Communication, process and dealing with conflict

Editor's note: This article excerpted from Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities (New Society Publishers, 2003).

Most of us don't realize that our wider society is dysfunctional because it's just ourselves, doing what we habitually do, but multiplied and magnified by millions of people. When we see governments or corporations using manipulative, controlling or punishing behaviors, through threats, terrorist attacks or outright war, it frightens and disgusts us. But when we do the small-scale versions of these same ploys ourselves, we don't see it. We may revile "terrorists," but what about our own choice of words and tone of voice this morning with our partner or child? Those of us who think we do these behaviors the least are often the ones who do them the most. The more spiritual we imagine we are, the harder it is to see it.

This is why good process is so important in cohousing. For life in community to be better than it was before, we've got to be better than we were before. In fact, we need good process skills more when we're involved in cohousing, since the community process tends to trigger faster-than-normal spiritual and emotional growth. The "crucible of community" tends to magnify and reflect back to us our own most destructive or alienating attitudes and behaviors.

We become magnifying mirrors for each other. The more intensely we dislike these attitudes and behaviors in others, the more likely we have them in ourselves (or used to have them), although we may be unaware of it. The more we criticize other people for them, the more likely that we're unconsciously condemning ourselves for doing the same.

The rock-polisher effect

The close and frequent interactions with other cohousing residents or forming group members about how we'll live and work together tend to evoke some of our worst and most destructive behaviors. And potentially, it can heal them. I call this the "rock polisher" effect. Rocks in a rock tumbler first abrade and then polish each other. Our rough edges are often brought up and then worn smoother by frequent contact with everyone else's. But the rock-polisher effect can be so painful it ejects some people right out of a forming group, or the group becomes so fraught with conflict that it breaks up.

Through good community process we can make the rock-polisher effect more conscious. Rather than suffer helplessly, we can use community as a powerful opportunity for personal growth. The process of sharing resources and making decisions cooperatively in community, and no longer being able to get away with our usual behaviors, is a wake-up call to the soul. Community offers us the chance to finally grow up.

Some cohousing communities, such as Sharingwood Cohousing in Snohomish, WA, help maintain well-being in the community by establishing a team of consensus and process facilitators whose job it is to train meeting facilitators, introduce process methods and keep an eye out for potential conflicts, intervening when necessary. "Get your best facilitators and the people most interested in process," says Sharingwood resident Rob Sandelin. "Encourage them and give them funds to get training in and bring back good process techniques back to the group. The investment of time and money in good group process will more than pay for itself in community health and well being over the long run."

As you'd expect, the same kinds of communication and process skills that enhance love relationships do the same in community, sharing from the heart, listening to each other deeply and telling difficult truths without making each other wrong. This includes speaking to and perceiving others in ways that allow us to stay in beneficial relationships with them while discussing even the most sensitive subjects.

Nourishing sustainable relationships

Here are some "good process skills" communities often use to create sustainable relationships:

Speaking more consciously

This involves speaking to one another in ways that tend to increase, rather than decrease, the level of harmony and well-being between people. When communication is "clean" enough, people feel confident they can talk to each other about anything, including disagreements or sensitive issues, and still feel good will and connection. These include using "I" rather than "you" messages, checking assumptions, describing feelings with real feeling words ("angry," "worried") instead of blame-words ("criticized," "manipulated"), and using neutral language to describe behaviors rather than characterizing people negatively.

The most effective communication skills I've found are those of Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication process, which help people speak to each other in ways that tell the deepest truths while enhancing good will and deepening their connection.

It takes time, energy and willingness to change the ways we habitually talk with people, so that our conversations enhance, rather than diminish, our relationships. At first these methods may feel "unnatural." It helps to remember that all communication skills, including those we use now, are learned behaviors, and we can learn new ones.

Creating communication agreements

Conflict can arise because of the widely differing communication styles and behavioral norms that people bring to community from different regions, subcultures and socio-economic backgrounds. So some groups agree on and write down explicit communication and behavioral agreements. For example, is jumping in before someone has finished speaking considered a disrespectful interruption, or normal lively conversation? Is coming directly to the point considered respectful of each other's time, or brusque and preemptory?

Check-ins

Check-ins can occur before decision-making meetings, or in separate meetings. Everyone around the circle briefly shares what's going on in their lives or what's present for them. No one interrupts or responds-there's no sympathizing, criticizing or offering advice.

Sharing circles

(Also called wisdom circles, the talking stick process, listening circles, heart shares and the council process.) These are sessions in which people share what's true for them and listen to each other deeply. Inspired by the Native American talking stick process, the purpose is not to solve problems or make decisions, but to explore issues and learn together, share personal stories and become closer to each other, or hear everyone's truth, pain, or joy about community issues. People usually sit in a circle. One person at a time picks up the talking stick or object and speaks from the heart. This often opens the door for others to do the same. Everyone has an opportunity to speak but also may choose not to do so.

The roots of conflict: emotionally charged needs

Community process consultant Laird Schaub defines conflict as at least two people having different viewpoints about something, with at least one of them having an emotional charge on the matter. Conflict also seems to be a multi-layered process. On the surface it may seem to be about differences in ideologies, priorities and values, especially about such controversial community issues as children, food, labor requirements and pets. But below that layer, it seems to be about fear, guilt or resentment, and below that, deep longings from early childhood for certain basic human needs for acceptance, approval, control, love and so on.

Psychologists recognize that besides physical needs for food, water, warmth and so on, certain emotional needs must be met for infants and children to develop into emotionally healthy adults including nurturing, affection, love, acceptance, empathy, connection, being valued, and being respected, to name a few. When an infant or child doesn't experience nurturing and affection in adequate amounts, for example, these needs can become highly charged because they're associated with the pain of loss, which creates the unconscious fear that the person will never get enough nurturing or affection. Hence, buried pain from old unmet emotional needs can trigger conflict in community 20, 30 and 40 years later.

Having deeply buried emotionally charged needs is not the problem. The problem is believing that at some level that community will somehow meet these needs. The secret, silent demand that community or other community members must provide what seems to be missing adds a cutting edge to conflict. This is why arguments about what on the surface seem like ideologies, priorities or values, can be so intense.

I may assume that living in a cohousing community means valuing inclusion (because I desperately needed acceptance as a child and didn't get it); you may assume living in cohousing means freedom for each of us to do our own thing (because you desperately needed autonomy as a child and didn't get it). So we end up having fierce fights about what our "community" means.

What can we do about it? We can develop good communication and process skills, learn to accept and welcome feedback and do course-correction when necessary, find ways to heal our individual issues and deal constructively with conflict when it arises.

The fine art of offering feedback

Clearing up hurt feelings, small resentments or petty judgments about each other often involves offering feedback, by which I mean telling someone about something they did or said and how it affected you negatively.

Offering feedback is not an attempt to assess or guess or criticize the person's intentions or motives. If you do that, it'll probably trigger defensiveness and escalate the problem. And although you also can request that the person do things differently in the future, this can also make things worse, if wanting the person to change is the only reason you're giving the feedback.

"Get in touch with your motives for offering feedback," advises process consultant Paul DeLapa. "If your intention is to offer information about how the person's actions or behavior affected you, there's a good chance the person can hear and accept it. But if your motive is to change them, it probably won't work."

Don't try to convince or coerce them. "People don't resist change itself as much as they resist "being changed," says Paul. So offering feedback can support someone's own willingness to change something if the feedback is offered in a way that doesn't register as a demand or as an implication that they're somehow bad or wrong.

How you say it has everything to do with how feedback will be received. It requires all the best communication skills we can muster; using neutral language, describing what the person actually did rather than assessing his or her character or motives, and using real feeling words rather than blame-words. Again, the best process I know of for offering feedback constructively comes from the Nonviolent Communication process.

Five ways to respond to conflict

1 Ignore and suppress it. Rarely a conscious choice, but rather a lifelong avoidance pattern, this response erodes the quality of well-being in a group. Your members might not notice the buried resentments accumulating over time, but visitors certainly will. "Why does this group feel so heavy?" And like trying to squash beach balls by pushing them under the rug, ignored conflict always pops up somewhere.

2 Leave it. Leave the subject, leave the room, leave the group or the community. Another popular, mostly unconscious choice, this is usually a lose/lose situation, for the person and for the group.

3 Leap into it aggressively. Some people thrive on conflict, and enjoy how emotionally alive they feel when sparring with others. They may crave emotional intensity or believe that aggressive criticism is equivalent to "being honest." They may unconsciously want to recreate a negative but familiar experience from early childhood. Some people may not experience their feelings consciously, so yelling at others gets them in touch with suppressed anger, and it feels great to let it out. Other people can only feel connected with someone once they've had a fight, as if they're testing someone's solidity or strength before they can trust them. By leaping into conflict, people may meet their own needs for aliveness, authenticity, healing, connection or trust, but their strategy of fighting with people to meet these needs can drive others right out of the room and right out of the group.

4 Change how you feel about it. In this response to conflict, emotional upsets are considered opportunities for personal growth and spiritual development. You don't address issues that upset you, but rather go deeply into any anger, fear or sadness as a result of the problem in order to release these feelings and enter a state of tranquility. This can empower individuals, and certainly prevents angry confrontations in the group, but it doesn't necessarily empower the whole community or help create sustainable relationships. Gary may continue blasting his loud music at 3 a.m. and annoy everyone else, no matter that you've become enlightened because of it.

5 Use the conflict to strengthen the community. Lastly, you can use conflict to generate more understanding and connection, and make changes in behavior to improve how everyone gets along, in other words, use it as part of "good process." Handled well, dealing with conflict can make a community stronger, more connected and lighthearted in the long run.

Receiving feedback, listening for kernels of truth

Even if you learn to offer feedback skillfully, much of the critical feedback you may hear about yourself could be delivered in a graceless manner. Even people committed to good process can still speak awkwardly or harshly when they're trying to deliver a difficult message. You could get feedback that implies or outright states that you're wrong, bad or defective in some way. You can hear guesses and presumptions about your motives stated as facts. You can be told you "always" do such-and-such or "never" do such-and-such. You can be armchair-psychoanalyzed as to what childhood factors cause your malfeasance. This can be so painful it completely obscures the important information the person is trying to give you.

Hearing critical feedback can hurt. Not only because of any harshness in the delivery, but also because of the possibility that, to whatever extent, it may be true. It helps to keep some principles in mind:

1 Just because feedback is delivered in a critical, exaggerated or hostile manner doesn't mean it doesn't contain a kernel of truth, or maybe a lot of truth.
2 On the other hand, it could be a projection of the person's own issues onto you, with nothing to do with your own actions or behaviors.
3 And even when delivered skillfully, feedback might still be exaggerated, or partially or wholly invalid.

Hearing critical feedback requires at least two skills: the ability to respond to the person in a way that doesn't make things worse, for you, for them and for the whole community; and listening for the kernel of truth in what they say and finding ways to check it out objectively.

We can help create sustainable relationships by giving feedback as skillfully as we can, without expecting or demanding that other people are any good at it. We can sift through any graceless or harsh criticism for whatever helpful truths about ourselves we can glean. This is a lot to ask. Yet it's the rock polisher in action, and it's one of the best ways we can use community to grow and heal ourselves and strengthen our relationships there.

Helping each other stay accountable to the group

One of the most common sources of conflict in cohousing communities occurs when people don't do what they say they'll do. As in business, this often causes repercussions "downstream," since some people count on others to finish certain preliminary steps before they can take the next steps. But by putting a few simple processes in place, residents can help each other stay accountable to one another in relatively painless, guilt-free ways.

One is to make agreements about tasks in meetings, and keep track of these tasks from meeting to meeting. This involves assigning tasks to specific people and defining what they're being asked to accomplish and by what time. It also involves having a task review at the beginning of every meeting, the people or committees who agreed to take on these tasks report whether they have been done, and if not, when they will be.

It also helps to create a wall chart of assigned tasks with expected completion dates and the person or committee responsible for each. Assign someone the task of keeping the chart current and taping it on the wall at meetings.

Community activist Geoph Kozeny suggests creating a buddy system, where everyone is assigned another person to call and courteously inquire, "Did you call the county yet?" or "Have you found out about the health permit?" This is not about guilt-tripping; it's about helpful inquiry and mutual encouragement. These methods rely on the principle that it's more difficult to forget or ignore responsibilities if they're publicly visible. Social pressure can often accomplish what good intentions cannot.

If not completing tasks becomes an ongoing problem with one or more people in your cohousing community, you can add additional processes. For example, when anyone accomplishes a task, thank and acknowledge the person at the next meeting. When someone doesn't accomplish a task, the group as a whole asks the person to try again. After awhile, the simple desire not to let others down usually becomes an internalized motivator for more responsible behavior.

If someone still frequently fails to do what they say they'll do, you can use a graduated series of consequences. First, several people could talk with the person, for example, describing the repercussions to the group of failing to follow through. If that doesn't resolve it, the matter could be taken up by a committee convened for this purpose. Last, it could become a matter for the whole group.

Why is this such a common source of community conflict? I think it's about developing the habit early in life of procrastinating or agreeing to take on more than is possible, and not having enough motivation to change. When we live alone or live with our families, it's relatively easy to change our minds about whether or not, or when, we'll do something we said we'd do, or just plain let it go. But in a forming group or cohousing community, this can have widespread negative impacts on other people, and we'll certainly hear about it. It can take time, energy and commitment to shift from "live-alone" or "single-family" mode to consistently considering how our actions will affect others in our community.

Sometimes conflict gets so entrenched and seemingly unresolvable that communities call in process gurus, consensus facilitators or other communication consultants to help sort out the problem. These consultants are skilled in process and conflict-resolution methods, and, since they're often community veterans themselves, their experience gives them a context for the unique challenges that arise when people attempt to live more closely and interdependently.

Life in cohousing is more functional and satisfying than life in mainstream culture – but often not as functional and satisfying as we'd hoped! It's like crossing a bridge between win-lose culture and the more harmonious and sustainable culture we aspire to and would like to leave to our children. Cohousing residents are traversing the bridge, passing from one realm to the other, helping generate that future as we keep learning better how to interact and communicate with each other in cooperative, win/win ways, resolve conflicts successfully, and so on. Utilizing the processes described in this article isn't evidence of our community's failure. These processes are simply training wheels - small devices to help us travel more easily from where we've been to where we're going, communities that are socially, ecologically and spiritually sustainable.