One practice I learned from the Reclaiming tradition was the work of establishing group agreements for communication and working together, in ways that respond to the group’s unique needs and desires. Ideally, one builds those agreements among the people present, but often people do not fully know how to articulate what helps them to feel safe and included. A lot of people have never been asked, or not thought much about it, or can only tell you what has gone wrong without being able to say what they need instead.

So as I’ve run workshops and groups I’ve found it useful to come up with my own proposal of the values of successful groups. From this I came up with a formula: “Respect yourself. Respect each other. Respect the work.”

These three components—Self, Each Other, Work—are like the Tarot’s Three of Pentacles: three gears that may spin together in a productive way that makes the whole greater than its parts. But if one or more parts gets stuck, it can truly shut down the whole.

Respect Your Self

When we come into a group or community, we bring with us our unique stories, desires, needs, values, wounds, boundaries, and cultures. We have significant questions pertaining to personal comfort, belonging, and survival: “Is there a place for me here? Will I get my needs met? Will I be safe?”

Those questions are addressed by the confluence of the three coins, but the place where we have the greatest power is in Self. There is no group or relationship that will consistently and unfailingly anticipate and tend to all our wants and needs without communication and conflict. Self-responsibility is the right and obligation to observe and tend my wants and needs, and it is one important ingredient for interdependent, resilient communities.

Within the realm of self-responsibility:

• Advocating for or addressing my physical needs and accommodations.
• Communicating what I need.
• Communicating and enforcing boundaries when I feel endangered or hurt.
• Establishing the necessary amount of space and connection for engagement with self-respect.

Self-responsibility is not radical independence. It is the recognition that to be interdependent means I need to make some effort to make things work. That effort could be in self-adjustment and accommodating my needs, and it could be self-advocacy and communicating what accommodations I need.

The best example, to my mind, of an ethic of self-responsibility in groups is around bathroom use. When I was in elementary school through high school, I was in classroom settings in which adults exerted control over my body through determining when I could use the bathroom.

There were 5-10 minute windows in which it was allowed, and it was incumbent upon me to discipline my bathroom needs so they could only be met in those windows. If I had to go during class or on a road trip, typically I needed to ask permission very publicly and visibly, and then to submit to the adult’s decision of whether or not I would be allowed. None of the adults knew how it felt to be in my body.

Should my body need to use the bathroom in an unpermitted way, I found it exceedingly distracting and overwhelming. I internalized shame that it was somehow wrong of me to need to go in the middle of a lecture or group discussion, for example, but at the same time most of my energy would then go toward willing myself to be present and mitigate an even more embarrassing accident.

This practice disciplines us to be ready for workplaces where our bathroom use might be in some way monitored and controlled. Whether it’s working at a fulfillment center where that time gets docked from your pay, or working at an office where you get tacitly monitored and judged, it turns your own relationship with your own body into a site of external control that undermines your bodily autonomy.

Perhaps ironic or perhaps by design, this kind of authoritarian control is primarily necessary in work places where people do not feel invested or empowered in their work. When there is not a sense of collective ownership in the work being done, then those who are simply there to get a paycheck may be more prone to taking long breaks that are about avoidance rather than tending bodily needs. But exerting more discipline and control only reinforces that dynamic, disempowering and disinvesting.

When it comes to my groups, now that I’m a grownup, I tell people that if they need to go to the bathroom, they should just go. Whether we’re in the middle of something or not.

Respect Each Other

We affect and are affected by each other. When we are in a group of individuals trying to get along with each other, some measure of civility and norms are both inevitable and necessary.

The way a person talks to me really affects how well I am able to hear them, whether I have to manage my emotional upset or whether I can consider their perspective. In turn, whether I am truly listening and valuing their input affects their own feelings of safety and belonging.

We often have unique standards of what is okay to say to others versus what is okay for others to say to us. We often have double standards or convenient exceptions—it’s never okay to speak in this way, except this time the dude really deserves it. We often think we know what is going on inside other people but also have no way of fully understanding their inner context, and the assumptions we bring to an interaction shape how we behave.

If you understand a person’s inner world, their history, and their context, their behavior makes complete sense. But mostly we only understand our own contexts and judge others’ behavior from our contexts. It makes life pretty challenging.

Group norms and agreements help to bring a sense of coherence to the group. Norms need to allow for conflict and disagreement with guardrails of acceptable behavior. I can hear a lot of critical feedback from a person but if they use a certain word, or say things that imply they know my motivations and inner world, I find it very hard to set aside my defensiveness.

For me, an important group agreement is for people to only speak from their own experience. So instead of saying, “You blew off the meeting,” which tends to engender the urge to defend or make excuses, I find it more workable to hear someone say “I was really disappointed when you weren’t at the meeting.” This tells me what my impact was and is often enough to provoke my guilt and responsibility, along with my desire to be esteemed in the group, to act better in the future.

Respecting each other means treating every other person’s needs as being as valuable as our own, which again sometimes brings us to conflict when it appears that needs are incompatible or cannot coexist. Sometimes a group cannot be for every person, and has natural boundaries that exclude people. At the same time, if a group does not wrestle with issues of inclusion and exclusion, its insularity can lead to a whole manner of toxic internal problems and problems for the greater community.

Respect the Work

Respecting the work is about the group’s process and tasks. This could encompass the business of the organization and the necessary tasks to keep it functioning, like filing paperwork on time, making sure everyone knows when the meetings will happen, having clear agenda and a process by which people can participate, processes to ensure the work produced is ethical and of good quality.

When I am doing workshops that involve experiential practice, for example, respecting the work means engaging in those practices with what John Kabat-Zinn calls “skeptical curiosity.” Make doing the work a sincere experiment, neither expecting it to fix all your problems nor expecting it to fail and be a waste of time.

To expect miracles means that when the work gets hard we may consider it a failure. It also opens us up to abusive gurus and community dynamics, believing that someone out there has the Real Thing, the Magic Cure.

To expect failure more or less guarantees failure. Every process has problems, which is not an excuse to continually work to rectify those problems. But at the same time, we don’t get anywhere if we don’t engage with what’s here.

Respect for the work includes the ways communities govern themselves. Whether decisions get made by consensus, by voting, or by fiat from a leader—any of these might be fine if the other two conditions are met. A benevolent dictator who respects the needs and wants of every person under their care might be a workable system. Until they die, and the person who takes their place does not respect Self or Community.

I prefer to participate in communities where there is more direct engagement by consensus or voting, but in some situations I accept hierarchy. In my therapy practice, I am a benevolent dictator. I run my own ship, and I strive to set clear expectations and meet clients where they are at. I am accountable to my ongoing clients to try to surface and address problems as they arise—that is part of the task of therapy—but my limit is when my clients’ needs or problems seem to require that I compromise what I consider to be the process. In those situations, I consider it respectful to all of us to support my client in finding a clinician who is a better fit. Even in hierarchy, there must be respect for self and each other.

All this is to say, the work of the group is its own being that requires its own tending and attention. This is the function of business meetings, as tedious as they are, in which the group intentionally gathers to do the work necessary to maintain its functioning. When I am involved in an organization, I want clear expectations. I want to know how decisions are made. I want to know how I can be involved in decisions if I want to be. I want to know what processes are available if I have a grievance or want to change the organization.

If these processes are not clearly delineated and publicly accessible, then the community will quickly become riven by gossip, secrecy, power struggles, and general bullshittery as social status gets leveraged to make organizational change. A governing process should exist and work regardless of who participates or does not participate.

In one of my early communities that was consensus-based, we had meetings in which the ethic was—whoever shows up to the meeting is supposed to be here and gets to make the decisions for the group. There was otherwise no criteria for membership or clear boundaries around who was a member and who mattered. That meant the opinions of people who invested hours of work into community were treated as equally important as those of the person who came to the meeting because they’re currently dating or having sex with another person in the group.

That’s no longer the way I want to practice community, but if that’s what you want, go for it. The difficulty arose from what I perceived to be a lack of confidence in and commitment to our process. People who did not come to the meetings voiced their angry criticisms over email, calling for decisions they weren’t present for to be undone or modified. And then we would violate our own process by allowing consensus decisions made at the meetings to be abandoned or undone. That doesn’t work! If decisions can always be undone or reversed on whim or because of a hurt feeling, then there is no process that can be relied upon to support the community. In a sense we end up stuck in process or always undoing and revising decisions around foundational practices.

Three Pentacles Spinning in Harmony

Once upon a time I believed there were intrinsically violent and destructive groups and ideologies, and others that were purely good and revolutionary. These days it seems to me that there are some that are absolutely violent and destructive, but many philosophies, religions, and practices that could be wielded for harm or healing. Or healing that entraps you in harm, like the self-help movement that turns into a cult. Or harm that leads to healing, like liberation theologies or the practice of what was once called “queering,” finding liberatory queer possibilities in heteronormative cultures.

What I have learned is that there are many kinds of transformative communities, and many ways ideologies can be wielded to opress or uplift, and every practice could work wonders, could create harm, or could simply be the wrong process for the task at hand. Life is really messy.

This framework of the three gears of respect may be a way of diagnosing whether a circumstance is harmful of helpful to you. When I am in this community, do I feel I respect myself? Do I respect the people around me, and feel respected by them? Do we have clear processes for doing our work, and can we engage in hard conversations about the work without it becoming personal and embittered?

And if there is struggle, where is it located? Is it hard to respect myself because we don’t respect each other? Is it hard to respect each other because the power dynamics are unclear and murky? Does it seem everyone respects each other but still I have no autonomy over myself? Does it seem like only one person really gets respect?

If it doesn’t work for everyone involved, it doesn’t work.

Hey! If you like my writing, check out my new book In the Midnight Hour: Finding Power in Difficult Emotions which is available for pre-sale now and will be released within the week.

From writer, witch, and licensed therapist Anthony Rella comes a collection of short essays on emotions, boundaries, disappointment, guilt, hope, shame, intimacy, and connection. Written with the warm voice of a caring and patient friend, these essays help guide the reader to their own center where they can find power, balance, and joy not despite difficult moments and emotions, but because of them.

From the Publisher, Gods & Radicals