Renewal Pages

Five Core Social Skills

Currants

For the moment, let’s assume that the willingness to help build a family or team capable of withstanding the pressures of a transformational journey is already in place. Let’s say this journey resembles a mission to send men and women into space, with willingness being the fuel which catapults the crew into orbit and then allows them to maneuver the spacecraft once orbital velocity has been achieved.

Setting aside this evocative metaphor, what specific crew-building skills are needed if this new kind of family is to thrive? Below are five candidates. Some have been developed here more than others. All still need work.

Common Table—The communion of shared food stretches down through the family meals of childhood, to the infant at its mother’s breast and the umbilical intimacy of the womb, and even deeper, to mythological memories of manna and sacramental bread. To prepare food for one another, then, stirs powerful associations.

Choosing to show up for meals, despite the occasional grumpy mood or captivating project, is likewise a gesture of caring. For mealtime is, quite literally, a forum, and our common table is therefore both the primary gathering place for our family and the loom upon which the remaining binding spells may be woven.

Emotional Rapport—We don’t have to always like the people we’re living with, but we do have to learn to love them. To paraphrase scripture, while it’s no big deal to love my friends, it’s a sizable stretch to love my enemies—those playing adversarial roles in my therapeutic dramas.

But whether enemy or friend, how do I learn to love you? What skills help me develop emotional rapport? Conversation. Music. Massage. Working and playing together. The formal or informal sharing of meditation, dreams, and prayer. There are plenty of opportunities, once the need (as well as the shadow) have been acknowledged.

Conscious Projection—The third skill lies close to the heart of why we came here. “You see and feel what you expect to see and feel. The world as you know it is a picture of your expectations.” We project ourselves onto everything and everyone around us, as though onto a vast theater screen. We see the world not as it is, but as we are.

To verify this premise, viscerally and experientially, requires a mutational leap of awareness. A second great leap occurs as we introduce lucidity; as our projections become conscious. Offering such projections back and forth to one another wisely and well is a vital and delicate art form.

Creative Problem-Solving—If interpersonal conflict is unavoidable (as the first underlying assumption suggests), then how may we best respond to these inevitable conflicts as they arise? Ideally, we employ conscious projection, readjusting our expectations and perceptions until we have  internalized our adversaries and transformed our problems into opportunities.

Somewhere in between being able to fully actualize this skill, on the one hand, and remaining locked in a downward spiral of fight-or-flight, on the other, lies creative problem-solving.

While the terminologies of various problem-solving techniques differ, the basic process is the same. First the needs and feelings of each person involved in the dispute are ascertained and validated. This helps clarify the problem. Then everyone commits themselves to finding and implementing a mutually acceptable solution. And the solutions which emerge out of such a process are, more often than not, elegantly synergistic.

Peer Coaching—How does a community choose to govern itself? There’s the dictatorial mode, in which a leader says, “Do as I say.” Or where the community as an entity says, “Obey these rules.” Then there’s the “anything goes” mode, in which everyone does their own thing and you have an environment with no common goals or standards and no accountability.

Having flirted with both extremes, we find that neither is palatable. Peer coaching, the final of these five crew-building skills, offers a third option. For coaching honors the importance of goals, standards, and accountability, as well as the necessity for personal autonomy and self-motivation.

Developmental coaching lays the foundation for peer coaching. Still later we internalize this process and learn to coach ourselves. Becoming proficient in any of the four binding spells touched on above only happens as we become competent practitioners of peer coaching.

This continues the series of the Light Morning Renewal Pages, an attempt to clarify and communicate the vision and values which anchor us here. “A New Kind of Family” has three sections: The Underlying Assumptions; Five Core Social Skills; and A Social Covenant.

The Underlying Assumptions

Black Lilly

A healthy community provides not only for the physical needs of its passengers and crew, but for their social needs as well. This is no small challenge! Twenty-five years has taught us that learning to love one another is far from easy.

Traditional families get some significant boosts—from the peculiar chemistry of physical intimacy; from the hormonal bonding magic between parent and child; and from the support and sanctions of society.

But the new kind of family that is emerging here at Light Morning has none of these. Nor were we drawn together by the magnetic lure of friendship, or by the economic incentives that bind employees to their workplace.

So it’s hard to describe the curiously durable glue that holds us together as a social entity. And it’s equally hard to talk about what it’s really like to live here, in this common table, transformational, high-impact style of community. It would be like trying to describe marriage to someone who’s never been in relationship. Or parenthood to a couple with no children. Both the hardships and the joys can hardly be conveyed.

What may be offered, however, are some of the understandings that we have grown into over the years. The following handful of core assumptions speak both to our past and to our pending renewal.

The first assumption is that interpersonal conflicts are unavoidable. This is true for any relationship. Whether you’re my friend, lover, co-worker, child, or spouse, I am sometimes going to say and do things that you don’t like. And you are going to say and do things that I don’t like. When these inescapable conflicts are not responded to creatively, they turn corrosive and/or explosive.

A second core assumption is that our surface problems usually have deep roots. We were raised by less than perfect parents, in a less than perfect world. The child’s remembered fears of powerlessness and abandonment, moreover, are very much alive within us. And are easily activated.

We peer out from behind our well-crafted masks of adulthood. Yet as a recent song title suggests, “the heart remains a child.” So you’re a pushy bread-labor focalizer. Or I’m not putting enough food on the table. And these surface problems will be insoluble, especially if we are unaware that they are being fueled by deeper anxieties.

The third understanding, intimately tied to the first two, is that anything unresolved from the past is re-created in the present. These highly creative “performances” are staged both inwardly and outwardly, in our dream life as well as in the dream-like world of our waking circumstances. And they are staged with varying degrees of conscious awareness. The casting director for these dramas has an unerring eye, we have learned, and is quick to cast us into the appropriate roles in each other’s plays.

This may sound like karma. But isn’t it also grace? For how better to free ourselves from the outmoded, energy-robbing, sleep-inducing patterns from our past than to re-create them in the present, where they may be healed. And especially in an environment like Light Morning, which offers at least a sporting chance for lucidity and transmutation.

A fourth premise is that we have a visceral predisposition toward fight-or-flight. This is the psychological counterpart of a biological survival instinct. It may be overt, such as unleashing a torrent of anger, stalking out of the room, or leaving a marriage or community. Or it may be more subtle, such as fantasizing violence, compartmentalizing, or engaging in denial. But whether subtle or overt, this fight-or-flight syndrome is the default setting whenever we are confronted by emotional situations that are uncomfortable or threatening

A final core assumption is that any significant transformation of these hard-wired patterns requires both willingness and skill. Developing relationship skills is essential. Without sufficient willingness, however, we won’t have the stamina to even learn the skills, let alone practice them. And where does such willingness come from—the willingness to face our interpersonal challenges with a warrior’s spirit and an open heart?

This is the question that drives us, both individually and as a community, as we explore the renewal of Light Morning. And only as we find a viscerally personal answer to this crucial question will we truly devote ourselves to the mastery of the following family-building skills.