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

Sen Zhan: Distribution of household and community tasks; who takes the initiative to set up a cleaning schedule? Who volunteers their time to track grocery costs and managed shared finances? Who takes care of the kids or finds a babysitter? Who makes Christmas happen?
           
The topic of contribution and participation according to community facilitator Laird Schaub is a reliable lightning rod issue, one that tends to be full of tension and strong opinions for all people involved.

Laird Schaub:  It’s usually not the money part. It’s usually the non-money part. The more tricky part is the labor contributions. You’ve got several ways this shows up. One of them is what counts. Some people are thinking shoveling snow, cleaning toilets. Okay, but what about the contributions to governance, committees, the accounting role? Does that count the same as pulling weeds in the garden? You have to learn how to talk about hard things.
           
What I’ve had a fair amount of success with is taking time to go around the room and have everyone say what it is that they’re doing for the community, however they define it. What do they think is a contribution to the community that they’re doing? That’s important because a lot of people don’t know what each other is doing.
           
They know that somebody is not doing the same thing that they’re doing. They often might feel like they’re being taken advantage of because they are doing this thing and others are not. They are not aware of a different kind of contribution that somebody is making that they are not doing.
           
There is a way that this may balance out more than they know. It’s easier to start rather than with accusations, start with self-disclosure. Everybody may not value all those contributions equally, but at least they get a much richer picture of what actually is happening and the wealth of contributions that are going on, a lot of them behind your knowledge.

SZ:  You might be surprised that even with all the curation that goes into intentional communities that they’ll still often end up mirroring problematic dynamics in the larger society. One of these suspects is power differentials and how they affect a group. For this we return to community facilitator Maria Silvia.

Maria Silva:  I think the problem is that we don’t see the inequalities. I think that power is always unevenly distributed. This is very bad news for people who are still hanging to the belief that a certain decision-making system or a certain organizational structure can make power equal. I don’t see that happening, at least not in my lifetime and my daughters’ lifetime. Maybe at some point humans will evolve so much that we will be closer to that, but for now, power is always unevenly distributed.

It is extremely painful to our hearts to accept this, but so much more painful to work under the pretense that we have conquered that and we are beyond that because what happens when you are in that train of thought is that you start leaving people behind because of this lack of awareness.
           
The thing with power is that we are very aware of how unevenly distributed it is when we don’t have it but when we are in a situation in which we do have it, we are not so aware.

SZ: It’s one of the central tenants of power.

MS: Exactly, it’s so important to befriend this energy of power to learn to live very close to it and have that flexibility to realize that if I’m talking with my ten-year-old niece, I have almost all the power. If I’m Maria talking with white founder men in my community, I am at the bottom of the barrel. We have to develop the ability to fluctuate within in the context and social situations that we are to really be present in an appropriate way given the power that we have in that situation.
           
Things like race and gender should always be there at the tip of your fingers in terms of power distribution, even in your marriage if it applies to your marriage and intimate friendships and any place where these levels of conversation are welcomed. They are not always welcomed unfortunately, but if they are, you should not be the one blocking them with your lack of awareness.

SZ: Have you ever had a nightmare roommate, one where everything seemed like it should be fine, even fantastic on paper, but then, after a little while of living together, you start to feel a constant tension in the air, exchanges that leave you feeling bruised or that you’re constantly doing something wrong or that you’re simply not good enough. It’s hard to put your finger on, but you start to wonder, is this all in my head or maybe it’s really my problem.
           
Coming up next is an exploration of one more factor leading to conflict in shared living spaces, a deeply psychological one.
           
I asked two experienced community facilitators Dianna Leafe Christian and Karl Steyaert their perspectives on people with challenging personality traits sometimes called personality disorders, a term that casts a particular kind of shadow. This is a topic that generates a range of opinions, so I invited a specialist in personality disorders, Dr. Rosemarie Soucy in Montreal to lend her expertise.

Rosemarie Soucy:  In general, all personality disorders will lead to difficulty in relationships. This instability is always there since the beginning of adolescence I would say. People struggling with personality disorders will say that all their lives long they have felt unstable. It’s a continuum all their life, so it has to interfere severely with daily life functioning; keeping a job, keeping a relationship when there is a pattern in one’s life.

SZ:  Diana Leafe Christian is the author of Creating a Life Together, a book that anyone with even a little bit of interest in living with others should definitely check out. For Diana, the topic of particularly challenging personalities was a pressing one.

Diana Leafe Christian:  Some people have one I call especially challenging behaviors and these are feeling entitled to special treatment, being self-centered and self-focused, having little to no empathy for others or it’s a lot of energy for them to feel any kind of empathy for someone else or their situation.

SZ: This difficulty empathizing with others is something Dr. Soucy speaks to as well.

RS:  In the field of personality disorder, we talked about a problem of mentalization. People struggling with this disorder had difficulty imagining that someone else can think and react and feel different than what they do for themselves. They will tend to interpret the others reactions and words as if the person were themselves.

SZ:  So, projecting a lot of what their internal frames of thoughts are onto other people.

RS:  Exactly.

SZ:  But with some personality disorders, there is often more in just a difficulty in seeing things from another’s perspective or imagining what it might be like to be someone else.

RS: Other aspects of these kinds of behavior are people who have a lot of anger if not actual rage right under the surface which can come out when someone disagrees with them. The person feels superior to other people and not only do they feel it, they’re just absolutely certain it’s true. These behaviors are called by mental health professionals narcissistic behaviors.

SZ:  If you type “narcissism” into Wikipedia you’ll get “Narcissism is a self-centered personality style characterized by having an excessive interest in ones physical appearance or image and an excessive preoccupation with ones own needs often at the expense of others.”

MS:  To put it very simply, narcissistic personality disorder talks about the problem of low self-esteem that is often unconscious and will compensate for this low self-esteem in different ways. It can be finding grandiose things in life. It can be by avoiding life because it would be too risky to experience situations that would react, debate or add on to the pain of low self-esteem.
           
People with narcissistic personality disorder will be triggered and it will be difficult for them to tolerate anything that puts their self-esteem at stake; humiliation, failure, even sometimes just disagreeing with each other can be felt as an attack. These are people who have great difficulty being intimate with someone. To be able to feel vulnerable with someone will usually lead to more superficial relationships.

SZ:  We’ve all got a story about someone who might fit this bill and if you’re anything like me, you might already be googling personality disorders to see if that nightmare roommate, the impossible coworker and even a member of your family might be well described this way. Trust me, I’ve done plenty of this.
           
At first, it was a huge relief to finally have a name and words to describe what I had experienced, but after a while, this very medical way of looking at things was starting to make me feel that I was really limiting the way that I was seeing reality, but categorizing and labeling was so easy to do and, to be honest, made it easier for me to let myself off the hook. After all, if somebody else had a difficult personality, that meant that I couldn’t have anything to do with the problems that we experienced, right?
           
I asked Karl Steyaert for his take on using the frameworks of personality disorders to describe the kinds of challenges we might encounter in communities.

Karl Steyaert:  I believe there is something that diagnoses are pointing towards that is meaningful and important to be aware of. I think it’s important to be aware that human beings have different neurology, different chemistry, different traumas with a large “T” and a small “t” trauma from our family and life experiences.
           
At the same time, I have a real caution about making diagnoses of people too fixed or too much of a focus of how we look at anyone. We’re all highly complex beings who under certain circumstances, any one of us is going to be self-focused and perhaps deeply non-relational or disorganized or not able to hold other people with care. Given the right circumstances, all of humanity will go to those kinds of extremes.

SZ: Even though we might all form hypotheses in our minds about the personality disorder that lurks just under the skin of everyone, how do we address that in a constructive way?

KS: For me I would translate that as wow, when I see this person behaving and doing X, Y and Z, I find myself concerned because I’ve now had three experiences where I would really like other people’s needs to be held with more care for example where I had more sense of consistency in what they were saying and what they were doing lines up.

SZ:      And yet it’s important to raise awareness that some people do have certain problematic patterns in relational dynamics as Dr. Soucy said, these are patterns that persist across many contexts over a lifetime. How do we talk about it with other who might be struggling with something similar?

MS:  I don’t know if it’s so useful to talk about the disorders. As human beings, we are all on the spectrum to be more or less skilled in communication and having harmonious relationships. The disorders are at one end of the spectrum and some people are gifted in being good communicators, being able to understand the differences among people and not be threatened by this. Most people are somewhere on that spectrum.

We all can reach our limit in being able to understand someone else because the other one feels so different than who we are, it becomes triggering or threatening for us. People suffering from personality disorders will reach that limit earlier in the process or will feel threatened by things that are more average from the ordinary experiences of relationships.
           
Most of us can go to the grocery store and if the cashier is a bit rude with us, we won’t feel threatened by this because we can imagine easily that the cashier had a bad day, a negative experience with the customer before us and we would just forget about it. But someone with a personality disorder could feel very threatened by this and take that very personal to the extent that it will ruin the rest of their day.

SZ: Or they may retaliate somehow against the perceived threat.

MS: Yes.

SZ:  So, what can you actually do when you find yourself in close quarters to one of these situations?
DLC:   First of all, learn a whole lot about narcissistic behaviors which we can learn on YouTube for free. There are lots and lots of therapists and life coaches, psychiatrists and others will tell us about this and what we can do.
           
The second thing, we need to lower our expectations to quit imagining that Jack there is going to care about me or care about our community agreements because he knows that they shouldn’t apply to him. He knows that he is in fact better than me and he is disdainful and possibly even contemptuous to me and also to these other people in meetings or just socially. Jack is a little hard to take. If I have lowered my expectations, I don’t keep getting hurt each time Jack acts that way.
           
The third thing is one that is the real kicker in community which is to place limits and boundaries on what Jack can do to me and to the community. Placing limits and boundaries on what he can do to me usually means that I tell Jack, “When you speak to me that way, I don’t like it and I don’t want you to do that. I want to tell you that if you speak to me that way in the meetings in the future, I will say, ‘Jack, remember how I said please don’t speak to me like that? I’ll remind you once. If you keep doing it, I’ll leave the meeting and you will know and everybody will know that that is why I left, because you did that.’” That’s placing a boundary and that’s defending your boundaries.

SZ: Boy did I ever feel what Diana was saying. From the way that she was talking about it, it was clear that she has definitely contended with her fair share of these kinds of behaviors.
           
I’ve actually tried all the things that Diana suggested to varying degrees of success with the people that I’ve struggled with. To some extent, they did work in reducing some of the problematic behaviors we’re talking about, but I noticed that over time, I was just resigning to put distance between us.
           
Also, it didn’t stop new behaviors from arising in ways that I couldn’t anticipate. Generally, I came away feeling like I had followed a set of rules for engaging with a category of persons rather than the person themselves.
           
Over time I also thought that I wouldn’t like to be someone who always chooses one strategy to deal with a problem. That to me would mean that I wasn’t changing and learning, that I only knew how to use one tool in my box.
           
So, suppose we find ourselves in a triggering situation with someone who is showering us with problematic behaviors, but maybe we’re in a good space and ready to try something different. What else can we do?

MS: Honestly, I think the only thing that can be useful is to learn to communicate better our own feelings and thoughts and to name explicitly the misunderstanding and to name explicitly our side of things. “I feel like you might be misinterpreting me right now. I don’t know what’s going on inside of your mind, but I can tell you what my thoughts and feelings are. You might believe me or not, but this is really my experience right now.”
           
We can hope that if that person receives that feedback many times, eventually it will raise some awareness for them to say, “Maybe I’m misinterpreting people” or to help the person see that it seems that my go to is to feel threatened. That’s something different than setting boundaries.
           
We are also responsible for predicting ourselves. We are responsible to get to know our own limits and making sure they are respected and sometimes unfortunately in order to remain respectful of ourselves, we need to end some relationships. We need to put limits that are very firm around us.
           
I believe it also has some positive impact on the other one even if it’s ending a relationship. To some extent, it’s modeling respect for oneself what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable for us knowing ourselves in that sense.

SZ: If no one gives feedback, then this person may never understand what the impact they’re having on others is but being courageous and giving that feedback can also be difficult because it also puts that person in a vulnerable place to say this is my experience.

RS: We see that life is a therapy, right in the sense that life teaches us about ourselves, the accumulated experiences that help us evolve. I’m a big believer in saying the truth and not hiding the truth even if it’s difficult because when we don’t see the truth and we try to compensate for the other’s mistakes or patterns of instability, it postpones their own experience with reality. It’s as if we become an obstacle in their own natural evolution.
           
This is why, especially in enclosed spaces when people share daily lives together, it becomes more important to be more explicit about what’s going on inside of us. We cannot take for granted that people will interpret us correctly. This is something that can help reduce the number of conflicts when there is a group of people together.
           
“I’m not feeling well this morning, so I would like you to not interpret my grumpiness as something personal to you.” It’s possible to add some little comments like this here and there so that everyone around can know a little bit more about the object mindset of people.
           
I would say that even people with no disorder, living in a group it’s a challenge to keep mentalizing the effects. It’s a lot for our brains to process and the chances to reach our limits are much higher. There is a higher rest for conflicts but it’s also important to get to know oneself better faster.
           
That’s the same thing with siblings, it’s a trigger, but it’s also a richness. Being close to many different people, you’re forced to find out where your limits are and then to reflect on yourself. That process helps to know oneself better. If you’re more insulated and only surrounded by one or two people that are like you so to speak, it’s easy to have a harmonious relationship. There is less conflict, but there is less self-discovery.

SZ:  I had one last question for Dr. Soucy. What’s something that you would love the general public to know about personality disorders that would help their understanding.

RS: People with personality disorders tend to be stuck in psychological spaces that are younger than their biological age. If we see it that way, we can understand a little bit more. We can be more empathic. Say you imagine yourself as a 15-year-old adolescent living with a group of people within your family or with friends at school and the kinds of reactions that you had at that time and emotions you were feeling.

SZ: It was so intense.

RS: It’s quite intense and we’ve all experienced this, but some people get stuck in that space. That doesn’t mean that they cannot evolve. They will evolve with time. That’s the way I would like people to understand personality disorders as people that are somehow stuck in a psychological space that doesn’t fit their current responsibilities or the expectations from society as what should be their role in society and how they should behave.
           
All human beings with evolve with time and hopefully mature and be able to deal with relationships and life in general in a more mature and more satisfying way for themselves. It usually helps to find some empathy when we think about these disorders in that way. We can also understand the suffering that comes with it.

SZ: I would not want to be stuck as a 15-year-old. That sounds like a terrible way to experience reality in a world of people who are more adult and more mature. That would make me feel somehow underdeveloped or insufficient. I wonder if that’s how it might feel to have a personality disorder, to feel like I’m constantly not enough.

RS: That’s such a unique part of experiences. At least, that’s what I’ve heard in my office
.
SZ: Reaching all the way back to Part 1 of the series, we started with investigating conflict in our family of origin as kids and parents.
           
Then we dug into the messy kitchens and bathrooms of living with roommates for the first time and the kinds of pitfalls awaiting us there.
           
After that, some of us might move on to living with a partner and starting our own families. Some of us might live on our own for a while and some of us might want to continue the co-living adventure with a carefully curated group of people interested in the same.
           
The nature of the conflict that we experience depends on so many things, the level of maturity any one of us might have in a group, the way in which we organize our group, the larger societal dynamics that creep their way in and even some deeply psychological traits that might make co-living an even bigger adventure than it already is.
           
No matter what your current living situation is, I hope that you’ve come to accept this omnipresent entity called conflict. It’s always there in the corner of any group situation just waiting to ask, “Just whose dishes are those anyway?