Working Conflict Like Dreams

Earlier this year I got an out-of-the-blue insight from a student in one of my facilitation trainings. Dave Werlinger (from Elderberry, a cohousing community outside of Durham NC) pointed out that working with conflict is, for him, a lot like working with dreams. Huh?

I'd never heard that before.

(Part of the beauty of teaching is sometimes insights flow in the other direction—from the student to the instructor.)

Dave's contention is that interpreting dreams requires a lot of paying attention and asking questions, where it's more about setting the right container than brilliant interpretation. In his experience things rarely fall into place right away. You have to be patient and willing to follow your intuition into non-rational territory. Free association is the norm, not the exception. He feels his way into insight.

The more I sat with that approach, the more it made sense. 

Though fulminating conflict is not a large part of the landscape of most communities (thank goodness), it's present to some degree in all communities, and most struggle to handle it well. (As a frame of reference, I encounter serious unresolved conflict in about half the groups I'm asked to work with—it's that common.) Here's what I've come to understand about why that's the case:

•  Almost all of those living in community were raised in the wider, competitive culture, where differences were settled through debate (the outcome of which is determined by a majority vote), intimidation, or fiat ("Because I told you so"). We brought that competitive conditioning with us to community, and when the stakes are high we tend to respond out of that earlier experience (rather than from community values). That is, we tend to fight, flee, or give up and get cynical. 

While that generally doesn't work well in cooperative settings, it's our default mode. If groups don't grow beyond it, they get stuck, conflicts don't get resolved, and they fester, eroding the foundations of community. Yuck.

•  In the majority of groups, the model for "legitimate" collective dialog is rational thought. Without explicitly discussing it, most groups fall into running meetings in community more or less the same way they learned to run them in student council: relying on parliamentary procedure and the expectation that all input will be presented rationally (if something starts as an intuition or a feeling, you are expected to translate it into a rational thought before speaking).

•  When you break conflict down, reactivity is always an element. That is, there is a strong emotional component. What's more, you aren't going anywhere until that's been acknowledged and its meaning is understood. (Essentially, if two people in conflict are viewing the same triggering incident through significantly different realities—which is quite common—is it any wonder that it's hard to make progress on problem solving? Well-intentioned attempts at resolution tend to break down in a battle over controlling reality—where each side demands that the other accept their framework as a precondition for moving forward.)

•  There will tend to be a higher incidence of conflict in community than in the wider society, because: 

a) You are trying to do something together as a group (that's why it's called an "intentional" community), and that translates into more opportunities to encounter different viewpoints than in a random neighborhood, where you are not trying to make common cause.

b) In community you have more intertwined lives, which means there are more things you have to work out with your fellow members—the more you share, the more likely you are to encounter conflict. (Read that last phrase again—many may find it counter-intuitive.)

(Hint: the measure of a community's health is not so much the frequency of conflict, as how well you work with it when it emerges. Conflict is unavoidable. Unfortunately, many communities also avoid learning how to work with it.)

So let's look at what we have:
—Conflict requires a capacity for working emotionally.
—Few come into community with that skill.
—Groups rarely start off with a commitment to welcoming emotional input.
—Community living brings people into closer association, accelerating the incidence of conflict.

Can you see the train wreck coming?

What I like about Dave's dreamy approach is that it's non-rational (note that I didn't say "irrational"). Since it's pretty clear that trying to think your way through conflict is a flawed concept, Dave looked elsewhere for inspiration. Having learned (through dream work) to trust that a state of inquiry, openness, and non-judgment can result in connection and insight, Dave was willing to try the same thing with conflict. Go Dave!