Why Restorative Circles provide a Healthy Strategy for Working With Conflict in Home-ed Communities

When any group of people come together, conflict is inevitable. Especially when working on a meaningful purpose that really matters, and has impact.

You may have heard of Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development; ‘forming, storming, norming and performing’. It’s the idea that after we have formed and before we move on to perform well at whatever it is we exist for, we storm together in order to converge and fall into a rhythm that allows us to normalise. We perform well, glow our light and attract in new members, this causes dynamics to change and the process begins again. More tensions to arise.

This can be experienced as leaving the bliss of the honeymoon period and no longer having that buzz of newness or creative inspiration. Tension can linger in the air and create an unpleasant atmosphere where members start to feel anxious or unsafe, wondering if or when things might blow up.

Things start to unravel and can collapse if left unaddressed. Confidence in the project wains and some people disengage, while other walk away. Those who are most highly invested stick around and struggle to perform as trust dwindles. The group feels disconnected, disjointed, and uncomfortable. The energy is flat, survival mode takes over and it’s lost that sparkle to welcome in new members. Sometimes the tension is even palpable.

Sadly, we have grown up in a culture that shy’s away from conflict. It’s ignored, swept under the carpet, or punished by those who exert power-over. Our inexperience of walking towards tension and taking mutual responsibility to care for the people, process and outcome has meant that when things come to a head it can often involve harsh words, painful feelings and lasting negative impact.

It’s no wonder we want to steer clear.

Many groups collapse for lack of the skills and experience required to adequately approach conflict in a restorative way.

A Restorative Approach

One thing I’ve discovered first-hand is that the process of forming, storming, norming, and performing is cyclical and healthy. Knowing this offers some level of reassurance to counteract the feeling of failure. With hindsight, we can see that each new conflict leads to a strengthening of the community which goes on to re-form in its new iteration, and eventually storm again. My experience is that these stormings become less and less burdensome as we become more adept at walking towards conflict. We hold the confidence that we can get through it on to a better place.

This is why I celebrate the restorative circle, (RC). It is an incredibly powerful process. Our home-ed community experience has allowed us to trust the process as an effective tool and we no longer needed to avoid conflict like the plague. Walking towards conflict became less daunting and our we felt empowered and confident. Confident that we would each be heard as a valuable member of the community, restore some level of trust and a degree of energy and hope to carry us onward.

My experience is that as the RC process becomes more familiar, circles are welcomed naturally within the community as they have raised our capacity to dialogue effectively through sharing power, mutual respect and value.

Building the Confidence and Skills

Our RCs were initially hosted by an outside facilitator until the community learned the skills to hold the circle in-house. We had around five circles (hosted by Gesine and Shantigarbha of Seed of Peace, and also Paul Kahawatte of Navigate), until we felt able to hold the circle process ourselves. Shantigarbha says that the role of the host is to repair the broken lines of communication, and this is indeed what happened.

The conversation was slowed down. Often heated conflict can be so fast and we’ve only time to react so are less able to access our sense of choice on how to respond. Rather than an argument, full of things we wish we’d never said, or fail to remember, in RC we can speak our truth and be witnessed by those present. This creates a sense of safety, and within this container it is possible for healing to occur.

Deep Listening

One thing that strikes me about RC is the emphasis is on understanding what the speaker is trying to say. This feels like a very significant difference to the way we tend to dialogue in our culture. Usually, we put all our effort and energy into trying to be heard, on getting people to understand our point of view.

Think about the difference it could make if each person is present tunes in to the speaker, taking that person’s experience on board before adding their voice. If we each had the confidence that the listeners will afford us the same respect when it comes to our turn, we could listen intently and be more present. Get to understand what’s going on for them before we share our story.

The way I see it is that in our culture people are so desperate to be heard they can be consumed with trying to articulate themselves in a desperate attempt to be understood, knowing that listeners are not really listening, but merely waiting for a pause to insert their voice, or picking out triggers to counter argue.

Our school curriculum teaches us to ‘debate to win’, our parliament models this behaviour. RC teaches us to listen and share ‘dialogue to understand’.

I enjoy the way Scharmer describes 3 Levels of Listening:

· At our most superficial we have an Open Mind, in which we have the capacity to listen only to the extent of understanding enough to create a counter argument

· Going deeper into our listening capacity we have an Open Heart which draws in compassion and empathy with respect to the speakers experience

· At our deepest level of listening we have an Open Will which is where the magic happens. It’s where two parties come together in the knowledge that together they will create new understanding from sharing and blending of their unique perspectives, gaining novel insights that have the power to transform even our values

With RC everyone leaves having learned more about people’s lived experience than before they went in. This is important. When we listen to get a sense of what’s going on for a person, it fosters our compassion, we may still not agree with their actions, however, we can empathise with the aims they were trying to meet. In contrast, never being listened to gives us a sense that we don’t matter, that our experience is of less value.

Mattering

I love RCs because they focus on the impact; how a person or people have been harmed by an action, system or misunderstanding, and this allows for healing. Our culture has a tendency to focus on the intention of an action and tries to negate its impact by saying that it came about from the best of intentions. Firstly, this is a denial of responsibility and steels the limelight from those who have experienced harm, and secondly, allows no space for healing.

Healing comes when we turn the focus on the impact. It gives us the sense that our experience matters. That we matter.

RC is an incredibly restorative process and every time I take part in one I take my hat off to the power of group healing.

Understood in its Complexity

In 2018 I enjoyed a year long NVC course with Seed of Peace which focused on Building Community. We collectively experienced a number of regenerative processes and systems for supporting healthy groups dynamics over 5 residential weekends. The developer of the RC process is Dominic Barter, resident of Brazil. I love how he sees ownership of conflict when he says, “conflict that arises in the community belongs to the community” and how the RC process recognises that “conflict wants to be understood in its complexity”.

I’d love to see the process adopted widely and become mainstream practice in community groups, schools, workplaces, crime prevention, and more. It involves an unlearning of certain coping mechanisms that go us where we are, and a relearning of how to offer the quality of our presence to the experience of others. It gives a clearly defined space to explore conflict which means we can get on with day-to-day tasks in the knowledge that issues are valued and will be given time by the community as agreed.

Once enough time has passed for a community to look back and reflect, it is clear to see how tensions could have been nipped in the bud long before they escalated; RC empowers conversations to occur long before issues become more than just irritations. Our community got the point where we dedicated regular weekly focus to ‘tensions’ present rather than ignoring them in favour of the practicalities of running a home-ed learning co-operative.

My angle has always been that if we don’t address tension, disconnect, and mistrust, then they’ll jump up and bite us in the butt and we’ll no longer have a community to run.

Resistance

There is always resistance due to the fear of walking towards conflict which we do not feel adept at handling, (RC gave us the tools for this). For us there was also the criticism that our focus should be on the children and their leaning needs, not on the issues of the parents, (despite the fact that the issues often related to our educational philosophy and approach).

This criticism made sense, we existed to provide rich learning experiences for our children, and things like conflict transformation diverted time away from content creation for the project we were running.

However, I see things slightly differently. I see home-education as a whole family learning experience, and when in community, a whole community learning experience. After all we are interdependent. Whatever positive skills for healthy living that we learn as a community will go on to benefit the individual throughout their life, and by extension, whatever, communities they become part of, including the family unit.

Passions, Roles, Commitment and Capacity

This is important because it highlights our differing passions and how we can each gravitate towards a different priority in caring for our community. I wanted to ensure the community was strong, with an undercurrent of understanding and trust that would carry us onwards. Another member was passionate about offering activities that stimulated the children in their learning journeys, whilst another wanted to create welcoming spaces with enough resources.

This brings to mind the question of commitment v capacity. We don’t have the capacity for everything. There is only so much time and energy we have to dedicate to our community, and each person is invested to a differing degree. If we over-commit ourselves then we end up burned-out. If we don’t spend time on the things that feel really important to us then we lose interest.

As the one in the community who was pushing for us to attend to our relational issues, (with the belief that our children are better held when we are better held), this felt like my most important mission. Each member felt energised by a task that they felt drawn to and would adopt and care for that role for the community.

Modelling a Restorative Approach

What I found most beautiful was that as we got more into understanding the RC process and engaging in it with ease, the children seemed to learn it through a process of osmosis. They naturally adopted its main characteristics when dealing with tension and conflicts. We’d modelled this behaviour as being something we do and they naturally took to it like ducks to water.

Even as young as 4 years old they would call a circle, sometimes requesting the parents or older children as silent witnesses to be present and represent the community and provide holding. The space was held with love and they had the trust and skills to work through issues and reconnect, which ultimately, is what it’s all about.

In the beginning it takes a leap of faith to adopt this strategy and take a restorative approach. The courage to jump in and engage with a new and unknown process. However, very soon the rewards become apparent. As a result of engaging in this way conflict becomes a route to deeper connection and the building of strong community. Our choice to embrace conflict as part of our home-education experience has contributed to the raising of healthy children with the skills to recognise, value and enjoy their interdependence.

I'd love to support you if you're community is going through a period of storming. It can be quite a strain on your home-education experience, as well as your health, depleting your resources and capacity to hold your family and show up as you want to. With a course of herbs and health coaching you can embrace the storm and let it clear the way for deeper connection and stronger community.

Drop me a line if you'd like to schedule a discovery call:

https://www.healthneedsthyme.co.uk/

sarah-janecobley@healthneedsthyme.co.uk