When is a conflict personal and when is it a community issue and what if it is both?

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 an expert who could help with conflict resolution or just ask the two people to deal with it on their own.

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 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.

An organizer looking at it through just the personal lens might think:

“Is anyone personally 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 that helps us look past personal issues.

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 just a conflict just between two people or not a problem because no one is upset.

It has become a conflict between a person and standards of their community.

And this is where the hard work can begin.

The work of upholding community standards or guidelines.

When a community guideline has been broken it is relatively easy to say:

“No-one seems to be upset, so let’s not make this into a problem.”
or
“Oh, this is just between two people and not our problem”

It is harder to say:

“This behaviour is not in keeping with the standards of this community, and we need to take action.”

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 use manipulation tactics to avoid their culpability.

The organizers are putting in the labour of having such conversations and may have to deal with the discomfort and risk of speaking with someone about their behaviour.

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 and the risk on the wrong person

I also worry about what happens when every situation is placed into the personal-conflict category because it can put the labour and risk back on the person who has experienced a breach of community standards.

The response from organizers 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, helpful 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.

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.

It is the type of care that involves taking that work off their shoulders?

The person who has experienced a breach of community standard 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 have to enter a mediation process with them.”

“ I don’t want to explain this again.”

“I just want the organizers to address their 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 previous boundary crossings and be burnt out from that.

They may be tired of having to personaly 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.

Personal hurt does not make something only personal

Of course, a breach in community standards and a 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 is a personal matter.

Organizers can help support these two people or ask them to work it out on their own. If they do offer to support they should only offer what you have energy and skill to do and do not step past the role of their organizer role. They are a CI teachers and/or a jam organizers and not therapists or mediators. Where I live in Canada there are free well respected conflict resolution process offered by charity groups that we direct people towards. Also preventing organizer burnout is part of managing a community. So it is not just about them staying them staying in their “wheelhouse’ but it is about not over extending themselves to help people when it is a personal issue.

But what if, after the breakup, their EX begins sending threatening emails, using intimidation tactics, or attempting to control or intimidate them at the jam?

Or what if both parties are breaking community guidelines in how they are dealing with their breakup causing chaos and inappropriate and behaviour on both sides?

Now there is both a personal conflict and a community issue and dealing with a community issue is part of an organiser’s job.

The personal lens can sometimes become a form of avoidance

Could favouring seeing issues through the personal lens sometimes allow a community to avoid taking responsibility?

If the issue is between two people, organizers can say:

“This is for the two of you to work out.”

This can be an “easy out” for organizers that allows them to shake their hands of the issue and walk away handing the work back to the two people.

A way to counter this impulse to avoid community responsibilities is for organizers to always ask themselves have community standards of care or community guidelines being broken here?

Sometimes the answer will be no. Every complaint should not automatically become a community issue.

But sometimes the answer will be yes.

And then the situation needs to be held differently.

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 a person who breached community standards or guidelines.

Perhaps they blame the person who’s experienced a breach in community standards for being overly sensitive and suggested they get therapy.

Now the community itself may begin to lose faith in the organizers.

The conflict is no longer only:

person ↔ person

or

person ↔ community standards.

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?

And what responsibility belongs to us as organizers?

And what responsibility belongs to us as organizers?

For me, consent culture is about creating communities that are willing to notice when something has crossed a line, take responsibility for the spaces they hold, and to do the sometimes uncomfortable work of upholding the agreements that are supposed to help hold us all.

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