How To Disarm Community-Killing Conflict
Identify and work through these five common problems.
❌ Your last book club meeting ended with a lot of tension, and no one has scheduled another one.
❌ Your community mural planning committee just ended with a shouting match.
❌ Your neighborhood garden group’s Facebook page has turned into a toxic hotbed of insults.
❌ No one who participated in planning the gala fundraiser will speak to each other anymore.
(ALSO: If you have a community life problem/conflict/conundrum that you’d like me to address in my new advice column, write me at askthedoubleshift at gmail dot com!)
When we find ourselves in situations like these, it’s easy to think, “Why do we even bother with community life?”
So I’m going to give it to you straight.
Dealing with other humans is hard. Like romantic and family-of-origin relationships, communities can be places where people bring all kinds of emotional baggage and difficult behavior. However, experiencing this messiness in community life doesn’t mean the community is wrong, bad, or doomed. Life with other people inherently has conflict, rough edges, disappointment, or even heartbreak; these experiences are the hallmark of interconnectedness. What I don’t want you to do is bounce at the first sign that something is going south.
There are many types of group dynamics that can derail an entire community, especially in newer groups with less history, trust, process, or resilience. This post will cover five common problems I’ve seen repeatedly in groups and how to navigate them. They include what to do when no one is sure how to make a decision, how to handle it when people create and escalate conflict online, and what to do when people gang up on each other and call each other out. Not knowing how to address these group conflicts can, unfortunately, very quickly derail months or years of the slow work of community building. But don’t worry, I do have some concrete solutions that can help resolve some of these issues. So let’s get to it!