Accountability feels inconsistent or absent
Harm repeats without acknowledgment or correction
The brain interprets this not as stress, but as ambient threat. Not acute danger (which mobilizes and then resolves) but chronic threat, which never fully turns off.
That’s when systems start to fragment internally.
Anger, Apathy, Silence, Helplessness: Not Personality Traits, But States
One of the most misunderstood aspects of this moment is how differently people are responding. Some are furious. Some disengage. Some go quiet. Some feel strangely flat or detached.
From a behavioral science lens, these are not character flaws or moral positions. They are adaptive states, ways the nervous system attempts to survive conditions it cannot change.
Anger emerges when a boundary has been crossed and no corrective action follows. It’s a mobilizing force meant to restore integrity.
Apathy often follows prolonged anger that never leads to impact. It’s not indifference; it’s emotional conservation.
Silence appears when speaking feels dangerous, futile, or costly. It’s a protective withdrawal, not agreement.
Helplessness develops when effort no longer correlates with outcome, a well-documented precursor to disengagement and collapse.
What looks like social disengagement is often biological overload.
The Hidden Injury: Moral Dissonance
One of the least discussed psychological consequences of political unrest is moral dissonance, the internal fracture that occurs when people are asked to accept actions that violate their core understanding of fairness, safety, or legitimacy.
When institutions meant to protect instead confuse, contradict, or destabilize, the nervous system loses its map. That loss produces symptoms often mislabeled as burnout, anxiety, or cynicism when in fact they are signs of moral injury.
Moral injury doesn’t require direct participation in harm. Witnessing repeated violations without recourse is enough.
Why “Staying Calm” Isn’t the Same as Being Regulated
One of the more damaging cultural messages during times of unrest is the insistence on composure. Calmness becomes a moral expectation, rather than a physiological state.
But regulation cannot be demanded. It must be supported.
When people are told to remain neutral inside incoherence to stay positive inside unresolved harm, the nervous system doesn’t regulate. It suppresses. Over time, suppression leads to numbness, irritability, exhaustion, or collapse.
This is why many people report feeling “fine” while also feeling nothing at all.
So What Actually Helps?
The answer is not disengagement and it’s not constant activation either. Both extremes exhaust the system. What helps is restoring agency in proportionate, realistic ways.
From a behavioral science perspective, that looks like:
Naming reality accurately rather than minimizing it
(Language restores orientation.)Reducing exposure to uncontrollable threat
(Constant consumption of unresolved harm keeps the nervous system activated.)Channeling anger into boundary clarity, not self-attack
(Anger becomes destructive when it has nowhere to land.)Creating small, local moments of impact
(Agency returns when effort and outcome reconnect.)Staying relational instead of performative
(Regulation happens in connection, not broadcast.)
None of these fix the system but they prevent the system from hollowing out the people living inside it.
Moving Forward Without Bypassing Reality
We often ask, How do we move forward? as if forward motion requires certainty or resolution.
It doesn’t.
What it requires is staying present without disappearing, not numbing, not denying, not demanding premature hope.
Forward, right now, may look quieter than we expect:
choosing discernment over saturation
choosing truth over neutrality
choosing to remain human inside conditions that pressure us not to be
From a behavioral science lens, that is not passivity. It is resilience without distortion. And it may be the most stabilizing act available in times that feel anything but stable.
With you in this.
Love,
Zelana