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

[RAYGASSER (RAYGASSER]

At EcoVillage at Ithaca (NY) we have a Process Committee, with people who
have extensive training in either therapy, co-counselling, or NLP, who's
sole job is to make sure things work on  personal level in the group. Any
disputes can be brought before them and mediated. A few have, and the results
seem to have been good: some of the "disputees" are now some of the best
"co-workers" in the group - still not agreeing on LOTS of things, but
knowing they CAN work it out and willing to look at each others' POV.

At most meetings (we schedule it in all, and bump it only as a last resort
if we urgently need decisions on super-pressing matters) we have "personal
sharing time", an opportunity for anyone to say anything about whatever they
are thinking/feeling. Just to be "gotten", no responses allowed. You need
to be careful in this kind of forum to keep it to "I feel..." or "When that
happens, it makes ME think...", and not get sucked into the "YOU make me 
feel..." or "I think that HE....". 

We also request that if anyone at any time during a meeting feels that "the
vibe is out" that they immediately stop the meeting and we handle it then and
there. Whatever is going on interpersonally is invariable more vital to the
well-being of the group than the "business".

Another thing that our Process committee does is to plan "community-
building" weekends and activities with no coho business planned. Just
hanging out, playing games with the kiddies & each other, all the things
we think we'll be doing by this time next year when the houses will be up.

But as Rob (I think) said, most of the dispute mgmt is handled off-line
and informally. We have a bunch of people who realize that if we're gonna live
together, it's not OK to s#$& on each other, and we must be willing to step
back and look at what's really important to each of us.

Ray Gasser, EcoVillage at Ithaca (NY), currently Maplewood, NJ
raygasser [at] delphi.com