Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: rules and regs (Liz)

[truddick (truddick]

Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2006 12:52:11 -0400
From: Liz liz [at] significant.com

"I apologize for my former email, which was sent while I was taking a
"break" from fighting with Turbo Tax. I cringe each time one of my
statements is quoted, because that was surely NOT how I meant to
communicate."

That's why people get to respond to your messages, because then you also can
respond and we eventually get to understand one another.

"I reacted strongly to two types of messages.
1) Those that seemed (to me) to say: don't ask us unless you are
presenting the whole story. (In my experience I rarely ever have the
whole story, I want to be able to ask questions while still at the
exploring stage.)"

Seems to me that you missed some perspectives here.  One is the perspective
of some of us who tried to respond, but doubted our ability to be helpful
without knowing more than we were given.  The other is that some of us would
conclude that the resolution to this type of conflict is "people, not rules"
and that, rather than dropping the hammer of enforcement, the best
resolution would involve a win-win resolution where the parties in the
conflict had a mutual concern and responsibility for understanding each
other's values.

"2) Those that seemed (to me) to say: that's a bad rule. (I've helped
develop many rules in my community. Surely some of them are "bad
ideas". But since we've created them together, I hope that, as we
discover the error of our ways, our discussion will be about the
process of fixing the mistakes, not a lecture on why it is a mistake.)"

This characterization confuses me.  Identifying the reasons why something
may be a mistake ought to be part of the process, and where that information
comes from, or the channel used to communicate the message, ought not be a
concern.

My own orientation toward this list is that we are all equals.  We are all
welcome to post opinions, questions, data, humor, and other items of
interest so long as they're cohousing-related.

>From that perspective, your characterization of some of our comments as
"lectures" seems ungraciously dismissive.  It's roughly the same as if some
of us had upbraided you for even asking the question in the first place.
You don't have to agree with my comments-but I'll thank you not to
mischaracterize them.

Perhaps Tom can re-connect and discuss this situation, using his years of
counseling experience, in the light of current understanding of control,
social norms, and paternalism (a term I wish would be eliminated from
professional counseling since it's gender-specific).


___
  !    _    Thomas E. "TR" Ruddick
  !   !_)   Nunquam Vadis Levis!
      !  \