Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Re: Improving group dynamics

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

On Nov 21, 2003, at 1:37 PM, Louise Conner wrote:

> Regarding team building and community skills, following is information 
> from
> Laird Schaub.

> In particular, people in our culture tend to mistrust or be fearful
> of strong emotional response, and I believe there is valuable energy
> in emotions that can be directed toward solving the problems instead
> of being used to bludgeon or manipulate. My idea is that people
> cannot do their best thinking and move to another position until they
> first feel heard and are allowed to make a full expression of their
> input.

I find a incredible lack of willingness to accept communication in 
whatever form the person can provide it. Therapists, ironically, tend 
to have the most rules about how one can communicate and lists of 
things that are inappropriate. I suppose because they see themselves as 
teaching their clients to be more appropriate, they tend not to listen 
but to keep teaching. Another limit to communication is what can be 
said on email and what should be said face to face or individually vs 
in a group. People have the idea that their way is the THE way to do it 
appropriately. Perhaps groups who have been together a long time had 
been properly trained to do it the same way and people who can't or 
don't want to do it that way have left, but it is hard enough to get 
people to express themselves in any way that insisting or even 
inferring that they do it "your" way will create huge blocks.

> Another possibility is to spend time looking at the nature of
> conflict and the advantages of moving away from the traditional view
> of conflict as an indicator of ill health in the group. Instead, I
> can show you how to work with conflict as an opportunity for gaining
> leverage on knotty problems.

I don't know if there is a an original quote on this but "Life is 
conflict."

If you are not in conflict with something, you are either dead or 
incredibly unaware. We are constantly in conflict over food, sharing 
the air, space on the bulletin boards, money for this or money for 
that. Choices create conflict. Change creates conflict.

Comfort with acknowledging and accepting conflict, recognizing it and 
embracing it I would say is the number one thing that would help our 
group process. People withdraw or try to gloss over anything that might 
reveal conflict. As a result we make no decisions that are of any 
importance, avoid discussing values, and have so much tumult over the 
most ridiculous things, all because no one had the time or the stomach 
for talking about our conflicting views of what we are doing here!

(We have a great community -- I'm just exaggerating to reveal the under 
lyng problems all the communities have -- even Laird's!)

Sharon
-----
Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org

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