When Is a Conflict Personal, and When Is It a Community Issue?
I have been part of Contact Improvisation communities that tend to understand conflict primarily as something personal.
Two people have a problem with each other. Perhaps one person has hurt another person. Perhaps there has been a misunderstanding, a boundary crossing, a relationship that has gone badly, or simply two people who do not get along.
The community organizer may step in and offer support. They might listen to the person who has come forward. They might offer to help the two people find a way to talk to each other or suggest someone who could help with conflict resolution.
And sometimes this is exactly the right thing to do.
But I have been wondering about what happens when we stop there.
What happens when we put a personal lens on something that is also a community issue?
Imagine a person at the jam has been looking for dates or sexual hookups with people in the community while on the dance floor.
The organizer might think:
“Is anyone upset?”
If nobody has come forward as being upset, it can be tempting to conclude that there isn’t really a problem.
But I think there is another question that needs to be asked:
Is this behaviour consistent with the community guidelines?
That is a different question.
It moves us from asking whether an individual is upset to asking whether the behaviour fits within the agreements of the community.
If the behaviour does not fit within those agreements, then something has changed.
This is no longer only a conflict between two people.
It has become a conflict between a person and the community.
And this is where the harder work can begin.
The work of upholding a community
It is relatively easy to say:
“No one seems to be upset, so let’s not make this into a problem.”
It is harder to say:
“This behaviour is not in keeping with the standards of this community, and we need to talk with you about it.”
Now the organizers have to have a conversation.
They may need to set a boundary. They may need to explain a guideline.
The person being spoken to may disagree. They may say they have done nothing wrong. They may become angry. They may tell the organizers that they are being victimized by the other person.
The organizers may have to tolerate the discomfort and risk of being challenged.
There is risk in doing this.
There is also labour.
But if a community has created guidelines, then part of the responsibility of organizing that community is deciding what happens when those guidelines are not followed.
Otherwise, what are the guidelines for?
When “work it out between the two of you” puts the work on the wrong person
I also worry about what happens when every situation is placed into the personal-conflict category.
Imagine that someone comes forward because another person has been intimidating them at the jam.
The response might be:
“It sounds like there is a difficult history between the two of you. Would you like us to help you find someone to work through the conflict with?”
On the surface, this can sound compassionate and neutral.
But what if the behaviour violates the jam’s guidelines?
Then asking the two people to work it out between themselves can place the responsibility and risk for addressing a community breach onto the person who has already been affected by it.
The person who came forward may now have to:
- explain what happened,
- communicate with the person who hurt them,
- manage the other person’s feelings.
And sometimes it is exactly the labour they do not want to do because it is risky, time-consuming, and can be upsetting.
Perhaps they have already done this many times before.
Perhaps there is a significant power imbalance.
Perhaps they are exhausted.
Perhaps they simply do not want to have a relationship with this person who has broken community standards or guidelines.
Perhaps what they actually want is for the organizers to say:
“We have heard you. This behaviour is not consistent with our community guidelines. We will address it.”
That is a different kind of care.
Personal hurt does not make something only personal
Of course, community conflict and personal conflict can exist at the same time.
In fact, they often do.
When a community guideline is broken, somebody may be personally hurt by it.
The fact that the impact is personal does not mean that the responsibility is only personal.
A person might come forward because someone they were dating broke up with them.
The breakup itself may be a personal matter.
But what if, after the breakup, the person begins sending threatening emails, using intimidation tactics, or attempting to control or intimidate them at the jam?
Now there may be both a personal conflict and a community issue.
The question is no longer only:
“How can these two people resolve their relationship?”
There is another question:
“What is happening in our community, and does this behaviour violate the standards we have agreed to uphold?”
If it does, offering only conflict resolution between the two people will fall short.
The personal lens can sometimes become a form of avoidance
Could calling something “personal conflict” sometimes allow a community to avoid taking responsibility?
If the issue is between two people, organizers can say:
“We support you, but ultimately this is for the two of you to work out.”
But if the issue is between a person and the community’s standards, the organizers cannot hand the work back to the two people.
The community has a responsibility too.
This does not mean that every complaint should automatically become a community investigation.
It means that when someone comes forward, organizers have another question to ask themselves:
Are community standards of care or community guidelines being broken here?
Sometimes the answer will be no.
Someone may be hurt because another person rejected them.
Someone may be angry because a friendship ended.
Two people may simply have very different understandings of what happened.
If organizers look carefully and cannot identify a breach of community standards or guidelines, then perhaps this really is a personal conflict. In that case, offering support for the two people to find a conflict-resolution process or telling them to resolve it personally can be appropraite.
But sometimes the answer will be yes.
And then the situation needs to be held differently.
What does care look like for the person who has been hurt?
I think we also need to expand our idea of what care looks like.
Sometimes we assume that care means helping the person who has been hurt enter into a process with the person who hurt them.
But what if care sometimes means taking that work off their shoulders?
The person who has been most affected might want to participate in the process. If they do, that choice should be respected.
But they should also have the option of saying:
“I don’t want to talk to this person. I don’t want to mediate. I don’t want to explain this again. I just want the organizers to address the behaviour.”
There can be many reasons for this.
There may be a power imbalance.
The person may be afraid of retaliation.
They may already have spent enormous amounts of energy navigating boundary crossings.
They may be tired of having to educate people about behaviour that should not be happening in the first place.
Sometimes the most caring response is not to ask the person who was hurt to do more work.
Sometimes the work belongs with the organizing team.
And then there is another layer
There is yet another kind of conflict that can emerge.
What happens when the organizing team does not respond well?
Perhaps a guideline was broken and the organizers did nothing.
Perhaps they minimized what happened.
Perhaps they treated a community issue as a personal dispute.
Perhaps they asked the person who was hurt to resolve it privately with the person who crossed the boundary.
Now the community itself may begin to lose faith in the organizers.
The conflict is no longer only:
person ↔ person
or
person ↔ community.
It can become:
organizers ↔ community.
The community may begin asking:
“Do our guidelines actually mean anything?”
“Will the organizers uphold them?”
“What happens when someone breaks them?”
“Who is responsible for making sure this community is safe enough for people to participate?”
And if the organizers have failed in that responsibility, there may need to be repair with the community.
Holding all the layers
I don’t think the answer is to stop seeing things personally.
But perhaps we need to become better at holding more than one level of experience at a time.
Perhaps we can also ask:
What happened?
Who has been affected?
What community agreements are relevant?
What responsibility belongs to the people involved?
What responsibility belongs to the community?
And what responsibility belongs to us as organizers?
For me, consent culture is not only about helping people resolve conflict.
It is also about creating communities that are willing to notice when something has crossed a line, take responsibility for the spaces they hold, and do the sometimesuncomfortable work of upholding the agreements that are supposed to help hold us all.
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