How I Handle Conflict in My Community

Tools and mediation formats for navigating explosive interpersonal disagreement.

This article is a bit more raw than my usual thought pieces.

I came into my new community full wind in my sails.

Full of energy, ideas, and sunny confidence in my community expertise. I was ripping out spiky plants in the path that had been continuously stabbing people since I first visited in May. I was cleaning out junky spaces with a vengeance. I was producing videos about our community on the daily.

For the first 3 weeks, I wore clouds on my ankles. For the next 6 weeks, it was a trailer park hurricane. All it took was one interpersonal conflict to poke holes in my sails and leave me completely deflated.

At least the Wild Seeds feed was sexy. My community marketing services are going well for me.

The person who had an issue with me was immensely triggered by my get-it-done style.

Whereas most people come to community afraid to step on toes — usually opting to do less than risk doing too much — I felt comfortable in my community experiences that I saw no value in hesitating. In fact, the community’s owner/founder encouraged that style of work.

What started with me putting her personal dishes away in the wrong place when I would clear the dish rack eventually escalated to her telling other people that I was just like her ex-boyfriend and locking herself in her room for a week and making her friend cook and bring her meals so she wouldn’t have to see me.

It consumed my mind. It became an emotionally expensive challenge that I wasn’t expecting.

I would be working and overhear this person in the next room telling others she didn’t feel safe around me and it had me bursting into tears. I believe I work extremely hard to be kind, patient, and practice deep listening. This showed me the fragility of my own self-concept.

While the owner was out of town, she demanded that I switch kitchens and move all my stuff out the same day because she couldn’t handle seeing me. She put me in a group chat with her friend and insisted all communication go through there. She banned me from entering any space she was in.

I complied because squabbling over which kitchen I was in didn’t feel productive. (Later, as community managers we decided to add to the community agreements that banning anyone from a public space is not tolerated).

There were some specific behaviors, which I took as signs of trauma:

• Mentioning things that deeply bothered her weeks after the fact

• Tolerating a lot of small things that bothered her without mentioning until it becomes one big thing

• Wanting to make up with me very quickly and overcompensate with niceness after we’d had a disagreement

• Giving vague or incomplete requests about what she wanted me to change in my behavior

On my side, her circumstances and erratic behavior reminded me of how my mom acted towards me during my parent’s turbulent divorce. It made my inner child feel confused and villainized all over again.

Ultimately everyone, even her own best friend stepped in to point out that she was projecting her past relationships onto me. It was concluded that her expectations were unreasonable and she was not fulfilling her responsibility to communicate maturely.

Stories like this might scare people from wanting to live in community. However, I believe the ability to navigate conflict is a skill that must be sharpened.

This situation just highlights what I think is perhaps the greatest gift of sharing life with others — surfacing your wounds so you can heal them.

My community over Thanksgiving; the highs are always worth the lows

My Tools to Navigate Conflict

The irony is that just one week before this conflict started, I was nominated as the mediator for conflicts. We joked about what would happen if I was embroiled in conflict, and lo and behold, it happened. I did end up facilitating our mediation, with two of our community members present to support.

It took everything in my toolkit to be able to navigate this situation as it unfolded.

First of all, thank god I was reading Non-Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenburg at the time. It came at never-a-more perfect moment in my life. I used this NVC recipe constantly:

1. Observe

2. Feel

3. Need

4. Request

I also pulled a lot of strategies from my favorite conflict resolution book, Crucial Conversations such as focusing on content or pattern or using their acronyms like STATE, CURE, and AMPP. In addition, I recommend Nonflict: The Art of Everyday Peacemaking. Browse the full list of titles that I recommend for conflict resolution.

Thanks to my workshop formats, we were able to go from explosive to expressive. We built an altar, sat down, and had a good cry with very mature forms of communicating.

Emotional, but good.

In our sit-down mediation, I followed these formats:

Deep Listening

• 5 minutes — party 1 talking about their experience

• 2 minutes — party 2 repeating everything that party 1 said in as much as possible the exact words that they used

• 1 minute for party 1 to confirm, correct, or add to anything that party 2 repeated back to them.

• 1 minute of silence to absorb

• Then switch.

The additional facilitators also stepped in when there was a lack of listening.

Timeline of Facts

Sometimes, it helps to review the timing of a conflict, and make a list of factual observations about actions that led to disagreements. This can especially help to chart communication failure points.

If you can objectively say, “We had 3 conversations about dishes, here, here, and here.” then it’s easier to track where things “went wrong”.

Focusing on facts and what actually happened looks like this:

You put these dishes away (fact) vs. You were careless and didn’t listen to me (opinion).

List of Grievances

It also helps to make a t-bar chart that lists each person’s issues with the other, to at least track the points of conflict and make everyone feel seen.

This is especially helpful when you aren’t sure why someone is mad at you, or if you suspect they may be holding things in.

I made a list of everything that I was aware of that I had done, and we were able to review it one-by-one. If approached in an open way, this can show that you are taking ownership of what you’ve done that has made the other person feel this way, and identify other things that may not have been vocalized.

There to hold you. Knowing who your allies are in community makes conflict easier.

What I experienced is the exact kind of uncomfortable situation that people fear about community. But it is like the fear of the unknown — when you have the skills to weather the storm, you aren’t afraid of sailing.

I’m going to be putting more of these workshop formats into SessionLab, one of my favorite free facilitation tools. Check their library for different formats, including conflict-themed workshops like “Translated Rant”, “Paired Walk”, “Temperature Check”, etc.

Anyways, I’m practicing more real-life vs. theoretical community building, and there you have it. Arguments about dishes are about as real as it gets.