...and what we can do about it.

I want to bring a piece that I don't hear mentioned very often and there's not much attention paid to it, but I think it's actually pretty major.

Location

I'll position my piece first before I dive in.

Since the 1950s a lot of psychology and counselling material has been developed on "Relationships," which really means dyadic sexual-romantic partnerships and marriage. This century the dyadic focus has expanded to include friendships and work relationships. In a closely related area, psychology and psychotherapy have hugely expanded the tools and approaches to personal growth including what we ourselves bring to our relshps.  Alongside these is a small but growing corpus of stuff about groups of all sorts: creating groups, building groups, repairing groups, groups for special purposes etc. 

There's also a long line of literature from the US about communitarianism, which at different historical moments has been very influential there. In many other countries "community" in the broad sense has been a buzzword for several decades: utilising the power of community for civil, public, government and commercial purposes.

A very small subset of this last area is about communal living, which by and large is seen by the mainstream as variously an idealistic and therefore impossible dream, or the province of dangerous cultists, anarchists and other radicals.

Sources of inspiration

Western attempts at intentional communal living go back to the early 19th century and were very often primarily politically inspired. The post-war “new age” communal living projects I first moved to in the 1980s very much continued the emphasis on political solutions but also included personal desires for living more connected to land and other people.

Proponents of communal living of course bring a wide range of motivations but I've noticed three broad sources for inspiration or templates of how to do it.

One is the ashram or spiritual community, with its very clearly structured cohering forces of sharing the tradition's Teachings alongside shared practices and very structured daily routines.

Another is what I call the Utopian Village. This is a dream of a small village in which everyone is known to and deeply connected with each other and the land, and in which food and shelter are produced from the land and collectively maintained. The technological level might be anywhere from Victorian industrial right back to early bronze age.

Multi-day live-in festivals and workshops can evoke the Utopian Village, through an experience of togetherness, often in simple living conditions, where material needs are supplied with relatively little effort.

The third is tribal cultures, usually pre-agricultural and often nomadic. In addition to the features of Utopian Village this brings a much simpler material lifestyle, and a richer embedment in land, via a animist/shamanic spirituality component that is core to the culture and collective wellbeing.

This is of course not an exhaustive list, and I'm not at all suggesting such inspirations are negative. We are in a situation in the West where we don't live communally and we really don't know how. In this situation we have to imagine what doesn't exist, and sources of inspiration are absolutely vital to help reassure us it is possible and fertilise our imaginations.

Encountering here and now

I want to bring an additional inspiration piece to add to the list, but rather than looking to other times and cultures I'm mainly interested in looking at ourselves as modern Westerners and where us Westerners are at right now. Here I'm following the adage if you want to get to somewhere else you have to start from where you are.

I know personally why it's very difficult for many of us to start from where we are right now, cos so many ppl motivated towards communal living are motivated by how painful their lives are without it, and so of course we want to jump away from that pain.

Pain is both an inevitability in human life and also a particular currency in Western culture. The West's achievements and immense creativity are built on a foundation of immense violence. Western affluence and the range of choices and capacities available to us Westerners is built on and depends on daily levels of structural violence which is almost incomprehensible in its scale.

And, like the impulse to get away from personal pain, wellmeaning ppl of good heart of course want to extricate ourselves from complicity in that violence.

But, as more and more thinkers and critics point out, we cannot deny our complicity nor our deeply personal dependence on what we are complicit in. The only way forward is to turn around and face that complicity fully and start to move towards it from a more accountable perspective.

Individualism

The particular piece about communal living in Western contexts I want to focus on is Individualism, the uniquely Western formulation of selfhood which gradually emerged in recognisable form about 400 years ago among the elite and gradually filtered down via the social transformations accompanying the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, was considerably expanded during the post-WWII rights era and has more recently had a further flowering via intersectional feminism, queer culture and the online world.

The core structure of Individualism is a two edged sword: On the one hand we get the immense freedom to be our unique self, and this freedom is closely entwined with the state via the legal concepts of citizenship and rights. The actual practical freedoms we experience in daily life of course are massively constrained by a plethora of other forces: Capitalism and fascist violence being two major current ones. But historically, and relative to many other cultures, our current freedoms are vast.

On the other hand this freedom comes at the cost of isolation: we are free to be a unique self but we get that freedom by distancing from others, by being atomised units which are not reliant on other atomised units and thus can pursue our own unique paths. To ameliorate the unworkable vulnerability that atomised selves have, the state carries out a wide range of coordinating and cohering functions on our behalf.

Alongside the functions and processes of the state, we also rely extensively on a whole bunch of cultural norms around space, time, and templates for relating to support us in maintaining the boundaries between ourselves and others, which in turn enable us to pursue our own individual projects.

We rely on architecture and town planning: the arrangement of homes into separated rooms, the fences and walls between individual dwellings, and defined paths between locations. We rely on time schedules, daily and weekly time patterns to open and close times for specific sorts of relating. And we rely on relating-templates to define what is acceptable and unacceptable in a huge range of different relational contexts, from the most intimate of who one eats, sleeps, farts, has sex and rears children with, through work and neighbourhood relationships, to the very largest of what is expected of politicians, public celebrities and international figures.

All these structures, processes and arrangements external to ourselves are incredibly vital, not just because any culture needs cultural norms and patterns to be able to function. In Individualism these things play the vital role of supporting us to maintain a workable-enough distance from others which ensures we have both the space of Individual freedom we are socialised to expect and enough relating to meet enough needs that we feel life is worth living.

Individualism doesn't have to be that way. It is that way because it evolved in a particular historical context in which the struggle for freedom from tyrrany and unaccountable power was a major driving force, but the only template those people had for exercising power was the very tyrrany they were fighting so hard against. Thus the fully enfranchised Individual was conceived as a mini-monarch: sitting in splendid isolation in the adage "An Englishman's home is his castle."

I give an extremely brief summary here. The actuality is hugely complexified by dimensions of class and gender: Individualism was a pursuit only for men for much of its history and largely so even today, and also heavily biased towards middle-classness, though working class Individualism had and has a presence. Like maleness, whiteness was and also largely still is taken for granted.

Individuals in relation

I want to highlight Individualism because I believe that for all Western people yearning for communal living it is an incredibly major element in our current culture and within ourselves personally which is seldom talked about and little understood.

The selves we bring to our communal experiments are very specifically shaped selves: we bring Individual selves. As such we bring deep patterns of both personal freedom and personal separation - and Individualism in the form which we carry within us inextricably entwines both those two patterns together.

We know how to be Individuals. We know how to be both free and separate. We know the patterns of freedom and the patterns of separation, and these patterns are supported and affirmed by everyone and everything around us. All the Westerners we interact with carry patterns of how to be free and separate, and all the social institutions, commercial organisations and products we engage with and use are created to fit people who carry those patterns of freedom and separation.

What we don't yet know, what nobody anywhere knows - is how to be Individuals in relation. Western culture has beavered away for 400 years to create the conditions for the astonishing freedoms we do enjoy now. It has seen the resulting separation as simply a way to achieve that freedom, and it has shaped significant parts of the state to ameliorate the costs of separation.

The challenge

Coming back to our small scale projects for communal living, what we want is the clarity of the ashram, the sense of fulfillment of the Utopian Village, the profound embedment of tribe. What we bring is the sedimented patterns in our nervous systems which fit us into the freedom and separation of Individualist society.

We have no patterns of how to live deeply together while also maintaining the great strengths and profound value of our own uniqueness. When I say "we" here I am referring to all multiples of the plural: we as separate selves don't know how to do that, all of us in our group projects don't know how to do that, the networks and broader communities we are in don't know how to do that, national cultures offer no tools for it, and broadly Western culture is completely silent about it. There's no collective wisdom, no shared patterns or habits of interaction. Nothing.

Wanting to live communally as Individuals is entirely new territory.

And we can't directly learn from more communal cultures and times, because the people who live in those cultures are enculturated to fit their culture. They don't have a Western shape of selfhood; they have a selfhood which fits them within their culture.

We can be inspired, though. We can see what is humanly possible, given entirely different cultural conditions.

The task

It is our task as Westerners to start with our own culture, to start from where we actually are now, and learn, and experiment, and discover, and grow new things. Because what we have, who we already are, for all its faults and costs and pains is also immensely valuable - if for no other reason than it is one possible expression of humanness and therefore a valid thing in the world and the world is intrinsically valuable in all its expressions.

I contend, though, that Individualism does have a specific value beyond simply existing, and that is the emphasis placed on the uniqueness of self and the cultural permission for unique self-expression. Speaking as a Westerner myself who is trans, I am profoundly grateful to be living in the context I do, with the immense support of a huge community around me to be my unique self, and in a nation-state which provides enough safety for me that I don't constantly fear being assaulted or killed.

A general direction

My account above of how Individualism is structured suggests an overall trajectory of development for Individualism. I suggest the way forward is turning towards the historical trajectory of unique selfhood, and emphasising it even more - but doing so not, as in the past, in order to create more distance and more freedom from others. Rather, the emphasis needs to be turning towards one’s inner world with an intention to become even more densely anchored in self to enable a gradual withdrawal from reliance on the external formations which help us manage our relational parameters.

What replaces those external formations?  The internal work brings a stronger internal connection to what one needs and wants from moment to moment.  This in turn brings a more resilient sense of personal groundedness from which one can communicate those needs and wants in ways which enable the connections with those around us to continue.  As a result, our relating can emerge from us bringing our own relational parameters that flow and change as our circumstances flow and change. This general move also opens possibilities for connecting with others in new ways which are more extensively revealed, which means we are more "seen" and more capable of seeing others, so that we experience much deeper and more comprehensive connection with others.

Such approach to relating can then, over time periods of several years, become sedimented into the material structures of our lives as we gradually expand and build on these more comprehensive connections which are less reliant on external structural arrangements.

Thus it becomes more possible for communal living to be profoundly satisfying and immensely resilient. And potentially orders of magnitude more rich than any available via conventional Western templates for relationship.

Time scales

I make reference above to periods of several years, which might sound alarming or tedious. However one of the principal things I’ve learned is that as Individuals we are very very deeply and viscerally reliant on existing social arrangements for our psychic and even physical survival. Trying to force change or go faster than we collectively can actually stay present with merely results in resistance and denial, conflict and blame, withdrawal and, very often, complete collapse of the project. We are playing with extremely deep stuff here which is core to our sense of self, which means that there is so much at stake that beyond a certain point people will kill themselves or others to protect that core.

Making any changes in those arrangements thus has to happen very gradually, with the overarching determinant being that people feel safe enough to proceed or go further. It’s super important to allow people to move in and out of the process, whether that is moving in and out from moment to moment and day to day, or moving in and out of a group project entirely. For many people, knowing that the exit door is always open in itself can greatly enhance a sense of safety.

Our nervous systems are both incredibly resilient but also incredibly delicate. Safety is something that is directly experienced, and often slowing down is what is required to create the conditions in which it can emerge.

Celebration

On the other hand it’s equally important to acknowledge and celebrate as far as has been possible to go at any moment. Because these processes of deep structural change take so long, celebration as a group has several immensely valuable impacts.

• It affirms that we are getting somewhere, so it affirms that progress is both possible and happening, even tho it’s slow.
• It also affirms that we have got this far together - that we are able to build together, which affirms the group.
• And it affirms the project as well: that the project is valuable and that we all collectively share and hold that value.

Celebration of individual inputs, roles or anchoring is of course also valuable, tho there is far less cultural edge around that, so I don’t expand on it here.

My experience is there’s a pretty clear correlation between increasing capacity to set parameters relationally on the fly and increasing flexibility around externally-supported parameters. We can observe this since it's quite concrete: Neighbours don't all need their own car, washing machine, lawnmower etc.  What usually prevents sharing at the suburban neighbourhood level is simply inadequate shared reltech that enables the required relating.

In a communal living group experimenting with relationality, as collective skill levels increase some material stuff might simply become redundant, some existing spaces might become newly accessible, or some protocols might recede in importance. The definite concreteness of this also means we can celebrate it as it lands and newly flexible engagements with material the material world become possible and bedded in to the culture i.e. taken for granted or "this is how we do things here."

The Fundamental Requirements

The conceptualisation I offer here of Individualism, its shortcomings and the potential way forward also suggest two main areas of development: that as Individuals we become more fully grounded in self thru significantly enriching our relationship with our inner world, and alongside that we learn more sophisticated skills for interacting with others.

Two basic interacting skills which are necessary are actively listening to others - really hear where another is in their terms and not in ours; and owning our own stuff - owning that what we feel and the actions we take come from us and are not forced on us by others. These two skills build on two skills in self-relating:  the capacity to "hold" oneself or soothe oneself enough that one can actually hear the other; and being able to notice our own emotions and what they pressure us to do.  

Naturally nobody is able to always deploy those skills in all moments, but a key step is a recognition they are vital skills and a commitment to using them as much as possible.

The internal investigation of what makes it difficult for us to enact those skills at any moment can be an immensely fruitful way to further one’s relationship with one’s inner world.

Another key tenet in new-style interacting is that any situation in an un-coerced relationship is made up of inputs from both parties - so that what happens in the relationship is never the responsibility of only one person.

A related tenet is that ruptures in relating are inevitable, and that repair is always available when all parties are willing. This doesn't mean that repairs always produce loving closeness; sometimes repairs result in a caring and warm distance. Repair after rupture minimally creates enough safety for the parties to stay in relation, and potentially is an enormous generator of trust and greater intimacy.

Again, teasing out how situations in a relationship arise can be a very fruitful stimulus for further personal internal work.

From Individual to group work

Turning now from personal and dyadic elements to the level of the group, one of the most important perspectives on groups is that the group generates its own “field” of energy which has a force of its own, independently of and beyond any of the individuals in the group. The field is hard for us Westerners to perceive but we are very strongly affected by it at a body and experiential level when we come into a group. The field is amenable to reshaping, and is very sensitively affected by inputs from group members and the surrounding environment. The field can thus be skilfully worked collaboratively to produce desired group outcomes.

This latter area is the most complex but also the most powerful area of what I might call new-style communality. It is the most powerful because of how powerfully and extensively we are affected by group fields when we are inside them. And it is skilling up in this area which I think has the greatest potential for cocreating new paradigms of communal living.

Technology can help us :-\

How can we learn and develop these new skills? How can we build on the immense strengths and weaknesses of Individualism and find ways to become Individuals-in-relation?

Thankfully there is a gradually growing toolkit of skills, practices and frameworks which can help us.

A wide range of different therapeutic modalities including talking therapies, new ways of working with trauma from neurological research, new somatic therapies, enhanced understanding of nervous systems and neurodivergence, applying 12-step programmes to a wider range of life issues, internal family systems work and plurality approaches all help us with our relationship with self.

Communication practices like Non Violent Communication and active listening, the Wheel of Consent pioneered in the conscious sex community, more complex understandings of power from the kink community, accountability via restorative justice and calling out/in, intersectional femst perspectives and research, and other frameworks, can all help us at the relational level.

Then there is the group level of technologies. Notably this level has seen less development than the personal and dyad levels, reflecting the complexity of groups, the Western cultural deficits around group life resulting from Individualism, and the dynamic reality that groups cannot do new things til their members have new ways of being-with-self. Some starting points are Arnold Mindell’s Worldwork, the work of Glen Ochre and the Groupwork Institute, and well as some of the stuff about leadership which can be applied to group dynamics.

All this and more, what I call relational technologies or reltech, has blossomed in the 21st century and continues to bloom and grow.

“Typically Western”…!

All this reltech is embedded in Western culture, although much of it is inspired by or influenced by non-Western cultures.  It is intelligible to us because it has been developed by Westerners who have an Individualist structure of selfhood. It has developed with a characteristically Western flavour: rationalist, science-like if not directly scientific, passed on in structured teaching contexts, and with a notably middle class bias.

As such, it has typically Western shortcomings. It can be excessively "heady" - theoretical and disembodied.  A very common area of disembodiment is around sexuality and sexual energy, which most reltech struggles with or entirely avoids.  It can be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, heteronormative, and the like.  It can also be brilliant: tender, deeply compassionate, profoundly wise, and widely inclusive.  But all of it is people pushing at the boundaries of the known and wanting to know more, understand more and do things better. People doing their best, from a genuine desire to alleviate the pains and sufferings of Western life.

These are the tools our culture is developing which potentially can enable us to move to a more relational world and a richer experience of life. And this tool development isn't finished.  We don't have to accept the existing reltech as it is.  Indeed, the challenge, our task and Individualist Westerners, is to experiment, lean in to the limitations of what exists, and learn more, expand more, grow more.

In doing this, we don't start from nothing.  Existing reltech is where we can start and where many people have already started.