This week, I was interested to learn more about the roles that are played within families and how each member interacts with the others. One of the theories we learned about was the Systems Theory. This is the idea that the sum of the parts are less than the system and that people in a families play roles. In the class readings, an analogy was presented that stuck out to me. It compared a family to a mobile which hangs over a child's crib. On the mobile, there are multiple objects hanging from wires.
If one of the objects is touched, the rest of them begin to move. If one of the objects is taken off, the whole mobile becomes unbalanced. It compared this to the system of a family. Something one member of the family does will affect all of the others and possibly even generations down the line. This got me thinking about how important our actions and reactions are. I think that very often we get caught up in a cycle that we don't realize is happening. For example, a wife could think that she is nagging because her husband is withdrawing, but the husband could think that her nagging is the reason he is withdrawing. We often think the blame for a problem lies with others. However, are we just not recognizing that there is an ongoing pattern that needs to be broken?
I have seen things like this happen in my own family. Usually when I get in a fight with my brother it is over the same things that we have fought over again and again. Nobody ever thinks they are the bad guy and the problem is never resolved. There is a simple solution: Communication. If we spent more time explaining why we think the way we do and why we chose to do the things we did, there would be less bickering over cause/effect and right/wrong.
The month before I moved out of my house to start my first semester, I had something like this happen to me. One of the roles I have in my family is being the oldest child. I am the first one to reach every new stage of life. So having me move off to college was a whole new thing to my parents. As the time got closer for me to move off to college, my dad began to start expressing (and this is a light way to put it) his concerns about my financial situation. For a whole month we could not stand in the same room together without the tension being so thick you could cut it with a knife. After a while, I began to notice a pattern. We would argue and then we would ignore each other for a while. Eventually we would become more civil, but right when I thought I was in the clear he would pounce on me again. This cycle continued over and over and over again. One day I was talking to my mom and she mentioned that our bickering was very exhausting for her because she had to play the role of peacemaker almost constantly. This came as a wake up call to me. Later on I talked to my brother and he mentioned that he had started hiding in his room when my dad got home from work so that he wouldn't get caught in the backlash. As far as I'd been concerned, I thought my dad was in the wrong and that he was being irrational. I also saw it as an abuse of his power over me, as my father, which goes along with Conflict Theory. Conflict Theory is the idea that power = influence. Basically what was happening with us is that we were in a continuous power struggle and neither would back down. After realizing the effect it was having on my other family members, however, I decided to finally ask him WHY? I learned that he had been working overtime so that he could help me pay for college and that he was concerned about the way I used my money because he cared about me and he didn't want all of his hard hours working to go to waste. After learning this, I felt ashamed that I had pushed back so hard. If I had communicated better, so many things could have been resolved early on.
The experience helped me to understand the chain reactions that happen in a family. Sometimes we get stuck in a cycle that never gets resolved because we simply do not communicate or we won't put ourselves in their shoes. We just let it sit and accept it as the way things are. Sometimes we need to take a step back and consider how our actions will affect the rest of our family. We are all attached to the same mobile. If one of us is pushed the rest of us will move as well, whether we want to or not. If we start to look outside our bubble and pay more attention to how our actions affect those around us, our relationships with our family members will strengthen. I challenge all of you to start to pay more attention to what goes on in your families. Are you stuck in any cycles? Are you doing anything that could be affecting someone else? If you do this, I promise there will be improvement.
