Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Consequences ?

[Karen Gimnig Nemiah (gimnig]

When you ask about consequences, I’m curious what your goal is? Getting
clear about this is essential determining a path forward.

Typically the answer I get is that folks want to change the behavior
(leaving dishes, poop etc). I’m sure we’d all like a magic wand for
changing other people’s behavior. The follow up question is: At what cost?
Certainly there are consequences you could institute that would change
behavior, and I’ve never met a community yet that is willing to use them.
It turns out that we’d rather be nice to each other and support connected
relationships than keep our common house free of dirty dishes.

Consequences are fundamentally about applying pressure to make someone
behave differently than they would otherwise. This is a power over approach
and like all power over approaches it will always harm relationships. I
can’t tell you whether it’s worth it. That’s your call, but mostly folks I
work with decide that it isn’t worth it for these kinds of things.

So if we aren’t going to try to force people to change their behavior, what
options do we have? At least the following two:
1. We can live with the behavior. We can decide that the benefits of
community, of which there are many, are worth the cost of sometimes
cleaning up someone else’s mess and make our peace with that.
2. Vulnerability. We can share our wants, needs and expectations, without
blame or judgement and trust that our neighbors care enough to take our
needs into account. This is hard work. If it is outside your community’s
capacity right now, there are ways to grow that capacity. CohoUS offers
trainings that would help including one I’m teaching on conflict starting
later this month.

For me it’s usually a combination of the two that works best, and it’s a
lot of emotional work to get there, but I think it’s worth it. I grow every
time I do it.
-- 
In Community,
Karen Gimnig
678-705-9007
www.karengimnig.net
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