Cohousing-L Mailing List: Dealing with emotional content ( Was cats: Wow!)

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

I think Jan Forbes missed my point, which was, it is in my experience, very
difficult for most cohousing groups to deal with emotional based content.
Pets are one of  the  topics that often go undealt with because of this. Of
course there are probably some cohousing groups who deal with emotive
content excellently and handle pets and kids and such issues just fine. I
just have yet to observe one myself, thus my reference to my experiences,
which are always expanding. And the truth  is my experience of course is
very skewed, being formally a person often called in to facilitate and work
with the group under these circumstances.

For example, it is a common behavior that when people form emotional
attachments to specific outcomes they draw "bottom line" requirements for
themselves and then stick the group with them.

Consider the following example: "If I have to put a bell on my cat, I am
leaving. I can't possibly live here with my cat so limited."

This is probably not the truth. In the light of later perspective, the
person would be very unlikely to really sell their home and move away over a
bell. The point of the statement is draw a bottom line and try to force the
group away from certain outcomes. It requires a fair degree of facilitator
or group intervention to catch this sort of  manipulation, and to keep the
group on a positive, creative course under these circumstances. The "line in
the sand" is only one of several dozens of behaviors that can pop up during
discussions of emotive content. It is, in my experience, wise to facilitate
such processes with good preparation.

Rob Sandelin




-----Original Message-----
From: cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org
[mailto:cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org]On Behalf Of Forbes Jan
Sent: Monday, September 03, 2001 10:36 PM
To: 'cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org'
Subject: RE: [C-L]_Cats. Wow!


Thanks for sharing your perspective here Rob but despite your good
intentions I don't think you've managed to smooth things over.

Pet owners and parents may be emotional and therefore in your opinion
irrational, but what sort of a world would we have if people were motivated
entirely by reason?  In fact, would that be enough to motivate them?  And
without feelings could you say they were truly human?  Would we even have
community if people were not influenced by their emotions?

The same goes for the other side of the debate.  When people fight to
protect wildlife they are primarily motivated by feelings not reason, which
is why for example here in Australia there's not much trouble finding
supporters for the fight to save cuddly koalas, not so easy for the other
99%, the invertebrates.


Jan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rob Sandelin [SMTP:floriferous [at] msn.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, 4 September 2001 15:23
> To:   cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
> Subject:      RE: [C-L]_Cats. Wow!
>
> Let me put on my  group facilitator hat here: Just to belabor the obvious,
> Pets are a major conflict issue in pretty much every community. They rank
> right up there in conflict issues with kids, work, food and relationships.
>
> I have seen an interesting pattern in many communities I have visited,
> especially cohousing groups. The conversation goes like this:
>
> Pet Owner: We don't have any problems with pets.
> Non-Pet Owner: Our biggest undealt with problem is pets.
>
> I have worked with groups dealing with pets and kids and both bring up
> similar emotional attachment blocks for many people. They can talk about
> lots of things, but as soon as you bring up a subject where they have a
> strong emotional attachment (pet/child) they lose the ability to maintain
> any sort of subjectivity and rationality. It is common that emotionally
> attached people take any general criticism of pets/children personally and
> often respond with the defensive methods they characteristically use.
>
> In my experience, when dealing with either kids or pets it might be a good
> approach to work on abstract goals first. What do we want to accomplish?
> Then, once you have a set of goals, you can work towards specifics of
> accomplishing them.
>
> It is pretty common to find cohousing groups that espouse environmental
> goals which then do nothing to regulate the carnage on local wildlife done
> by the pets. Constraining pets is simply too hard for most groups to work
> out.
>
> Now I put on my naturalist  hat:
>
> Cats in natural systems are super predators, their population is not in
> anyway linked to the prey populations. In a natural system the population
> of
> the predators is directly linked to the population of the prey. When the
> prey drops to a low point, it causes the predators to die or move on,
> leaving a small remnant prey population to then rebuild its numbers. Super
> predators keep feeding on the prey base until it is locally extinct,
> because
> they do not rely on the prey for survival. There are over 200 studies now
> of
> cat predation effects from all over America, and there is a good abstract
> of
> this research available from the Audubon society. It used to be on their
> website.
>
> Rob Sandelin
> Ex-facilitation trainer
> Natural history teacher
>
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