Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: advice on resolving conflicts

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

One of the dichotomies of cohousing is there are process people who like to
talk about feelings and process conflicts and so living in a cohousing group
feeds that. The other side are people who want a secure and comfortable
place where they have friendly neighbors, but do not have very much, if any,
interest in personal growth sorts of things. 

The process people (and I am one) tend to expect everybody to be the former
because that is THEIR expectation of what community is about. Yet cohousing
is a big tent, much bigger in many ways than other forms of intentional
community, and so lack of energy towards processing emotional stuff has more
space. You do not have to deal with peoples dramas or group dramas if you
don't want to. The process people will jump right in, but there are likely
people who did not move into your group to do group therapy and may even
resent being expected to do so, and to a non-process oriented person,
"group conflict resolution" often  looks and smells like group therapy. 

Rob Sandelin
20 years resident at Sharingwood