When Dialogue Across Difference Collapses

On Relational Ruptures Through the Lens of Open & Closed Systems

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

I got hooked. Again.

Bamboozled. Wrapped around the axle. Another contentious and emotionally volatile conversation with a right-wing religiously fundamentalist loved one. It’s like life handed me a quota of about five emotionally charged conversations per year with those across the wide canyon of difference. And last week was one of those.

One of those in which voices gradually started to elevate along with our blood pressure. And the all-too-familiar hangover of walking away feeling mutually discouraged and unseen.

How the hell do we do this, friends? I still find myself shouting into the ether…

How do we — or even can we — remain productively conversant across difference in this contemporary climate?

I’m certainly not going to solve these large hairy questions here. But I do want to land on one in particular:

Why do certain conversations seem to have a consistent, predictable, almost inevitable moment of collapse?

Before I attempt an answer, I want to share a couple stories with you.

When My System Began to Open

I was raised in deeply red and rural southern Indiana inside Christian fundamentalism where ideological certainty amounted to safety. When it came down to it, spiritual questions were not welcome because of their tendency to provoke an atmosphere of instability. That system was tightly boundaried, cleanly coherent, and quietly self-protective.

In 2004, while working through my M.Div., I did the Denver Seminary rite of passage and worked part-time at Starbucks. I was the only male in a store full of young women. They knew I was an aspiring pastor at a conservative seminary, and somehow, over time, they trusted me.

Two of them pulled me aside during that season to talk through unplanned pregnancies. I remember sitting in the back room listening to their tear-filled panic, financial doubts, and existential disorientation. I found myself empty-handed seeing there was no packaged theological response that would not have caused more harm in those moments. Even back then, it was clear to me that what they needed was the safe and steady presence of a friend, not moral clarity or platitudes from a safe clinical distance.

I remember recognizing, in real time, how insufficient my inherited and seminarian frameworks were in those moments. My original systems had begun to crack open and stretch well beyond their former boundaries. I had to find a way to remain grounded yet open to surprise.

Then in 2010, three friends — queer and Christian — approached me for refuge after being pushed out of church ministry jobs. Two were in very fragile states of ideation and attempts. Again, rehearsed answers would have only been more violence to their already wounded heart. The invitation seemed clear, to sit inside their powerlessness and remain right there without trying to resolve it.

Relationships like these and soooo many others have profoundly rearranged me. They throw dynamite into the side of the mountain and force new roads where we once believed solid rock stood.

Yes, I’ve read a lot of good authors who have disrupted my closed thinking, but ultimately how my former footing fully gave way was due to relationships such as those and the resulting proximity to suffering.

Open and Closed Systems

Which brings me to systems theory.

An open system, by definition, contains permeable boundaries. It allows for feedback and is adaptable. Open systems are process-oriented, weighing decisions over time. A river is an appropriate illustration of an open system — water, sediment, organisms flowing in and out.

In its unhealthy form, an open system can become chaotic — all permeability with no structure. Like a body without bones.

A closed system, by contrast, has rigid, highly regulated boundaries. It carefully guards who belongs and who doesn’t. Conformity to the rules of the system stabilizes and protects identity. Instead of a river, it’s more like a sealed bottle of water or like a terrarium that keeps life contained as opposed to the freedom of the wild.

In severely closed systems — religious or political — certainty equals safety. It’s not stated, but safety is paramount. Questioning feels destabilizing and expressions of difference are often framed as a moral issue. For the members within, the more intense the emotions, the greater proof of righteousness.

The dogma is screwed down so tight that any leak of doubt is framed as a failure. The emotional climate of severely closed systems is anxious and hyper-vigilant. These are the kinds of systems where tyrants and protected abusers quietly grow like weeds in your garden.

Within the conversation of open and closed systems, it’s sometimes referred to as a bounded or centered set

But let me be clear, unhealthy open systems also create harm. A system with no center, no structure, no shared commitments, collapses into instability. Often, unhealthy closed systems were initially provoked by unhealthy open systems and vice versa. We see the tendency to swing between one brand of fundamentalism to another.

Healthy homes, healthy communities, healthy spiritual ecosystems are neither rigidly closed nor indiscriminately open. They’re more like harbors — structured with enough lighting and buoys to guide boats safely in while still open enough to welcome movement.

Why the Conversation Collapses

So why does the conversation across difference so often implode?

It becomes clear that at a certain point, these conversations stop being about a mutual understanding of differing beliefs and instead become about system survival.

When someone operating from a more open, adaptive framework introduces ambiguity into a conversation, the nervous system of a closed environment interprets it as a threat.

Introducing ambiguity into old certainties compromises feelings of safety. Ambiguity and even nuance makes identity so much less clear. And questions? Hell no! Questions especially the kind that linger for more than a day compromise the sharp clarity around who belongs and who doesn’t.

So, when the conversations begin to collapse and the emotions escalate, you know the psychological self-protective devices are starting to settle in and take over the room.

My own nervous system certainly ain’t neutral in those moments! I’ve been humbly reminded of that as I’ve watched myself go into all manner of freezing or fighting or flighting, and fawning. (I’m skilled at all the f-words!)

When voices rise, when frameworks of biblical inerrancy and infallibility are invoked as unquestionable anchors — frameworks I once signed in blood to affirm — something young in me wakes up. Those micro-traumas stir up disorienting memories in little Ryan. Now, I’m no longer debating theology, politics, or ethics as a centered individuated adult. I am re-encountering fifteen-year-old me inside the confining straight jacket of a closed system where belonging was tethered to pressurized performative beliefs.

That’s why these conversations don’t simply annoy or frustrate me. They fucking grieve me to the moon and back.

Differentiation Has a Cost

As I mentioned, geography rearranged me. Diverse relational exposure rearranged me even more. Twenty-three years in Denver after a youth in rural Indiana rearranged me. Interfaith circles and ongoing education continues to rearrange me.

This rearranging moves toward an often awkward differentiation.

And differentiation always carries a cost.

Some loved ones still see me as the good conservative kid who slipped down the slope of liberalism. There’s confusion about whether I’m safe enough to officiate a wedding or too risky to even invite. Without a systems lens, someone inevitably becomes the problem. The scapegoat. The cautionary tale.

Relational ruptures over thinking about how we think carry a distinctly particular ache. They activate something tender, pre-verbal, perhaps unconscious. A non-consensual exposure of your inner child.

The reality is, so many of us have been holding this exhausting weight for too long, hanging now by our last thread of energy due to the seemingly constant tension and endless arguing.

The only way to remain in relationship with someone who treats a text as an untouchable idol is often to excessively rehearse hypothetical debates. I no longer have the stamina for that level of intensity. It’s not that I lack the conviction I just value compassionate relational presence far more than those tired old performances.

The Grief Beneath It All

When I strip away the systems theory, the sociology, all the heady analysis — what remains in the heart is simply deep sadness. A penetrating and consuming sadness.

My heart groans for real. It’s groaning now.

I wish the canyons were narrower. I wish complexity didn’t feel like betrayal to some of the people I love. I wish conversations about faith and politics didn’t so reliably hit that predictable point of collapse.

Again, nothing is resolved in this essay, but here’s my honest conclusion I’ll offer you, even as I recognize it’s more like a love letter to a younger me…

These conversational collapses and relational ruptures are not a failure. Really, they’re not! They are simply the sound a closed system makes when it encounters differentiation. It’s the toll we pay as we continue to wake up and grow up.

Part of that cost, the cost of continuing to love folks across systems of difference is a severe and prolonged grief. And, listen, it truly isn’t realistic to remain endlessly conversant across every difference. Life, especially in this climate, necessitates distance and sometimes excruciating goodbyes. I know that relationships like the ones I mentioned, have already rearranged me once — and I’m unwilling to return to a system that requires performative certainty at the expense of loving my neighbor.

I’ll continue entering those broad relational canyons, but hopefully with increasing wisdom, hopefully with a self-compassion that is more realistic about the thresholds of my nervous system, and more accepting of the limitations for true sight and mutual understanding between systems.

And when the old wounds become re-irritated and I feel fifteen again, I’ll try to remember:

The system I inhabit now is not built on a fear of becoming destabilized.

It’s built on a steadiness wide enough to hold both structure (closed) and surprise (open) all at once.

And while I continue the active and inefficient work of grief, that healthier more balanced holding of the both/and, is worth this ache.