Scott Peck in his book The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace suggests that the path to genuine human connection lies through chaos. He says that in community building, people need to get past their need to “convert” or “heal” the other person – or, as we might suggest “fix” what is “wrong” with everyone else and the situation or “solve” the problem the family is facing. As it turns out, the chaos itself is made of these needs to convert, heal, fix and solve. These efforts are often rooted in the even deeper human needs to be clearly seen and deeply heard.
In every family we have worked with, we have heard two statements made towards the beginning of the engagement. They come with unerring predictability. The first is “we don’t want to do anything touchy-feely” (or words to that effect) and the second is “we don’t want to go into the past, we want to move forward from here” (or words to that effect). The impulse behind these statements is not only understandable but contains great wisdom to be honored. If becoming touchy-feely and going into the past mires the family in drama it is wholly unproductive. The family is concerned, and rightfully so, that they will be even more stuck if they go there.
That said, there is a particular kind of “touchy-feely” and “going into the past” that is essential for families to genuinely move forward. That is where the real work is and the desire to avoid these things often contains the tacit recognition that eventually they will have to go there.
We have come to call this deeper work reconciliation.
Reconciliation is often not the first move a family can or should make but it is often the second or third. Most families don’t have the capacity or capability to reconcile when they start working together – this is where the family is right in recognizing its own limits when it comes to “touchy-feely stuff” or digging into the past. The consultant does well to honor that reticence. The family knows that it is not ready or prepared for the chaos that this will involve. Yet reconciliation – moving beyond the need to convert, heal or fix each other – is the precondition to genuine collaboration or family governance. Families that make that journey are more likely to make it; families that don’t are almost certain to fall apart either dramatically or incrementally over time.
In a recent group thread on Linked-in, an advisor was facing a situation in which two “camps” had developed within the family over the direction of the family business. There was an upcoming family meeting that he was supposed to facilitate that was to put the finishing touches on a family governance document. One person, a second gen business owner, responded in the thread that ”[Our family] had all kinds of issues swirling around entitlement, rights, judgment, gossip, etc. The ONLY way we made headway was to work with a consultant who specifically focused on having each family member work on what their resentments were first, then discuss what each family member’s part is in the dysfunctional family/ business dynamic.” My guess is that that work was not easy or involved only smooth sailing. His statement struck me as an example of the fundamental truth of the work that Scott Peck is speaking to…chaos is part of the process.
Peck reminds us of Carl Jung’s axiom that “All neurosis is the avoidance of legitimate suffering”. A lot of the suffering in families is the neurotic kind – it arises from avoiding the work of facing legitimate suffering. The impulse to evade the restorative work is the expression of not only the families fear of the chaos that might ensue but also of its collective neurotic patterns of avoidance. Again the way into collaboration lies through the willingness to squarely face the legitimate suffering the family must address. This requires a kind of unflinching honesty and real courage.
Otto Scharmer and Adam Kahane make much the same point that Peck makes: they suggest that before transformative change emerges there is a kind of letting go that must occur. Getting to this “letting go” is a lot like the labor of childbirth – it can be difficult and chaotic. In Scharmer’s model the process seems smooth with a great deal of observation and sharing of diverse perspectives in constructive dialog. In Kahane’s work, which occurs in highly conflicted situations, he recognizes and acknowledges the chaotic nature of the work. In Peck’s view this work looks not only noisy but uncreative and unconstructive as people swat at each other without any grace or rhythm. The struggle looks like it is going nowhere and accomplishing nothing. It is not pretty and it is not fun. This is also true in Kahane’s work in highly conflicted systems. We have seen families respond well in Sharmer’s model, but that more pleasant experience seems to work better where people are not enmeshed in their own complexity. Most families have to face and pass through the chaos.
Now here is the kicker – what I see as the key insight in Peck’s book. He suggests that there are two ways out of chaos – one works and one doesn’t. The first way is through the imposition of structure. Peck calls this an “escape into organization” and as such it is a further expression of the neurotic need to avoid legitimate suffering. And this is the move I see families make all the time. To avoid the difficult work of reconciliation, they engage in creating structures. Mission statements, playing with values cards, generating committee structures, forming task forces, changing family leadership…the list of activities to contain the chaos is almost endless. This is not bad – remember the family is not ready for genuine reconciliation and the skills they learn in doing these things are important. But, this work is fundamentally avoidant. If the consultant does not recognize the bypass that is occurring (the escape into structure) but rather sees this structural work as the primary work to be done to resolve the chaos – as the legitimate rather than illegitimate solution to the family’s problems – it will not work. This structural work is, at best, preliminary to the deeper work of reconciliation – it is a means to a deeper end, not the end in itself. The underlying dynamics will tear through the paper thin “escapes into organization” like a Bengal tiger would tear through a shoji screen. If the consultant does not see this and know how to navigate past it, the family will have spent a lot of time and money to no good effect and the failure to make these structures work will leave the family damaged, cynical and hopeless.
In the end, the escapes into organization do not work because they are not, in their core, honest. They are an attempt to create “community” in the family without “communion”. From Bonheoffer’s notions of community they imply a kind belief in “cheap grace”. They are a dodge of the harder work of confession, penitence, standing in witness to one another and taking personal responsibility for the suffering of the family system.
So if the way through chaos is not through structural solutions, what is the way? Scott Peck suggests that the path out of chaos into genuine community lies in what he calls “emptiness”. Groups resist this notion. As Peck himself says: “The fact that “emptiness” is a mystical sort of word and concept is not the deterrent. People are smart, and often in the dimmer recesses of their consciousness they know more than they want to know. As soon as I mention “emptiness,” they have a presentiment of what is to come. And they are in no hurry to accept it.” What he means by emptiness is that people will have to give up their drive to make reality conform to their expectations and meet what they believe to be their needs. This involves people taking personal responsibility and seeing their own contributions to the family dynamics. It involves people dropping the barriers of judgment, ideologies, and need for outcomes. It means they have to stop focusing on their positions and their solutions, and so on. In Sharmer’s terms this is the part of his process he calls “letting go” in order to “let come”.
Facilitating this reconciliation work in families is a tricky business. It requires significant skill on the part of the facilitator. It requires exquisite timing. It requires the skillful pointing out in ways that can be heard that, as the organization fails, the fault lies in the systems “escape into organization” not in the individuals who are sabotaging the plan so carefully constructed in the last family meeting to “solve the problems” in the family. It requires an ability to get people to face their own responsibility in creating the system that is keeping the family stuck. It requires the ability to create a container that will hold honest emotions that are often strong and provide a calm and unflinching presence in the face of the chaos that the family must engage in. It requires the ability to compassionately hold and engage the legitimate suffering the family must go through.
The result of all of this is that almost always a breakthrough comes. In Scharmer’s model he calls this presence. Kahane has referred to it as communion. In Peck’s view it is called peace. These are all good descriptions that are looking at different facets of the same phenomena. Often the experience of groups in this state is silence – there is a sense that nothing more needs to be said. It is very, very quiet. And then someone speaks and all of a sudden it is apparent to all that there has been a fundamental shift, that the real work can begin and that honest solutions are closer at hand than anyone imagined.
© 2013. The Wesley Group. All rights reserved.
— August 26, 2013