By Starhawk
(excerpted from Communities #203, Summer 2024)
Embracing Conflict
When any group of human beings come together around a project or goal, sooner or later there will be conflict. We have different ideas, needs, priorities, and values, and they may clash. According to Diana Leafe Christian, who has studied and written about intentional communities, 90 per cent of such communities fail, mostly because of conflict. That’s a terrible toll in lost hopes and squandered resources. Learning to deal well with conflict is a vital skill for communities.
Conflict raises our level of distress, so it’s a natural instinct to try to avoid it. But when we don’t hold people accountable for their wrongdoing, when we ignore bothersome behaviors or allow the group to proceed in a wrong direction, we may end up hurt, angry, or overcome by disaster. Attempting to avoid conflict, we often exacerbate it. Conflict must be faced, and in reality it can be a healthy aspect of community. Disagreements are a sign that people care about community issues, that members are autonomous enough to have differing goals, desires, visions, and perspectives. When disputes arise, and we work through them with respect and integrity, when we embrace conflict and do it well, we deepen our level of community connection and trust.
Frames
Whether or not we can resolve a conflict often depends on how we frame it. A conceptual frame, like a picture frame, tells us not what the content is but how to see it in relationship to everything around it. Linguist and political theorist George Lakoff speaks of frames as overarching metaphors. We experience the world through sensation, and we understand abstract concepts through sensory imagery. We speak of the stock market “rising” or a politician’s popularity “waning.” We “stand” for a principle or “back down” under pressure.
Often outside of our conscious awareness, frames determine how we think about a subject and what we might decide to do about a situation. Consider for example a simple object like an N95 mask. We could frame wearing a mask as a sensible health precaution, or as a political statement, or as an attempt by the powers that be to control and separate us. Each frame will have a different impact on how we feel and what actions we take.
Imagine that you arrive to the common kitchen of your cohousing complex the morning after a big community dinner, and find a sink full of dirty dishes. You might frame this event as “The other people in this community are a bunch of selfish pigs!” Or “Sally left this to get back at me because I opposed her idea about the fundraiser!” Or “Wow, people must have been exhausted last night! I’m sure they plan to come in and clean up this morning. Maybe I’ll give them a hand.” Each frame contains within it assumptions that can lead to varying courses of action—some of which will be less conducive to community harmony than others.
There are three frames we often use in conflict which make it extremely difficult to resolve conflict: the win/lose frame, the good versus evil frame, and the frame of a test of moral purity. I’ll look at each of these in turn and then consider how we might reframe them in a way that can helpfully resolve a conflict.
The Win/Lose Frame
Framing a conflict as winning versus losing inevitably creates a power struggle. If I win, you have to lose: it’s a zero sum game. None of us enjoy losing. The very term “loser” is an insult. Losing can trigger our deepest fears, threaten our sense of self-worth and intrinsic value, and leave us feeling powerless and shamed. Winning is seen as strength, losing as weakness, and who wants to be weak? We are surrounded by models in our politics and figures who cannot bear to lose, even to the point of lying and claiming they’ve won when they haven’t. No wonder we often fight desperately hard to win.
Yet if you’ve participated in team sports, if you’ve lived any kind of real and complex life, you know that we all lose sometimes. Being able to lose gracefully is a sign of strength, not weakness. Sometimes the strongest act a person can take is to give up and let go. I think of Simone Biles, withdrawing from competition under the glare of global publicity when she realized that to continue would endanger her life and health. That decision took enormous moral courage: a different kind of strength than the physical strength she so gracefully embodies. Fortunately, it allowed her to return another time to win even greater successes.
Our community conflicts are rarely at such a life-and-death level, but knowing when to give in gracefully can be a mark of leadership. If I insist on always having my ideas prevail, I prevail at the expense of other people’s sense of autonomy. I pay a cost in relationship for every battle I win. If others cannot express their creativity or take ownership of a project, over time they will leave. If we win on every issue, we may lose the organization.
But what if we could reframe our conflicts and see them, not as competing ideas, but as a palette of options, with our different perspectives and visions enriching us? Instead of making every disagreement a fight to the death, we can see opportunities to collaborate. We take the best of each idea, the most brilliant aspect of every vision, and synthesize something that is greater than its individual parts. Conflict can sharpen our focus and help us reach better decisions.
Conversely, in creative endeavors sometimes one person does have an overarching vision that needs the support of a group to carry it off. That can be an opportunity to offer help and support to one another, especially if we know that leadership will shift and change over time, that the same person will not always create the celebration or write the script for the play, that the star this time will play a supporting role another. True empowerment can mean amplifying and supporting someone else.
Good vs. Evil/Good vs. Good
One of the most common frames in the dominant culture is that of Good versus Evil. Conflict arises when we have different ideas, goals, and priorities, and increasingly, we see those disagreements framed as all or nothing, black or white, all-virtuous versus irreparably tainted.
Some conflicts in the larger world and the political realm really are issues where one side’s position is overwhelmingly better than the other’s. Even in our voluntary groups and intentional communities, there are times when someone might do real harm. We are not immune from violence, theft, or abuse.
But even the most heated conflicts are generally more nuanced than can be expressed in a simple sound-bite. And most of our conflicts in community are not about actual harm. More often, they are disagreements about competing values that both sides actually hold.
For example, in Earth Activist Training, our permaculture organization that teaches regenerative design grounded in spirit and activism, we want our courses to be accessible, without money as a barrier. We also want to pay people fairly for their work, and for the organization to be sustainable. Each time we price our courses, we face this conflict between values that are hard to reconcile in this world. But we find many more creative workarounds when we recognize that this is a conflict of good vs. good, not a matter of right versus wrong.
There are many such conflicting needs and values that arise in community. For some people, privacy and quiet may be a strong value, for others, conviviality and community celebrations may be a high priority. Yet the most introverted loner probably enjoys some social occasions, and even the most avid party animal needs some quiet time. In a rural community where wildfire is a threat, one group works to get grants and pay for fuel reduction on the roadsides, another organizes local people to come out and volunteer to do the work. Both approaches are valuable and necessary—but conflicts can arise when one group feels devalued or disrespected by the other.
Framing our differences as good vs. good acknowledges that people on both sides of the issue have legitimate aims, concerns, and needs. We don’t have to strive for absolute perfection: we can look for a solution that might be workable. Sociocracy uses the concept of “Safe enough to try, good enough for now.” We might adopt different solutions in different situations. A community might balance needs for celebration and quiet by identifying times when noise is appropriate, and times when community spaces will remain quiet. In Earth Activist Training, we price our courses fairly to bring in the revenue that we need, which can make them expensive. To compensate we offer work-trade, and fundraise to offer diversity scholarships. At other times, we might offer a course on a pay-what-you-can basis for everyone.
When we do the work of recognizing and valuing one another’s underlying needs, we deepen community connection.
The Frame of Moral Purity
People who are attracted to intentional communities tend to be people with strong values. We may hold high moral standards for ourselves and value integrity, always attempting to live up to our ideals. But if we frame every choice and decision as a test of our or others’ moral values, high standards can become problematic when values clash or ideals come up against practical realities.
This becomes especially problematic when moral values clash with practical realities. Can we hire someone to do the housework in our community space? Or do we have a strong moral conviction that everyone should clean up after themselves? But what if community members have widely varying needs and outside time commitments? What if some are overwhelmed with caregiving responsibilities for children or elderly parents, and others are carefree? What if some community members simply don’t do their share of the work, and that becomes a constant source of conflict?
Do we provide parking for community members? But aren’t cars a major cause of climate change? How can we morally encourage or enable their use? Why not a bicycle parking lot instead? But what about those community members who can’t ride a bike, or have demanding time commitments to jobs or children? Who makes these decisions?
Conflicts like this can become endemic and damage the ability of members to create practical systems that actually make community life possible and rewarding. But what if we could let go of the expectation that every choice must perfectly reflect each value that we hold, and acknowledge that life is full of compromises and trade-offs? Our goal might shift from perfection to doing as well as we can, and to viewing these issues as an opportunity for creative problem solving. We might shift to valuing cleaning up as honorable work that should be fairly rewarded, and offer options to either do the work or pay for it to get done. We might take a harm-reduction approach to cars, rather than insisting on abstinence, and provide the parking that some community members need, and also space for bicycles, a rideshare board, and ways to consolidate trips.
Questions for Discernment
How do we know when to step back and let go, and when to stand firm in a dispute? Here are a few questions to ask ourselves or one another to help us examine how we’re framing a conflict:
● Why do I feel I need to win this argument? What’s really at stake?
● Is this potentially an issue of safety or real harm?
● How strongly do I really feel about this? What’s the worst that could happen?
● Are my opponents arguing for values that I actually also hold?
● What are the needs and concerns of the opposition? Can I acknowledge their validity?
● Am I supporting other people’s visions and goals, as well as advocating for my own?
● What moral value is really at stake here? Is there a way to uphold it that can also recognize a spectrum of other needs and perspectives?
Reframing is one of many important approaches to addressing and resolving conflict, and communities do well to develop a full toolbox of communication and mediation skills. But there is one overarching frame that can help us engage creatively with conflict: instead of seeing it as something frightening to avoid, see it as something quintessentially human that enlivens our interactions, deepens our connections, and enriches our communities, something to joyfully and creatively embrace.
Starhawk is the author or coauthor of 13 books on earth-based spirituality and activism, including the classics The Spiral Dance, The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups, her visionary novel The Fifth Sacred Thing, its prequel, Walking to Mercury, and its sequel, City of Refuge. Starhawk directs Earth Activist Trainings, teaching permaculture design grounded in spirit and with a focus on organizing, social permaculture, and activism (earthactivisttraining.org, starhawk.org). She travels internationally, lecturing and teaching on earth-based spirituality, the tools of ritual, and the skills of activism.