Qualities You Want in Community Members

Today I want to tell the story of someone I've become acquainted with in the context of doing work with her community over the past year. As I work with groups on the average of one or two per month and have been doing this for a third of a century, you can appreciate that a lot of hot water has flowed across my tea bag and I've met a lot of folks—many of whom are amazing. It's one of the cherished perks of my profession.

In any event, I'm taking the opportunity today to celebrate the qualities I've observed in one particular new friend that has touched my heart in a profound way (so much that I arose at 5 am last Thursday to compose this email to her, slightly edited to redact identifying descriptors):

We didn’t get off to a great start when I first arrived on the scene this summer and you were still in high distress following the precipitating incident, and you weren’t sure you could trust me. (On my end I have no trouble with your caution—it made perfect sense to me. You had been burned badly and didn’t want to expose yourself to more hurt. You were a wounded momma bear, and I was poking at the wounds.)

As you might imagine, it was not the first time that someone hasn’t responded well to me right out of the box. It goes with the territory. I’m brought in because of problems and it’s my job to go there. I never try to be mean, but I’m also direct, and that can be painful.

In any event, it was clear from your participation in the first community meeting (I try to track discontents pretty closely) that you were shifting in how you related to me based on what you saw—to the point where you volunteered to be in the circle with me for a clearing if someone wanted to do it with you, and that was not where you had started. I was impressed.

In my business there is a lot of easy talk about taking in information and adjusting one’s views, but I don’t see it nearly as often as people claim they are capable of it. You have been the real deal, and I’m taking time to honor you for it. You have been a delight to work with. Not because you agree with me all the time, but because you state where you are (I don’t have to guess), you listen to what I have say, and you sometimes change your mind. Not only that but you go through your internal process pretty quickly.

These are the qualities I’m trying to highlight:

a) You are committed to self awareness, and understand that this has to start with your emotional response, if that’s a component. That means knowing what your feelings are, and looking at how those responses are serving you or not, so that you can make a considered choice about which feelings to feed and which to shift. (This is not so hard to write, but there aren’t nearly enough folks capable of that discernment.)

b) You are willing to own your shit. Mind you, everyone is bringing some, so the nuance here is not that you have any, but that you are doing the work to recognize it and admit it publicly. That’s gold. It's a terrific model for those you live with. We all have feet of clay, but not everyone can own it. (You need look no further than Trump to see a spectacular example of someone who can’t do it. What an awful role model.)

c) After doing your due diligence with self care and self analysis, you consider the impact on the whole—what’s best for the group, without betraying yourself or your family. Boy do we need that. To be fair, there are plenty of others in the community who bring that capacity to the table as well (thank the goddess), but right now I’m highlighting that in you.

This is an awesome mix, and I love it when I see it. It’s what gives me hope that we can build a better world after all, despite all our human frailties.

So much for the molasses; now the sulphur. Here’s where I want you to stretch, where I think you can do more: learning to see difficult dynamics through the eyes of the people who irritate you. That’s where the money is. While people do stupid and ill-conceived shit all the time, they rarely intend to be shitty. They’re just doing the best they can with what makes sense to them in the moment, and if you can see that possibility (good intent coupled with sloppy delivery) it can help enormously to not stay stuck in a story about how they’re the antichrist. 

I'm talking about the difference between containing or limiting your reactivity, and actually seeing irritating people as good-hearted, just not as able. Notice how I immediately worked to find Dale [a pseudonym] a soft landing when she spoke provocatively at the last meeting. That’s what I’m talking about. I defanged the poison right away by first acknowledging her good intent and then getting her to admit that it was in her interest to learn to be less provocative, which she freely did. (I can’t guarantee that that will happen every time, or course, but it’s worth the attempt.)

This is the response I received later in the day:

I will say honestly that I still don’t understand your method in how you go about establishing relationships with people in a group at the beginning, and freely admit I did not trust you at all after our initial conversations, but I remained open to the possibility and hope that we would eventually understand each other better. I can truly say I have felt safe and confident with you in every minute of every meeting. I don’t really need to understand that discord, I just accept it. I have enormous respect and gratitude for the work you’ve done and continue to do with our group. I have learned an enormous amount about active listening just by watching you do it.

You really understand my strengths and my weaknesses and it means a lot that you took the time to reflect that back to me. I am frequently the one in the group asking that we begin by assuming good intentions of each other, and I am perfectly willing to admit that is probably because that is where I struggle the most myself—maybe not in theory, but in practice. Can I objectively stand back and recite the reasons behind someone's actions that have nothing to do with her being a bad person? Yes, as I did at the last meeting. But I see that I lose my grasp on that when it comes to practical application in instances like this—when I felt angry enough to think that shutting her out of meetings was the answer. (For the record I don’t believe she is inherently bad, but neither do I believe she is a safe person for my family to be in relationship with.) Detached from my feelings, I have no trouble agreeing with you that they have good intentions and want good and reasonable things—the same things I want. Emotional safety for themselves and their families and visitors in our community. Trust in their neighbors.

Sometimes (historically often) my frustration and impatience with others get the better of me and that shows, and isn’t productive.

My therapist has also pointed this out and the big work I am doing in therapy right now can be summed up in the one word—acceptance. The more I am learning to accept what IS (rather than being stuck in anger/sadness/frustration that what I WISH WERE is currently NOT) the more patient I become. Because when I’m stuck emotionally in resistance—like I was this summer—it has a hold on me every minute of every day. When circumstances beyond my control have much *less* of a hold on me in my daily life, patience becomes much easier!

I had a big shift moment when my therapist asked me “Do you think your community will ever be 100% healthy?” And I said “well no, of course not,” and she said “Can you accept that?” It was the exact right moment to ask that question (after months of my life being far too attached to neighbors’ needs, feelings and actions). 

I’m always trying to grow. I like what Brené Brown says so much—“I’m here to get it right, not to be right.” Being wrong doesn’t threaten my sense of self and that is the greatest freedom of all.

Wouldn't you like to live with people like her? Don't you feel that by teaming up with allies with those qualities we could actually build a world that could work for everyone? I do.