Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Consensus and conflict

[Scott Drennan (scottd]

I think there's a distinction between the welcoming of conflict and the
welcoming of violent confrontation.  What Sharon describes with throwing of
chairs and pounding of tables seems like it would be traumatizing to people
with a history of bullying and abuse, and not what I would be looking for
in a cohousing community.

I find that Roseberg's Nonviolent Communication <https://www.cnvc.org>
provides a good adjunct to sociocracy and gives a vocabulary and structure
for us to discuss contentious issues in ways that don't degrade to
bullying, name calling and throwing things.  Since use of NVC is included
in our community values it also gives a tool to stop those sorts of
escalations without needing to resort to the same techniques.

cheers,
Scott
---
Scott Drennan
Treehouse Village Ecohousing (in development)
Bridgewater, NS, Canada
https://treehousevillage.ca/


On Wed, Jan 6, 2021 at 4:45 PM Sharon Villines via Cohousing-L <
cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org> wrote:

> > On Jan 5, 2021, at 10:25 AM, Fred-List manager <fholson [at] cohousing.org>
> wrote:
>
> > I am convinced what the world needs now is a normalization and even a
> > WELCOMING of "conflict".  Dominic Barter says "conflict is new
> information
> > entering a system, that has not been integrated."  I don't see sociocracy
> > as having such a mechanism in place.  And I have taken the course.
> Maybe I
> > missed something?
> ...
>
> I actually miss the heat in our early membership meetings with people
> yelling, pounding on tables, walking out. Once we were confronted with
> Person A protesting that Person B had thrown a chair at her. Person B
> admitted to throwing a chair but he said he didn’t throw it at her. He just
> threw it across the room.
>
> Sometimes I wish that there were exercises that desensitized people to
> yelling and arguing and having to stand up for themselves when they thought
> they were being criticized. They seem to be directed to keeping everyone
> "nice.” it’s all well and good to feel compassionate when compassion is
> helpful. But it doesn’t usually mean much when people are arguing points of
> view.
>

...