RE: Religious Practices in Cohousing/NVC
From: Emily (epittearthlink.net)
Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2003 18:42:07 -0600 (MDT)

Raines wrote:
>Perhaps this is a good opportunity to model in NVC what (if anything) you 
do when you believe that the observation was in error or doesn't reflect 
reality (i.e. it came out that neither event in question actually did 
conflict with the holiday) ... do you continue to process the observation 
and the reactions to it because the reactions are genuine and what's 
important regardless of whether the underlying situation is actually an 
issue... or do you go back to the first-to-react and let them know that 
they don't need to worry, the perception was in error so the underlying 
problem doesn't exist?>

I think this is a good point. I don't actually know much about the NVC model
that I've seen discussed on this list. But in the example of this
discussion, it seemed that although the initial perception was indeed in
error, it clearly brought to the surface an underlying issue that was of
concern to many folks (myself of course included). It became clear during
this discussion that the issue at hand was no longer the one that was
brought up to begin with (given that someone pointed out that the event
originally described was not actually in conflict with Yom Kippur). However,
I would say that the discussion itself still merits consideration. Perhaps
the participants of the discussion, and I'm primarily referring to myself
here, should have clearly stated that the topic had shifted. 

If this were a "realtime" community, rather than a listserv, I would say
that I feel it is absolutely imperative to discuss the underlying issues,
once they are identified. I don't know how that applies here, in a virtual
community (and am interested to know what others think about that), but in
my experience, when underlying issues surface in a community, they need to
be called out and dealt with, or they will simply keep resurfacing, and not
always constructively.

In having this discussion, I should also acknowledge that the thread here is
very personal to me, and reflects the issues that I deal with over and over,
and particularly this time of year and again in December. For me, Judaism is
my cultural identity. If a conflict arose around an event that got scheduled
on the most important holiday of my culture, and the organizers refused to
acknowledge it when I brought it to their attention, I would feel angry,
hurt, and isolated. The reasons are complex and difficult to convey through
this medium. However, I also know other people who share my background who
don't feel the same level of frustration around this issue as I feel.
Obviously, there are many different ways of experiencing this type of
scenario. But in re-reading my last email, it sounds somewhat heavy-handed,
and I feel I should acknowledge that to the list, since it was not my
intention.

Raines also wrote:
>A secondary question is modeling for online discussion via this primitive 
tool known as an e-mail list>

I've thought about this a lot too. Personally, I feel that email is a
challenging way to have important discussions. It is very difficult to
convey tone, and things that are simply meant to be emphatically stated will
often come off as angry, etc. It is too easy to misconstrue meaning.
However, I also think that a listserv is a valuable tool for having
discussions on a global level and allowing many people access to a
discussion. So to me, this underscores the question of how to have
constructive discussion using this medium.


Emily Pitt
Boston

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