Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Interpersonal Conflict

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

This is a great thread and prompts me to take issue with some of the 
assumptions. These assumptions are wide-spread, and as will be obvious, not 
shared by me. I haven't been writing much because I've been swamped, mostly 
with technical problems stemming from setting blogs so I can write. So it goes.

> a lot of courage and skill to sit down one-on-one and have a hard 
> conversation or two.

Plus time and psychic energy. 

Some people thrive on such conversations. They get energy from them. Others are 
drained beyond belief. Requiring face-to-face conversations on difficult topics 
is a huge diversity limitation right there. And unnecessary. 

There are many ways to resolve conflicts. Requiring two in  a room or even 
three in a room will ensure that some conflicts will never be resolved. In 
fact, great care will be taken by the conflicted to avoid even admitting a 
conflict because if they do admit it they will be 

(1) coaxed into such a conversation, even by trickery from those who are 
convinced that this is just what you need (as if it were a laxative),

(2) be blamed of triangulating because you are expressing yourself to anyone 
but the object of your frustration, or

(3) called out in public as requiring support, like a Baptist prayer meeting.

The method I would like seen developed is The Fixer. Something like NVC's 4 
steps, and more manageable than the 12-step programs. Vernon Jordan School of 
Getting Things Done. It would go something like this:

1. Be a savvy insider who knows what is possible and what is probably not.
2. Talk to Bill.
3. Talk to Bill's significant others — his secretary, his best friend.
4. Talk to Monica.
5. Repeat as necessary until everyone is either happy or has given up.

Probably more than 5 steps, but someone please go for it. Communities like 
families need Fixers. NVC is a private solution I can use on myself, and you 
can use on yourself. It doesn't automatically produce or enable Fixers.

> When you can feel the love?

One of the reasons Endenburg's sociocratic process for decision-making works is 
that it doesn't require anyone to love each other. You can love if you want, if 
you have time, if you can, but you don't have to. It isn't required to create a 
harmonious living, working, or anything community. Harmony is about agreements 
that allow everyone to live their own lives happily and enthusiastically.

Conflicts are caused and resolved by decision-making. I make a decision that it 
is okay for my dog to poop on the green and you decide it isn't. How do you 
resolve the conflict? By making different decisions to which we both consent. 
Like poop on Joe's lawn. Then Joe gets involved and his decisions affect both 
of us. We need a new decision to resolve that conflict.

Endenburg experienced consensus decision-making in the traditional way of 
everyone sitting in a room until they worked everything out. He attended a 
boarding school in which all decisions were made by the 400 students and 
teachers working together. It was an expectation that if everyone loved each 
other, anything could be worked out.

When he graduated and went to University, he was shocked that the students 
didn't work together to help each other. When he began to manage the family 
business, he realized that if the kind of harmony he had experienced at 
boarding school were to go beyond small communities of very committed people 
who worked on it for many years, there needed to be another standard besides 
love.

From his studies of electrical systems and cybernetics, he realized all that 
was necessary was consent. Any decision made only needed to allow each person 
to live or work happily. This didn't require loving each other. Consent only 
needed to be based on a person's ability to function within the aims of the 
community.

Every person affected by a decision needs to consent to it in order for 
everyone to live in harmony. Love does not conquer all, and is not enough. 
Otherwise there would be no divorces. (I am assuming here that love exists 
before people get married. A huge leap of  logic but you get the idea.)

> her/his own business to take up with their therapist?
> 
> Along those lines, how do you attempt to ensure that new members joining the 
> community have the communications skills and emotional maturity to be a 
> successful community member?

I recently, myself, said to one of our community members who is about 230 times 
as paranoid as I am that he should keep his thoughts between himself and his 
therapist, so I realize that this kind of thinking is incredibly easy to fall 
into. Communities, however, are systems. Better to think of this conflict as 
the community needs expert help. It may need expert help because Clyde is a 
member of it, but it is the community that has identified the need for help.

With expert help, the community can then decide how it gets that help but 
pushing it off on Clyde by judging him to need help is not a community 
strengthening decision and not one the community is probably qualified to make.

Lest people misunderstand, this logic does not mean that the community can or 
should accept living with people who are so dysfunctional they are a risk to 
themselves and others, or disruptive to community life. I'm only saying that 
the community needs to recognize the problem as theirs and consider what kind 
of expert help it itself needs and how to get that help.

Even in the everyday situations where individuals are in conflict over where 
dogs poop, if they are allowed to poop at all on community property, this is a 
systems issue. The community is a cycle of forces pushing and pulling. The 
community has to be clear how those pushes and pulls will work. Individuals 
aren't to blame for unclear community agreements. This isn't the pooper's and 
the poopee's problem. The property doesn't even belong to them. Neither has the 
authority to make the decision about the uses of community property.

Life is growth and movement. Growth and movement lead to change. Change 
requires new agreements. If those agreements are reached when their need is 
first detected or predicted, the conflict is slight and usually not even called 
conflict. Big avoidance results in big avoidance. As Laird says, the interest 
rate on this is steep.

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines
"We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities." Walt Kelly