Cohousing-L Mailing List: Emotionality of Great Facilitation: it can be done without Phd's

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

One of the things I see in some of my students in cohousing communities (at
least at first) is a fear that in order to facilitate and deal with emotions
effectively they will have to make this HUGE life commitment to years of
studying  human dynamics, etc. For the purposes of Cohousing facilitation
you can have a positive working set of skills, that will contribute to
making the group function better, without having a PhD in sociology or
reading dozens of books and taking thousands of dollars worth of  workshops.

In my experience, there are two ideas that can improve your relationships
and processes: 1.)Pay attention to what's going on around you, and 2.)
evaluate your processes regularly. Actually #2 often leads to #1.

Then comes the kicker: If you are feeling that you don't have the skills to
work with emotional stuff that's brewing, hire  a local family counselor  to
help you out. Most larger communities in America have family counselors in
the phone book and they offer a wealth of skills to help you do emotional
processing. That is their expertise. There are huge parallels in family
counseling and group work. I have heard several  stories where such a person
was so fascinated by cohousing, that they gave huge discounts  to a group in
order to work with them. In some cases, a cohousing group is a dream come
true for these folks, a wonderful laboratory of case studies to see in
action. The advantage of a local family counselor is that they are local,
they are available. I have heard many stories  of groups getting some great
training from a local person. They might miss  some aspects of cooperative
living, but they can give you some good things to work from to work out
thorny emotional conflicts.

There is growing cadre of experienced folks in the communities movement
doing this work as well. Laird Schaub, Tree Bresson, Holly Oneal,or myself
can all come and apply communities experiences.

There are many groups that make an annual budget item for cooperative
training, spend it to have a session or two, and then take and apply the
parts that seem to fit. Each year, they get a new set of ideas and skills to
try out. Sometimes this is part of an annual retreat. Doing this once every
five years is not as good as once a year, or even more often as needed. The
average cost of such things runs divided into a  community of 30 adults is
often very cheap on a per person basis.

I have been to communities where a small subset of the group  got interested
in something, like Marshall Rosenburg's communication ideas, started  a
study group, then practiced this so it became how they worked with each
other. This then spread to the rest of the community, who saw the benefits
and techniques and decided to work this way also. Not every single person
did so, but the overall benefit of even half the group using such a method
seemed to make a big difference. There are a large number of such
communications processes, and so if one doesn't fit, try on another. Pieces
from each that fit that can molded together to fit your particular needs.

One of the problems I have seen with such training work is over
generalization. A trainer does a workshop, and then this becomes the sole
"truth". The "expert" syndrome often creates  an over dependence on one set
of ideas. (This drives me absolutely nuts in my work with groups, when I
hear back: But...Rob Said......) Each learning you undertake is like making
your own shoes, it will fit some people, some of the time, until their feet
change, then you need change part of the shoe. You might find parts of the
shoe that still work, but then you need to add some new parts so it fits.

Remember, once you live together, you have decades and decades to improve
relationships and skills. It's not a one time, all or nothing deal.  So if
you don't have it all together the first couple of years you live  together
it's OK. From my experience, it seems pretty normal to me that after a group
is actually living on site together, after about 2-3 years, they begin to
run into stuff they want to examine about their relationships and
expectations. Evaluate and pay attention, and consider starting a small
training budget.

Very few people come into cooperative living with the skills they need to
succeed. If you expect that magically, once people live together, its all
going to work out wonderfully smoothly and you will live happily ever after,
well...You are going to be disappointed. Cooperatively sharing your life
with several other adults  is not a typical situation in America, and most
cohousers run into lots of issues and problems eventually. As new members
come in, they often have way less skills than those that have been in the
group for years. This eventually can drive the group into a wall. Any
cooperative group can benefit from spending some time examining the
cooperative life and what it  means. Doing this together as a group is a
great way  to build a bigger understanding of yourself, and helps bring the
newest people up a notch in their skills and understanding.

Rob Sandelin
Community Works! Group process workshops for social change groups.