Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Problematic Controlling Personalities and Cohousing

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

Working with conflict caused by individuals is an interesting and often
untravelled road. From my experience, cohousing groups  have some unstated
but often very tangible boundaries which define how much energy the group is
willing to expend  to work with individuals who cause conflict. Often
actions which cause problems  within the group process get ignored because
that is the easiest thing to do.

Conflict  work is  like a swimming pool. There is a whole bunch of water
involved, and even the shallow end of the pool can be scary to someone who
is not a swimmer. There is also a deep end, which requires  some skills to
stay safe in.

Here are a couple, very shallow end process methods for dealing with group
conflict caused by individual behaviors.

1. What? Observe and clarify exactly what behaviors are occurring. Use as
few labels as you can. For example: A facilitator team writes down the
following: Jess  spoke in a non-neutral tone and put emphasis on the words
incompetent, irresponsible, and outrageous. The  next 12 speakers all spoke
about these words, Sally, Jim and Rob spoke in non-neutral tones about them.
The group then spent the next 38 minutes  talking about the words and the
reactions to them.

Whew....This seems like a bit much right? But it you really want clarity you
have to understand what behaviors are causing what reaction. And if you ever
want to intervene with the individual you will be best served if you can
find  specific concrete  examples of behaviors that  led to reactions by the
group. Often these are  words and tones so you need to try to describe these
as best you can.

2. Do a general public intervention which covers the behaviors but does not
single out the individual. In the example above, the public intervention
that was done was a general article in the groups newsletter about words and
their effects. The individual read the article and realized that it often
applied  to him, and thus  he  began changing  his behavior, choosing his
words more carefully and checking his tone.

 For a specific set of process ideas about how to use interventions,  see
the Conflict and Connection issue of Communities magazine, Fall 1999, issue
#104, page 47. The article is called, Working with difficult behaviors in
meetings. (If you live in a  community you really should subscribe to this
magazine. Its a great  deal at $20 a year and full of very relevant and
useful information))

See the resources on the Intentional Communities Resources Pages at
http://www.ic.org/nica/resource.htm

Rob Sandelin
Community Works! Group process  workshops for social change non-profits