Conflict, Bullies, and Introverts

A friend of mine recently posted these comments in response to my blog of Nov 16, 2015, What It Takes for Groups to Be Less Conflicted about Conflict:

Assuming the accuracy of data reporting the relative predominance in cohousing of people who view themselves as introverts, the use of boundary “management” or strengthening/closing in response to bullying (or even just to conflict in general) may be seen more frequently when an introvert feels bullied.  

My thinking is that the initial response called for—engaging or confronting—would require a decision or choice to engage, which the introvert might need to go inside to reflect upon first. Once there, they might determine that inside is safer and less demanding, and not come out again.
Staying in the fire is not easy for anyone, and perhaps even less so when the preferred examination process takes place internally. The decision to return to the fray and engage may be asking introverts to demonstrate a greater degree of courage than they possess, especially when it is not supported by the community.

Let's unpack this, starting with definitions and premises.

o  Almost all groups will contain a mix of extroverts and introverts. For the purpose of this essay I'm defining extroverts as people who are energized by engagement with others; introverts tend to be drained by engagement. Extroverts recharge their batteries by being with others; introverts recover alone. It's not a good or bad thing; it's just different.

o  Plenaries (meetings of the whole) tend to favor extroverts because it's an energizing environment for them. For introverts meetings can be a strain—they often have to pump themselves up to stay focused and engaged, and they're frequently operating outside their comfort zone. 

o  If you add conflict to the mix (emotional distress) the stakes tend to get even higher. While extroverts often raise their energy in the presence of conflict (some even thrive on it), this can be excruciating and feel unsafe for introverts. This tends to make it even harder for introverts to get their oar in the water and keep pulling.

o  Bullying is about acting in a way that's intimidating, making it harder for others to voice their  concerns or interests, or to hang in there when disagreeing with the bully. It is not about the bully's viewpoint; it's about how they express themselves and the ways in which they apply pressure on others to back down or otherwise yield. Bullying succeeds when others believe that exiting the unpleasant dynamic is more important than getting their needs expressed or met.

o  Bullying can show up in a wide range of ways:
sarcasm
raising one's voice
talking fast
interrupting
getting upset 
denigrating other's viewpoints (if you think this is rare, reflect on the dominant style of current political discourse)
woe-is-me manipulation (let me have my way because I'm a victim and your opposition prolongs or exacerbates my suffering)
threatening unpleasant consequences

o  Bullying may be a conscious, tactical choice, or it may be an unconscious style, so ingrained in a person's personality that they engage in it by default. 

o  Bullies may care how their behavior impacts others or they may not. That said, there is an advantage in cooperative culture in that there is a baseline assumption that the group will do its best work only when all relevant viewpoints are expressed and taken into account. Thus, in a cooperative setting there is a greater chance that a bully will be willing to be willing to work with feedback about how their behavior is making it harder for others to speak. The bully may deny that that they intend to intimidate others, but they may be willing to work on changing their behavior once they know it's having that effect.

• • •

So what can be done about bullying in cooperative groups, taking into account how hard this dynamic can be for introverts? Here are half a dozen suggestions:

1. Talk about it ahead of time
I think it's essential that group's discuss the phenomenon of bullying behavior and how they want to handle it. (Hint #1: It is an an absolute nightmare to postpone this consideration until you're in the moment. You need to do this pre-need. Hint #2: Note how I phrased this—bullying behavior. Object to the behavior; not the person.)

2. Commit to interrupting bullying wherever it's encountered
This will almost certainly mean authorizing facilitators to step in when they believe bullying is occurring—whether the intimidation was intended or not isn't the point. If bullying is allowed to happen unchecked, things will not magically get better.

Note how nuanced this can be. Suppose someone in the group is intimidated by loud voices and feels bullied by a member of the group who is frequently passionate in their statements. How much does the group want to protect the person who feels intimidated and how much does it want to support each member having access to their natural style? Where is the balance point?

3. Have agreements about how you'll work with emotional reactivity and develop the skills to deliver the support you commit to providing
You have to anticipate that when bullying surfaces that some of the time reactivity will be part of the mix. It will be paralyzing if there is no confidence in the group's ability to compassionately and accurately work the moment—be it the bully's distress, other's distress, or both.

4. Introverts and extroverts are going to have to make peace with one another
You cannot expect everyone else to adapt to you. For extroverts this translates into being sensitive to how your style can make life challenging for others. For introverts it means there has to be room at the table for the passionate and the boisterous, just as much as for the quiet and contemplative. You don't have to pretend to be something you're not, yet group culture is a mixed salad, not a homogeneous stew.

5. Offer a mix of formats, making it easier for introverts to contribute or to express distress
Take time to canvass your membership to get a sense of what will help people feel safe and that their contributions are welcome. Don't guess what people want; ask. 

What am I talking about? Small group breakouts, individual writing, talking sticks, and guided visualizations are techniques that offer a more deliberate pace and a less chaotic on-ramp. Intermix them with the up-tempo raucousness of brainstorms and open discussions.

6. Make sure that the right to be heard is joined at the hip to the responsibility to hear and work constructively with the views of others
When bullies are driving an agenda they are all too often insisting on their right, while sidestepping their responsibility. Make sure that that doesn't happen. First help them be heard, then slow things down to make sure that there's air time for other perspectives. After all, introverts are not stupider; they're just quieter.

Getting Less Conflicted About Conflict

In the last week, a colleague sent me the link for a TEDx talk entitled: Conflict: Use it, Don't Defuse It. The two presenters, CrisMarie Campbell and Susan Clarke, are professional facilitators and they do a good job of laying out their main premise: that conflict is inherently neither good nor bad, yet most people (and most groups) avoid it (or try to contain it) to their detriment.

They claim—and I agree—that conflict is a source of energy and information, and if you can learn to approach it with vulnerability and curiosity you can get amazing results. In the video they share some powerful stories about their personal and professional lives where these lessons were brought home to them.

Unfortunately, Cris & Susan don't take it quite far enough. While making a case for the benefit to be derived from stepping away from defensiveness and combativeness, they do not make clear how someone can make that choice—especially in the heat of the moment.

Over my years as a process consultant and facilitator, I've learned that the point of entrée is working with the belligerents emotionally, where you're able to bring to the surface an accurate summary of what each player is feeling and what those feelings mean. It is crucial that this be accomplished with minimal judgment and maximal empathy, so that the person feels heard and understood (note that I didn't say that they feel agreed with, which may or may not happen).

Often, as the facilitator, I will demonstrate what I'm looking for before asking the other conflicted party to take a turn, simply because this request may be too difficult until they, themselves, have been heard. While it's important that the hearing and reaching out ultimately happen across the lines of the conflict, it is often useful for the facilitator to prime the pump—after which they gracefully exit the dynamic, leaving the belligerents to proceed on their own.

The key here is whether authentic hearing and sharing are happening. If so, the facilitator can step back. If not, then the facilitator steps in.

While conflict comes in all shapes and sizes, the most interesting forms (read volatile and intractable) involve at least one party being in active non-trivial distress. As such, once you're clear that there is a significant emotional component in play, then I think it's helpful to keep the focus on the feelings until they have been adequately identified and understood. This expressly means setting aside content (the action or behavior that triggered the conflict) until that's been accomplished.

To be sure, people will tend to squirm when you do this (because arguing over content is more familiar and is deemed safer), but it can be done. If you don't, then the unresolved tension tends to distort the information and cripples the problem solving. In short, attempts at problem solving without acknowledging feelings just don't work. Somehow, a bridge needs to be built between two conflicted people (it may be more than two, but any conflict can be broken down into a collection of pairs) or you won't get any constructive traffic between them. Further, it has been my experience that that bridge needs to have emotional girders or it will be brittle and insufficiently resilient.

While it's possible for the belligerents to have done sufficient personal work to be able to understand this dynamic and to unilaterally step back from the fight and reorient with vulnerability and curiosity (as Cris & Susan advocate), don't count on it. It takes an exceptional person to pause mid-salvo, lay down their ammunition, and ask their upset counterpart for more information. I've seen it happen, but not very often.

Better, I think, is developing a group agreement (and the group's capacity) about how you'd like to proceed and then authorizing the group's facilitators to step in and guide the process, reminding people firmly, but gently how they intend to act when conflict surfaces.

I realize that I'm asking a lot. For the most part, facilitators are expected to manage the content of meetings, making sure that the group stays on topic, listens well, and moves productively toward resolution of group issues. By adding responsibilities directly related to conflict, I am significantly expanding what's expected of facilitators—I am asking them to manage energy as well as content, and to work with people emotionally as well as rationally. This is a big jump and won't land well for everyone. Even if you like my thinking about conflict, you need to seriously consider whether you have facilitators who can answer the bell (or be trained to).

Back in the Lymelight Again

This past week, Ma'ikwe had a Facebook exchange with someone close to her (whom I'll call Jesse) that didn't go well despite both of them wanting the best for each other. Worse, when Ma'ikwe reached out to me for help (having recognized that the back-and-forth with Jesse had derailed), my response didn't help. Yuck.

While the key dynamic with Ma'ikwe is the cumulative emotional toll that her constant struggle with chronic Lyme has exacted on her psyche, this tender dynamic is worth exploring because it could happen whenever someone is in a depleted state. This sequence is unquestionably not peculiar to Lyme.
I'm going to use this blog to unpack how three intelligent, caring people could miss each other so poignantly. Think of it as a crash site investigation.

The Back Story
o  Jesse lives with her partner on a small rural acreage, where they do homestead farming, work two jobs, and try to keep up with their rambunctious four-year-old daughter. Their lives are full.

o  As Ma'ikwe and I are self-employed, it was easier for us to travel to Jesse's family than the other way around, and over the last four years, Ma'ikwe and I have visited them a handful of times. To date, Jesse and partner have not visited Ma'ikwe at Dancing Rabbit.
o  A straight forward person, Jesse's style is to simply put out what she wants and let others know what she's thinking. While she doesn't expect to always be agreed with, it's her way to speak up when something is on her mind.
o  Ma'ikwe has done a lot of personal growth work over the course of her adult life and she's generally willing to look closely at her part of a dynamic when things don't go well.

o  Ma'ikwe suffered from depression in her early 20s and the personal growth work helped considerably with her recovery. By the time we met, she was a high-functioning, spunky, centered woman who was an accomplished organizer and frustrated with people who flaked on commitments.

o  Jesse and partner lead a more or less traditional nuclear family lifestyle; Ma'ikwe and I don't. Both she and I have been involved with intentional communities for decades, and we have an odd marriage in that we live three miles apart, each in our distinct, though well-connected communities (Sandhill Farm and Dancing Rabbit). Jesse has had no personal experience with group living.

o  Lyme disease (which Ma'ikwe's been battling in its active chronic form for most of the last three years) is progressively enervating and she's struggled to come to grips with her no longer being able to do things, or be anywhere near as productive as she once was.

o  In the last year, Ma'ikwe discovered that her 15-year-old son, Jibran, also has Lyme disease. While there has been a certain amount of camaraderie to their seeing the same doctor and commiserating with one another over symptoms, it's been heartbreaking for a mother to see her son suffer and be cheated out of normal teenage activities.

o  On top of near-constant muscle and joint ache, and a sharply diminished capacity to do things, it is psychologically exhausting not knowing when or if she'll recover (about 20% of chronic Lyme patients never do). While Ma'ikwe has a strong will and is an amazingly upbeat person who rarely complains (which is one of the bedrock reasons I think she's a great partner, by the way), Lyme's constant siege on her being is an exhausting burden, and sometimes it's too much. After a difficult weekend, she was in one of those especially tender and teary places at the start of this week.

Ma'ikwe & Jesse's Facebook Mishap
On Tuesday, Jesse reached out to Ma'ikwe via Facebook, unaware of Ma'ikwe's fragility and low emotional resilience. The conversation started off well enough, with Jesse inquiring how she was doing, knowing Ma'ikwe had better and worse days.

Jesse asked if Ma'ikwe would be open to visit where she could offer a stretch of domestic assistance and Ma'ikwe said she'd love that.

Jesse had noticed (via Facebook reporting) that Ma'ikwe had seemed in better spirits following a long visit from her mother in September when she was able to provide substantial domestic assistance and wondered if Ma'ikwe's health challenges were exacerbated by living in an unfinished home with a partner (me) who was around so little to help.

This is where it got sticky. Ma'ikwe tried to explain that good and bad days were not so much related to how much the dishes were done as they were to the cycle of spirochete blooms, yet Jesse pressed on. Even though Ma'ikwe reported that she benefited from a precious level of emotional and physical support by virtue of living in community, Jesse noted that her health challenges seemed to coincide with her moving into her new house three years ago. Maybe she needed to live a more "normal" life.

Ma'ikwe had a bad reaction to that, believing that Jesse had no feel for what living in community meant. On the other hand, stress is undoubtedly a contributing factor to Lyme becoming active and there's definitely been stress related to building the house—so it wouldn't be right to say that Jesse was completely off base.

Jesse was offering her heartfelt thoughts, connecting the dots as she saw them. Ma'ikwe was upset that she didn't take the time to look for more dots before offering the conclusion shed drawn with them. Ma'ikwe felt misunderstood and Jesse felt punished for reaching out. Train wreck.

While they broke off the exchange before it got ugly, Ma'ikwe could tell right away that it hadn't gone well, and even in her strained state she did a savvy thing—she asked for help. That's when I got in trouble.

Laird's Face Plant
Ma'ikwe recapitulated the Facebook dialog and asked for my perspective. Because the communication was on email, I made a guess as to her emotional state and assumed that she wanted help seeing things differently. (There's a big difference between being in distress, and talking about your having been in distress.) While she really did want my perspective, she first wanted my emotional support—as her partner, as someone who knew she was in a fragile place, and as someone who is a professional who works with people in distress. ("How come you know so well how to offer emotional support to others but not to me?" That hurt.)

Essentially, I violated a cardinal rule of working emotionally: validate the upset person's experience before doing anything else. I misread that she needed that (hey, everyone makes mistakes) but my big goof was not noticing that I was making an assumption and checking it out before proceeding. Doh. 

I was so happy to be able to offer a bridge to Jesse (I didn't find it that hard to see an innocent and caring motivation for all she wrote, even if much of her offering was off the mark) that I leaped to that, bypassing the acknowledgment of my partner's pain. Not one of my finest moments.

So now we had three people feeling shitty. Ugh!

By the time I caught up with Ma'ikwe's email expressing her frustration with my response, I at least didn't compound the problem by writing another email (I may be a slow learner, but that's better than being a no learner). Instead I picked up the phone and apologized.

In spite of all the prickliness of this communication chain, I'm in awe that Ma'ikwe could muster sufficient focus and energy to scrape herself up off the floor, tell me fairly cleanly how my reply to her didn't work, and then send a follow up email to Jesse that did a terrific job of laying out the elements of what's being hard for her right now.

My hope now is that Ma'ikwe and I can convince Jesse to get back on the horse, and stay in touch. While it's no fun going through hard exchanges; it's when we're most susceptible to reactivity that meaningful relationships mean the most.