Reunion Conversations

Reunion Coordinator: Suggestion

Feeling courageous and committed to your classmates?

For a truly valuable class reunion, one that will magnetically attract those committed to mastering relationships and supportive communication, here's a suggestion.

Announce a drug-free, no alcohol reunion.

Many people use drugs/alcohol to relax and get comfortable. This can become a crutch. Drugs/alcohol support people going unconscious.

Conversations generated through alcohol produce unpredictable results. Most often such conversations do not result in an experience of transformation or a sense of a having created a breakthrough. "Next mornings" are pretty much the same as all next mornings after drinking. Quite often after an evening of drinking ones thoughts, the next morning, include self-recrimination and invalidation. Seldom is there an experience of pride and a new sense of awareness and consciousness. Resolutions made melt away within days.

The value to be gotten from zero alcohol is that each person will be supported in starting out a conversation communicating from what they are experiencing rather than starting it with some clever thing the mind can manufacture. Quite often humor is used to hide something. For classmates who perhaps never ever were completely open and honest with each other the experience is usually uncomfortableness.

Communicating from one's experience will usually come out, "I'm uncomfortable." When the truth is told the uncomfortableness disappears. Instead, most people suppress what they are experiencing and dump lots of words in the space to cover up the truth.

Also, uncomfortableness is about a non-verbalized withhold, perpetration, or judgment. If you find yourself being uncomfortable when you first meet a former classmate it reveals that there is something left over from a previous interaction. If you are having the effect of causing another to be uncomfortable then most likely, no matter what you think, you have not been a safe space for the truth to be told.

As a reunion committee member your job is to create space for classmates to experience each other. It's your responsibility to create a valuable experience.

An alcohol-free environment supports everyone in creating fun without mind altering drugs.

If you are a nondrinker, share the value of what it's like to interact socially without drinking. Some classmates have never had that experience. In truth they are stuck socially back where they were when they first started drinking. They did not know how to be comfortable with you—so distancing were your communications.

Until a committee chair sponsors a non-alcoholic reunion he/she will never know how many classmates don't attend reunions because they don't enjoy being around drinkers.

Afraid to be so daring?

The next best step? At this coming reunion discuss the possibility of a drug and alcohol-free next reunion.

Ask, "Would you be willing to support me in having our next reunion be alcohol-free?"

This completes the Reunion Conversations Tutorial.

If you found this to be of value consider anchoring in the value by:

(1) Sharing the site and what you learned about yourself.

(2) Making a donation acknowledging the sponsors (Community Communications) and thereby the author.