Sen Zhan speaks with four experts in the field of communities and conflict navigation:
Laird Schaub, Maria Silvia, Karl Steyaert, and Diana Leafe Christian. 

Sen Zhan: Conflict, universal and persistent just like death and taxes, it’s one of the things you can count on when it comes to human existence and it gets even juicier when it arises in the most prosaic of settings, one we’ve all experienced at some point in our lives, shared living spaces.

Over this two-part program, I’ll be speaking to four experts in conflict navigation with a particular lens on how conflict manifests in shared living spaces over a lifetime starting from our families of origin moving on to roommates, living together as a couple and into co-living systems like intentional communities.

I am joined first by Laird Schaub, long time community founder, facilitator and trainer who tells me about how power dynamics and hierarchies are apparent in a family setting.

Laird Schaub: We can think about family dynamics where you’ve got multiple people, mom and dad and perhaps siblings and we have to figure out how to share the space, that is not cooperative, it’s generally hierarchic where the parents have power that the kids don’t have. For the most part, all the major institutions, schools, churches, families are hierarchic not where everyone’s voice counts, and we work it out together.  Learning how to do this requires effort and it requires unlearning competitive conditioning that we are steeped in. A lot of people don’t even know that they’ve got that until they run into it when they are with others.

Maria Silvia:  What kind of conflict happens in families or with kids, I think it’s the same type of conflict that happens with adults.  When I first noticed my lack of tools was working in schools with children. I stumbled into a system that was struggling to manage discipline with kids. What I was seeing looked very crazy and definitely an inefficient system in which adults were investing enormous amounts of energy and everyone was unhappy.

I think we are very immature in learning that kids have a lot to say, even at a preverbal stage. I would say that a lot of the conflict that happens with kids, the power struggles, the tantrums, it’s because adults are not listening. I see it also in families, sanctions like time out or “you did this, so now you don’t get to use your phone,” when the act of the child and the sanction have no connection whatsoever. That creates a lot of energetic demand on everybody.

A better way is to think if I were an adult and I break my phone, what would happen to me? Well, a natural consequence would be that I would have to save some money to buy a new phone. If the child breaks a toy or an item that belongs to the household, maybe the child needs to generate some income to replace it. Of course, it’s not about the real money value, it’s about the child having the experience of breaking something, even if it wasn’t intentional, and experiences the consequences.

SZ:  But what about when the parent is really at the end of their rope?

MS: When everything else fails, I would go to this behavior is costing mommy or auntie a lot of energy. This requires that there is a good relationship with the child, so for them, it’s very meaningful that you as the adult are losing energy because they are used to your energy in terms of your attention, your humor, your compassion, your presence when they are in trouble, your being near them if they need you.
           
If they are not used to that, then this tool will not be efficient, but if you have established that connection, the child doesn’t want the adult to be depleted. That’s also one that is very efficient and works with kids as young as two. They can understand the difference between an engaged adult and an adult that is completely tired, bored and out of patience with what’s happening.
           
A word of caution, as the adult who holds the power, you want to be in so much sobriety using this tool because this tool could be used to exercise your power over the child as well when the child is doing something that is perfectly fine. Let’s say a child is crying over a broken toy. If you as the adult don’t like what’s happening or you are uncomfortable, you could say this is costing me a lot of energy, but there is nothing wrong that’s happening. Every tool has the potential to create intimacy and connection.

Karl Stevaert: What makes conflict different in shared living situations has to do with the fact that when we’re living together, we’re exposed to much more of each other’s lives, not just in terms of sheer time, which is certainly also a factor, that we’re bumping up against each other more hours of the day, but perhaps more significantly is that we are encountering each other in more intimate ways and in more intimate aspects of our lives.

For myself, I find that when we are encountering each other in the kitchen, when we’re encountering each other around our leisure time, there is a different quality of how we want all of ourselves to be a bit more welcome in intimate spaces, in shared living spaces.

When we live together with other people, particularly if we do so over a longer period of time and develop a bit more closeness with each other, we begin to reactive family pattern dynamics. We begin to have the same kind of attachment distress or attachment bonding. Both have their plus sides and challenges that we had with our families of origin.

The classic example is one that I often go back to, the dirty dishes and how often that becomes a lightning rod in so many communities because of our core childhood reactions to caring for common space, whether it’s cleanliness or noise, can bring up a lot.

MS: My daughter is 20 years old, and she moved in last year for the first time with a friend in college. I could see the trainwreck ahead. They had a good relationship, lots of things in common, but despite my guidance to my daughter, they did not talk about agreements around the shared space. This is very typical of how we deal with this type of relationship, moving into a shared space whether it’s with a romantic partner or a friend, we just rely on good intentions.

SZ: Or being able to go with the flow.

MS: Yes, and hope for the best instead of having conversations about needs and how to get those met. That of course requires self-awareness. If you’re going to live with someone else, you have awareness of what’s important to you in your living space. If you’re used to living just with your family of origin or by yourself, you may have never had to think about it, but there are things that are very particular to each of us as to what we need in our space in terms of stuff, cleanliness, beauty and other beings like plants or animals.
 
It’s a big mistake not to talk about those things. There are more complex things like noise level and administration of money. Preemptive talks about this are so powerful and yet, at least in the societies that I navigate, people are so reluctant to do that.

We are clinging onto finding the right person and if we find the right person, we don’t need to go through all that mundane unpleasantness. I think that we’ll have to wake up from that dream very soon because it’s not working very well. We are so addicted to this idea of romance and “the one” and the person who will make everything perfect and we just land crashing from that one.

SZ: I’d like to take a moment here and introduce the notion of intentional communities. Most of us have some experience of living with other adults that we’re not related to. For some of us, just a few years of this experience is enough to last a lifetime. Then we find a long-term living partner, start our own families and continue the cycle of planting the seeds of family dynamics in our children.

For others, the experience of co-living might actually be what we’re looking for for quite a while longer, maybe even for the very long-term. Some of us might even look specifically for other people motivated by the same reason we have for wanting to live closely together.

Enter intentional communities, the intersection of expertise of our four guests. But how exactly do intentional communities different from other shared living arrangements? To answer this question, we turn to long-time community trainer and author of the seminal guide to intentional communities, Creating a Life Together, Diana Leafe Christian.

DLC:  An intentional community is where a group of people live together, and they have a common shared purpose. Their common shared purpose is why they have created their intentional community which is where the word “intentional” comes from.

SZ: This might sound like a lot. As if simply living together wasn’t enough, if inevitable conflict seems to be the byproduct of sharing of space and resources, why do some of us seek it so much?  Here are a few voices from the residence of The Life Itself Intentional Community in Berlin Germany on what made them choose an intentional community over any other kind of living arrangement.

R: My name is Rutell. I am 34 years old. I was born in North Carolina. My dad was a Marine when I was growing up. I have six people in my family, so I’m always used to being around a lot of people. It’s nice, but also, I didn’t really get a voice because I was the second to the youngest. It’s nice to figure that out as an adult with people and have conversations around living because sometimes you miss that when you’re younger because of family dynamics.

I: My name is Ilya. I’m 33 years old. I was born in Russia and grew up in Germany for most of my life. My number one reason for living in an intentional community is that I can explore how to go through difficult situations together, how to be open for new perspectives and find new ways to solve problems or filling out possibilities that I didn’t expect before.

M: I am Miranda. I’m 26 years old. I’m from Mexico. I think the main reason for living in an intentional community is to share the joys and the burdens of everyday life and to create support systems that help us lead a better life together.

I feel like people care here. There is a very solid foundation of caring people that are not indifferent to the world around them or to each other and that gives me a lot of safety in a foreign country which I think makes a huge difference in the way that I experience my everyday life.

Laird Schaub: The impulse to live together comes from several angles in the culture. Some could be economic. It’s cheaper to live together. In addition, there are relational and social impulses. People want more relationships at the center of their lives. There is also the theoretical idea that people don’t like the competitive culture and they really would like a life that is more cooperatively centered. That impulse could be very accurate in terms of they will be happier in what they are seeking for those reasons. However, that doesn’t mean they know how to do it. Most of us are raised in a culture where we’ve learned competitive dynamics which means that even if you don’t want to be living that way, when push comes to shove, if it matters to you in that moment, then we tend to be combative or manipulative or whatever different strategies that we develop in the mainstream rather than how to work it out. Even if you believe in cooperation, it doesn’t mean that you know how to do it.

SZ: Let’s return to Diana for a moment. In her experience, there are a few broad categories that create conflict in intentional communities which I think apply across the board to all kinds of shared living situations. One of them is what Diana calls “structural conflict.”

DLC:  It’s a term that I made up to explain when people get together to create a community and certain very, very important things are not put into place in the community’s life in the very beginning. When those things are missing, there can be a whole lot of conflict and there is no shared structure for how to decide things together and make decisions on self-governance. If it’s just random and chaotic, that will create conflict.

SZ: Even though Diana uses terms that are usually heard in the intentional community field, it’s not a far leap to see how the ideas of self-governance, participation and membership are extensions of what naturally exists in more general contexts like flat shares.

How do we decide if we should prioritize energy ratings or price when we need to replace a refrigerator? How do we share grocery costs and cleaning duties? Who do we want as a roommate and who gets to stay overnight?

Thinking about this, I wondered about Maria Silvia’s 20-year-old daughter who had moved in with her good friend.

MS: I would say that in her situation, it was the absence of the preliminary talks that we referred to before. What’s important to you in your space? I think these two very young people came without that self-awareness. Maybe they were used to being catered to what’s important to them at home.

The next obstacle was when conflict came up around whatever, the kitchen, the bathroom, the cat, only one of them had good tools for navigation. It was very interesting to see these two girls, my daughter who has some self-awareness for a 20-year-old and some conflict navigation tools clashing with this other culture represented in her roommate whose vocabulary was all about right and wrong, shaming and blaming.

My daughter could not work with that, so she made attempts, coached very closely by me to come to the conversation. Ask what are you needing? What are you feeling? Those questions took her nowhere because the other person could not speak for herself. Instead, she would pronounce judgment on what was happening or what the other was doing.

Those were obstacles that they could not overcome, and they are separating ways after one year, which is sad for me because they seemed to be very good friends, but it’s not surprising.

SZ:  Even with the best structures in place, people still knock each other off balance sometimes; differing personal habits, political perspectives, expectations about how to speak to each other or simply the occasional bad day can bring our well-planned living team to a rude awakening.

Let’s come back to Laird Schaub and his definition of conflict.

LS: Not only is there disagreement about what to do, but there is a non-trivial emotional compliment. There are disagreements where that is not present. That is not the hard part. The hard part is the reactivity.

In the U.S. where I work, where I live, the culture that I’m steeped in, there is a lot of uncertainty about whether to engage emotionally in principle and then how would you do it even if you had the courage to try? This is foundational in terms of what the response to conflict will be like.

I have come to the view, and I didn’t start here because I was raised in this culture and didn’t have this awareness, that when you live with other people, you’ve got to acknowledge and figure out how to work authentically with feelings as a prelude to getting anything else done.

SZ:  But working with feelings is scary.

LS:  You did a good thing highlighting that if you’ve only had bad experiences with the expression of strong feelings, you're going to be afraid of them. That’s a dangerous place. It makes perfect sense. The only way to recondition is to start having good experiences which means the willingness and courage to try to go in with the belief that someone knows what’s going on or has ideas about how to manage this and when you do this, it turns out that getting the words right, the concepts right, the story right isn’t as important as getting the affect right or the energy.

Let me put flesh on those bones. If someone says, “Sen, I’m furious with you. You left the dishes on the table again. You know that we have an agreement to clean them up. We’ve asked you about this and you’re still not doing it.”

I could say, “I can see you’re really upset that Sen has done this repeatedly and you’re really frustrated.” That would be an accurate reframing of what they said, but the energy would be completely not connected. If I’m facilitating, I would say to that person, “You are furious that Sen has done this over and over and you feel like you’ve made a clear statement about it and Sen is still not getting it and you’re at your wits end.” I would get into that energetic zone so that my electrons are in the same orbit as theirs. What happens if you do the former and not the latter is that people will feel managed and that’s different than feeling heard.

SZ: The feeling of being managed, there is a hierarchy, someone who is doing the managing and that means that they are somehow superior to you in that situation or they’re neutral.

LS:  I am in control, and you are not. You are less because you are out of control because you’re in distress. “There is nothing wrong with you. You’re having a reaction. Let’s see what it is.” This is foundational because when you’re in reaction, it tends to be associated with distortion meaning your ability to hear accurately what people are saying and to work with the information.

You have to have a bridge between people for communication to happen. When someone is in distress, that bridge is damaged. The first thing to do is bridge repair. If you don’t have a connection where a flow of information is accurately going, problem solving is impossible. You cannot move forward. “You don’t understand the situation. I don’t trust you or what you say.”

My first job as a facilitator coming in would be to hear and connect with your emotional experience. I’m not taking your side; I’m being present for your reality, and I have to extend that to each person.

SZ: What if you’re the person who is receiving that? They’re angry with me because I haven’t done the dishes for the umpteenth time and now, I’m receiving all this anger and I’m feeling frightened. I see myself going into reactivity. What do I do to center myself and not deflect, not pushback, not manage, just to hold that person while I’m feeling threatened myself.

LS: That’s a good question. There are a couple angles. One is personal work and the other is how to get to a place where I can hear this, I can recognize what’s going on in me in terms of my reaction. You need to assess what’s going on for me. “Am I in reaction? If so, how serious is it?”

Some reactions are relatively minor that you can breathe through and stay in it. Other reactions are overwhelming. I am locked down. I can’t hear. The basic guidance in this moment is to put your own oxygen mask on first. In other words, if you are overwhelmed, nothing good is going to happen for you. You need attention, you need care just like the other person does. Both of you need attention.

The two things to keep in mind when you’re going into reaction is self-assessment, how much I’m in reaction and need to be accurately heard. What can I put in place to support that happening? In some cases, for instance, that might mean having another person present for the conversation. When I interact with this one person, it scares me. We don’t have a great history together. I need somebody else to help hold the container so it’s not just me alone. That in itself will reduce anxiety. Those are options, set it up so that the exchange is not delayed and yet it’s safer and more accessible.

SZ: Many of us may want to live together because we’re moved by an age-old drive to form tribes, whether we’re motivated by resource sharing, the desire to be in the company of others or a shared vision to build toward a sustainable future together, we are going to run into conflict probably sooner than we expect.
            Given that conflict is likely going to persist no matter how well structured our plan for living together is or how evolved we are as individuals or groups, we’d do well to learn how to be with it and to move through it with as much grace, compassion and good humor as possible.

How do we manage resentment when it comes to different levels of contribution and participation in a shared living space? Is a shared living space a microcosm for larger societal dynamics? Are there some personalities that are simply too hard to live with?

In part two of this program (POSTED TO THIS WEBSITE BY OCTOBER 28, 2022.), we will be investigating how power, boundaries and especially challenging personalities contribute to the complexity of conflict.