Gibbens also talks about feeling bullied. She supported Bernie Sanders until the end and wrote in his name on Election Day.

“I finally had to take the Bernie bumper sticker off my car,” Gibbens continued in her voicemail. “I almost got rear-ended at an exit coming off the freeway. I mean just harassment because I had a Bernie sticker on my car. It’s really ugly. It leaves us scared because there's so many people who seem more emboldened to be bullies.”

Paula Niedenthal, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin who specializes in emotions, said “this bumper sticker thing fascinated me because it’s sort of similar to sports teams.”

“There’s this anxiety about being exposed,” she said. “You have a bumper sticker, it's almost like having a Green Bay Packers sticker and being in Texas.”

We asked our experts to offer advice on how the four callers we feature here might be able to communicate with the other side. For Gibbens, it’s about how to feel safe and communicate with her mom.

“Instead of it being her mom who is the problem, the problem is that there are political differences that are impacting the relationship between the two of them,” Shapiro said. “At least it's worth thinking through what would happen if she did go (to Louisiana), and she articulated to the family, ‘I'll go on the condition that we don't talk politics.’”

There’s always Thanksgiving or Christmas to try again.