Dealing With Family Conflicts
How does your family handle the disagreements that occur in your household? Conflicts are basic to human relationships; they are inevitable and should not be avoided. However, family members should know how to negotiate and resolve these conflicts. To negotiate, parents and children both need to make a genuine attempt to understand the attitudes, feelings, and desires of one another. When disagreements are resolved successfully, family life is enhanced and relationships are strengthened.
Some families cannot seem to settle conflicts. Family members may deny that problems exist. Or they may draw a third person into the conflict, supposedly to mediate the difficulty, but who instead may take a position on one side or the other and thereby make the disagreement worse. Sometimes when they are unable to resolve their conflict, the warring parties may join together to focus attention on another family member as a way to avoid dealing with the real problem.
Within every family, certain alliances, coalitions, and rivalries exist. At times, mother and daughter might form an alliance against father and son. Or the two parents might unite against the children on a particular issue. But within a healthy family these coalitions are not fixed, they change from situation to situation, and they do not disrupt the functioning of the family. If they become rigid and long-lasting, however, they can do damage to the family.
It is natural to be unaware that any alliances exist within your family. But to get a better sense of your family’s dynamics, ask yourself questions like: “What family member do I tend to agree (or disagree) with most often? When my children are fighting, whose side do I generally take? With whom in the family do I usually spend my free time? Who in the family most easily angers me?”
Tags: Conflicts are basic to human relationships, Family Conflicts Solving