Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: personalities within cohousing communities

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

Occasionally a severely socially dysfunctional person lands in cohousing,
often attached as an unwilling spouse of another member. Sometimes these
people just quietly live among you, seldom engaging. Other times they jump
in with both dysfunctional feet and cause great havoc and personal turmoil.
I have seen a few start up groups disband because of such a person, I have
lived in a community with such a person for a time, and I, because of the
work I once did, have run into lots of communities in this situation.

One way to spot these people is often to ask them what they see the problem
is: They almost always blame everybody else. If you hold up a mirror and
show them their own  actions, they go into huge denial and continue to blame
everybody else.

There are some really brilliant people who are completely socially
dysfunctional, to the point of pathology. They are very difficult to work
with, take a great deal of patience, and sometimes, you need to band
yourself as a group together, and work out a strategy to survive and thrive
with the dysfunctional person.

But there are lots of groups who have no such problems, and sometimes the
dysfunctional person moves away.

In my experience the best ways to work through such problems is to regularly
evaluate processes, create and empower intervention models, and be proactive
in approaches to maintain group equilibrium.

You might find some useful materials in the intervention  chapters at
www.ic.org/nica/book/Cover.htm

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood community
Homes for sale and a building lot  www.sharingwood.org



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