Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Dealing with interpersonal issues

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

Stuart asked about  what formal mechanisms folks have for handling
interpersonal disputes.

This is an odd one for us at Sharingwood.  For a long time (too long) 
we held a general expectation that people were responsible for cleaning 
up their own messes. Mostly they didn't, they just did the old sweep it 
under the rug routine. This is still the dominate paradigm.

In the past year we started doing sharing circles as a place for people 
to safely bring up issues for resolution and also just as a place to 
share our history and feelings.  This has planted a bit of a seed to 
move people into mediation, but still things come up which don't get 
dealt with.  There is still a strong resistance for the group as a 
whole to jump in and deal with interpersonal disputes.  We do have a 
mediator which we have used twice in the past for level 3 conflicts 
between individuals.  Last year we budgeted money for mediation, no one 
used it.  Not sure if that means we had no conflicts, or no one felt 
their conflict was intense enough to require mediation.

This weekend we held a parents forum with no agenda.  Several people 
recognized their disputes, owned up to them, and I hope will follow 
through on talking about them.  (kids sure do generate conflicts!)

We have a communications committee which is chartered with dealing with 
conflicts but have never had one brought forward to us directly.  Also 
we have a family counselor as a resident who is very helpful as a 
mediator, but no one has yet asked him for any help.

So, I know we have conflicts, we have structures to deal with them, not 
many of which get used.  Not sure what this means yet, but it is some 
of the muddiest waters of my community and eventually I suspect we will 
have a whopper of a conflict to test our structures.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood