Bonus Post #3 – It’s All About Relationships (5-Part Mini-Series)

PART 3 – Create Authentic Community 

How do you create a sense of community––healthy, authentic, and quality close personal relationships?

My research and experience suggest that these four qualities are central to experiencing meaningful, satisfying, and fulfilling personal relationships: openness, acceptance, growth, and warmth. Let’s look at these four qualities more closely. 

Openness in communication means sharing honestly, risking being misunderstood or not taken seriously, and asserting rather than avoiding or being aggressive in how we express our thoughts and feelings. 

Acceptance of one another’s thoughts and feelings happens through perceptive listening, trusting one another to work out relational quandaries, and empathizing with one another.

Moreover, rather than deny or become defensive about occasional awkwardness in our evolving relationships, we find ways to grow our relationship by being supportive, empowering, and imaginative. 

And we find ways to generate warmth and affection through genuine care, authentic connection, and mutuality without crossing boundaries of professional propriety or personal intimacy.

These are the keys to creating authentic community, to relational health and satisfaction––to the magic called Real!

I’ve found that participating in a personal sharing group is the single most important experience in my life over the last fifty years. And regular participation in professional support groups has added vital, integrating impact on my career over this same time span. This is where I most experience authentic community! 

How so? 

Because there’s been an openness to talk about the more important things in our lives. Sufficient freedom to be ourselves, without judgment from others, is present because we share our hopes and dreams, failures and feelings, ideas and suggestions. And from such openness and acceptance, including prayer for one another, we experience a powerful kind of bonding or warmth that brings growth and change––a feeling of being rejuvenated, of receiving new strength and Life! In fact, we experience authentic community and the magic of becoming Real.                                                                                                        

Most humans yearn for authentic community––quality personal relationships characterized by openness, acceptance, warmth, and growth. It may surprise you to learn, though, that an expert on our contemporary experience of community, psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, suggests that it is exceedingly rare. What do you think? What’s your experience of true, authentic community?

 

We’ll explore Peck’s reflections from his book, The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace, in next month’s Bonus Post, PART 4 – The Challenge of Community. (Originally 533 words)

 

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