You might be able to name some of the core rules of your workplace, but could you name the core rules of your household? I’ve been thinking about the rules we live by in our French Experiment—the intentional community where more than a dozen of us work and live together. I would generally claim that these rules are relatively idiosyncratic, that I don’t have a sense of what your rules should be at your house because I don’t know the details of your life. But here, in this blog, I’ll wander off that path of open-mindedness and name two rules that you and I and all of us should have.

The first real rule we brought to our collective is the “resentment rule” and it goes like this: If you find a sense of resentment building inside yourself, you need to have a conversation. We brought it with us from our workplace, Cultivating Leadership, into our shared home, to see if it would work just as well with housemates as with colleagues.

And it did good work for us. This is a tough rule when we practice it well, because it makes heavy demands on us. It demands that we actually notice when we’re feeling resentful (and not just act on that resentment in an oblivious and passive aggressive way which is unfortunately my favored response). And then it demands that we figure out the resentment enough to have an actual conversation about things with an actual person or people.

But by itself, it’s not quite enough for high quality conversation because it doesn’t help us own our projection about why we are resentful. It is possible to have this rule and then just walk into a conversation where you blame the other person for the way you’re feeling or claim some kind of moral high ground that makes their experience wrong or unimportant. That isn’t the path to high quality conversations (or high-quality working or living circumstances), so we needed a second rule to sit alongside this one.

Enter our brilliant coach/therapist, Debbie delaCuesta, who challenged us with another rule: Own your stories as your own construction rather than the truth. This means that when someone does something that we resent, and we have a story about it (which we necessarily do because that’s how resentment arises) our job is to not hold on to the story—no matter how true it seems—but first to understand the story as arising from uncomfortable sensations in our body. And then, to loosen our grip on the story and explore more cleanly what happened (not our story of what happened) with the other person or people.

The combination of these two rules is magical. The combination tends to switch an experience of blame to an experience of collective responsibility. We understand that each time we feel resentful, there is some piece of ourselves at play and it is not a straightforward case of changing others. (As if that were really straightforward at all, but you know what I mean.) With these two rules, we lean into the core idea of “confront in order to deepen” that my mother taught me when I was young that goes exactly against what my bodily reaction is to conflict. My body is afraid of conflict with someone I care about—it tells me to just hold back (which tends to produce a passive aggressive response). And my body pushes for conflict when it’s someone I don’t care about that’s making me mad—the poor person at the airline check in counter who has just informed me that my flight is cancelled and the next seat is tomorrow evening. My body doesn’t automatically know that conflict—done well—deepens our relationships.

Without these rules, I’d tend to just go with habit. This means that, if someone does something that makes me grumpy, my kneejerk reaction would be towards blame. Let’s say that someone is leaving dishes in the sink (which almost never happens here, but let’s imagine). My pattern would normally be to (I’m embarrassed to say) at first do these annoying dirty dishes, but with more resentment building up inside me every time it happens. Then, if the pattern that I didn’t talk about kept going (and honestly, why would it stop?), I’d probably start stacking the dishes somewhere—dirty but out of my way. All the while I would be building up a story about how thoughtless the other person was or how little they regarded me or our shared space.

But here we have these two rules, and so I know that the resentment is actually my problem to deal with.  I either need to have a conversation with the community where I raise this, or, if I know who the person is who is leaving the dirty dishes in the sink, I can talk to that person. I have to admit to my resentment, let go of my story about it, and be curious about what’s going on for that person. This inevitably offers both of us information: the other person learns that I have this pet peeve, and I learn that they have a different relationship to dirty dishes, like maybe they tend to do dishes in a whole set rather than dish by dish. As we talk, one or both of us is likely to change—and our understanding of one another deepens which deepens our caring for one another. Total win, even if my body told me it was a bad idea.

These rules are helpful, too, if you have the opposite relationship to conflict: you want to talk it through right away. For the talk-it-out members of the community, it’s not the first rule that’s the most difficult, it’s the second. Because what people usually want to talk through is how right they are and how wrong someone else is. This combination of rules doesn’t allow that. You cannot simply decide you are right and another person is wrong. You have to go in remembering that you have one set of experiences and the other person has another set of experiences and it’s generally the stories about them that make them seem right or wrong. (Note we’re not talking about murder and mayhem here, we’re talking about the ordinary relational breakdowns between well-meaning humans.)

These rules aren’t simple to follow at all. We all have to be up for a conversation and willing to at least try to engage it well. We have to put down our righteous indignation and the sense that we are on the moral high ground—which feel so delightful but are so corrosive to relationships. We have to put down our sense that we have the right answer, and be open to learning new things about the situation, the other person, and ourselves. We all have to believe that things can get worked through with conversations where everyone is openly sharing and deep listening. We have to state our irritations in as blame-free a way as possible. So there’s plenty of skill here as well as will.

And there’s one more hidden benefit to these rules I didn’t expect. These rules make it harder for us to complain to one another about someone else in the kind of classic, behind-the-other-person’s-back kind of way. If I complain to Meg about someone leaving dirty dishes in the sink, I actually just expose the fact that I haven’t done my work and talked to the person. Or I expose that even though I talked to them, I’m still holding on to something in me. So our rule creates better hygiene between us as well.

I’m sure there are reasons these rules wouldn’t work for some families or collectives. But I can’t think of any. So the two questions today are: 1) Would these rules (or similar ones) work in your context? And 2) What other rule do you have that you think might work for all communities?