The Role of Community Relationships

by Erik Denton: MA, LPC, CADC I, ABA, Counselor, Consultant, Presenter

I fondly remember a variety of different things about my childhood, and those things revolve around layers of relationships. These relationships were a part of the fabric of my day-to-day life and taught me about community. Over the years, how our society does community has changed, including the COVID-19 pandemic drastically altering it. As I have observed the winds of change, I have also wondered: How can we bring back those layers of relationships that we used to have?  

When I was a child, regardless of the seasons, children could continually be found outside playing. During the spring and through the fall, adults were outside walking, talking, meeting people, playing with their children, or just enjoying nature.  Generally, throughout the year, but mainly during the winter, families would go to family friends’ houses on a regular basis, and those evenings unfolded in stages. The first stage was dinner which included all ages. The main meal would be prepared by the host, and the visiting families brought side dishes and beverages. Dinner combined delicious cooking, and the conversation generally highlighted events often centered on what the children were doing. Once dinner was over, the children left to play together, and the parents played cards; pinnacle being my parents’ favorite. This part of the social evening stretched out for several hours prior to stage II: desert. This was where the deepest, and often painful, life topics were opened up between the adults. As children, we were allowed to come and retrieve a dessert before going back to where we were playing, however, we were definitely not allowed to remain in the area. The adults were focused on connecting with each other.  

Periodically my father’s friends, most of which were his co-workers, would come by. My mom would go to lunch with her friends, or they had hobby-orientated gatherings. The social backbone at that time did not stop there. The parents in the neighborhood knew who each other were. Those parents gathered together and determined the boundaries of where we could play which encompassed about a sixteen square block radius, and they would determine which week each mother was going to provide lunch for all the kids playing. In addition, they would talk to each other and back each other when we stepped out of line.  

Over the years since I was a child, I have noticed that community has been slowly eroding within our society. Social events were still commonplace; however, it was more family-orientated and involved less connecting at other people’s houses the way my parents did on card nights. The change in the wind was that socializing was more within family circles–ranging from nuclear to extended. That is still socializing, and my parents had visiting family woven in, but when people are continually socializing within the family, they stay within the family dynamic roles that were seen growing up.     

With the emergence of technology, and I love technology, a sense of community has eroded further. Starting in the seventies with the development of the game pong, the door of ever-expanding game systems flung open. Although there are still threads of community with playing in groups on-line, it is more two dimensional with the absence of playing in person.   

The next strong winds that I have noticed blowing across the bow of our society were those of philosophical superiority. Fueled by the internet, the idea of being ‘right’ is often founded on race, religion, sexuality, politics, etc., which segregates people into life compartments laced with the judgment of whether a person is good or bad based on what they think and believe. These winds set off avalanches of “cancel culture” attacks from one citizen group to another including attacks on a person’s occupation, career, family, reputation, etc.   

Those strong winds hammering the community picked up strength during the COVID-19 pandemic and evolved into gale force winds as the world was shut down. Citizens were reclassified by the governing bodies as essential or non-essential workers. Regardless, as to how it was explained, or meant, people felt devalued, and cast aside by their societies. To top it off, ninety percent of people were completely confined to their homes for the better part of two years. Every level of connection including friends, family, and coworkers, even encountering people in public and at school, completely collapsed in on itself. After the first month of societies shutting down, depression, domestic violence, and suicide rates exploded in comparison to prior years.   

Now, several years after the shutdown, the reconstruction of community is slow and cumbersome. Reminders of the shutdown are still present as many stores, medical facilities, and restaurants still have their signs to remind us to keep our physical from each other. People are more tentative to approach each other in general. Sneezing and coughing signals people to look away, if not move away, from each other. For some people, masks have become part of their ongoing attire and continues to maintain barriers of separation because we cannot read each other’s facial expressions. Adolescent anxiety of not being able to interact within their own peer groups is at levels we have never seen as a society. As a result, texting one another, even while standing near each other, is also at an all-time high.   

Community today is a long way from what I remember when I was a child. As I survey the carnage aftermath left prior to and after COVID-19 shutdowns, I am not sure how close we are to reconstructing. The question is: What do we do to rebuild? How do we return to the healthy levels of connecting, relating, supporting, and enjoying each other that we used to have?   

Physics plays a part in this process– a body in motion tends to stay in motion until an outside force affects it, and the opposite is also true. A body at rest stays at rest until something causes it to be in motion. Intentionality must be the main power tool to rebuild connection; it puts our relationships into motion. One of the first barriers to that intentionality is fear. Prior to COVID-19, fear was riding the strong philosophical winds, and fear became some of the gale force winds during COVID-19How can we overcome our fear to move toward reconnecting and rebuilding our society?  

The first step may be the hardest. It starts with removing the masks from our psyche the same way most of us have from our faces. For those of us who do not have medical conditions that hinder our immune systems, this includes removing our fear of both sneezes and coughs, as well as not being afraid of talking, meeting, and knowing someone who is different or believes differently than we do. In 1863, the Hatfields and McKoys were two families who started killing each other over a missing sow. The pig would have fed one family for the entire winter. While no one knows what happened to the sow, those two families used it as a way of striking out at the other. Prior to COVID-19, the compartmentalization of our society into thought camps was moving at a rapid rate. In the neighborhood where I grew up, the families were a mixture of Christian, Morman, and Atheist, but those differing philosophies did not stop our parents from working together to parent together. Philosophies are philosophies, beliefs are beliefs. They only make an impact when they are lived out in the context of relationships.  

Secondly, roughly 200,000 businesses completely collapsed in on themselves during COVID-19. As sad as that is, the aftershock of COVID-19 is continuing to collapse business. Even though society is opened up and people can enjoy and engage where they choose, businesses which are customer dependent are not seeing their customers returning. Their base was almost entirely wiped out with only a trickle coming back. Businesses, not just restaurants, but shops, gyms, material arts studios, yoga studios, tattoo parlors, mom and pop stores, photography studios, art galleries, etc., are not flourishing and many are closing. We are their survival life force.    

The third thing is closely related to the second. We need to return to our routines. People had a full stream of what they enjoyed in life interwoven throughout their day, week, month, year, and for two years, those routines were reduced to what could only be done within the confines of our homes. We experienced twenty-four months of little interaction other than reading, watching television, movies, family, video games, cooking, eating, etc. Our hobbies and interests were revived or discovered with remodeling being one of the biggest activities across the board. Although these are wonderful activities, and I am very enthusiastic about hobbies and interests, what we can do in our homes has become our current daily, weekly, yearly routines.   

Prior to COVID-19, most of our focus was outside of our home and ranged from what we enjoyed in society coming back to things we enjoyed at home. Now, the reverse is the norm void of our choice with our focus being primarily inside our homes. We did the absolute best we could under those gale force winds – and we survived! But now, we don’t have to survive any more. With self-empowerment, we can now reevaluate and reset our routines by our desires as we choose. Psychologically, our new habits and routines have been reestablished, and we need to intentionally reexamine those routines. Intentionally reset our lives, not because we survived, but because we lived, and now we want that life to become reestablished in a way that helps us the most. And now we want that life to become reestablished in a way that helps us the most, and that involves the various layers of relationships through community.