FORVM

Unhappy with your family? You’re not alone. Here are ways to understand family conflict and how to resolve it.

Is blood thicker than one’s resolve? How to deal with family feuds—and keep your sanity in tact

At my father’s hospital bed in the early hours of the morning, I stared at a man I hardly knew. He was staring at the wall that lit up with headlights from the street below. He wasn’t sleeping anymore—he was afraid to die in his sleep—and so I decided that sitting up with him to keep him company was better than just sleeping on the tiny bench beside his bed.

For the better part of the last decade, my father and I haven’t seen much of each other. Papa and I didn’t agree on many things. Mama, when she was still alive, didn’t help either because every time she was hurt or sad about things my father did or didn’t do, I was the one she told. Micro-aggressions like his constant teasing that my eyeglasses made me look like an ugly nerd were forgiven. However, I needed to physically limit my time with Papa so that the microaggressions won’t balloon into full-blown snarky insults. Visits to our old family home were monthly and short because as toxic as our relationship was, I still believed we had to have one. One afternoon ended all that.

I was visiting Papa with my two small sons. He loved sharing photos of my boys on his Facebook wall. That always made my heart swell with love. But on this particular afternoon, he kept watching TV. I said, "Papa, your grandsons are here. Why don’t you play with them? Tell them a story. You have lots of funny stories.” Without taking his eyes off the TV, Papa replied, "I don’t need to know them. Whatever you post on Facebook is enough.”

I may not have been a good daughter but I believed I was a good mother. If he didn’t think my kids were worthy of knowing, then he didn’t deserve them. Since then, we only saw each other briefly on holidays. We didn’t speak to each other and that was okay. Until that strange dawn at his hospital bed, where I had spent more time with him than I had in the last 10 years. The years caught up with us and, in the darkness and silence, we didn’t know what to do.

THE REAL CAUSE OF CONFLICT: INTOLERANCE

Many people believe that enduring family conflict is caused by something truly terrible— abuse, violence, abandonment. While this is true, this doesn’t mean the rest of us from seemingly normal families are immune. Tony Ahn, a Child and Family Therapist with a Master’s in Counseling from Penn State University, said, "As a psychotherapist, I worked with many families experiencing different kinds of conflict.”

It may surprise normal folk that it doesn’t take a lot to cause family relationships to dissolve. In my case, it was Papa’s casual rejection of my children that made me withdraw. To give another example, a famous personality this time, Meghan Markle’s relationship with her father disintegrated when he was found to have allowed paparazzi to stage photos of him preparing for his daughter’s royal wedding. He broke her trust and she broke things off— all detailed in a heartbroken letter he also leaked to the press, proving yet again that the Duchess of Sussex was correct to not trust her father anymore.

Ahn said, "The primary cause of family conflict is an inability for one person to accept how another person is, leading to intense frustration that they are not the person they want them to be. The person they want them to be invariably meets their needs better. This can happen between spouses, between siblings, between a parent and a child (or children), between any family members, and it can be one directional or bidirectional (mutual). One common manifestation of such nonacceptance is past emotional injuries, often known as triggers, that have gone unresolved.”

In short, intolerance is the cause of family conflict. Manners dictate that we don’t discuss politics and religion at the dinner table because these are polarizing topics. Other things people find as acceptable reasons for conflict are life choices like your career, who you decide to marry, your gender identity and whether or not you want children. However, there are many other trivial things that are found to be intolerable and a cause of conflict. The way you dress, your friends, your hobbies, your favorite food, even the way you speak or laugh can be unacceptable to family members simply because they don’t see these aspects of you as ideal.

In truth, what we see as the ideal isn’t what’s real. We may dream of perfectly behaved children who will obey our every directive but the reality is very different. Ahn said, "We need to recognize each others’ limitations and accept them. Acceptance doesn’t mean we have to like them, however. You probably don’t like cleaning up after pets or toddlers, but we recognize that no amount of explaining, yelling, or hitting is going to make your cat stop knocking things off the table or your two-year old stop being a messy eater, so you don’t expend a lot of emotional energy being frustrated that they do these things which you don’t like. [Instead] you work around them. You don’t leave glasses on the

“MANY PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT ENDURING FAMILY CONFLICT IS CAUSED BY SOMETHING TRULY TERRIBLE— ABUSE, VIOLENCE, ABANDONMENT. WHILE THIS IS TRUE, THIS DOESN’T MEAN THE REST OF US FROM SEEMINGLY NORMAL IMMUNE” FAMILIES ARE

table for the cat to knock off. You feed the toddler food that are relatively mess-free. Similarly, you can accept your family members’ limitations and work around them.”

If you’re the object of intolerance, you may have realized that there are two ways to deal with the situation. Walk away and build a life where you are loved and accepted as you are, or be the one who accepts your family’s limitations and find ways to work around them. For many people, including myself, walking away was easier. "Estrangement is a solution for some people,” Ahn agreed. "If continued contact with a family member is harming you physically or psychologically, attempts to stop the harm have failed, and you believe you’ll be happier without that person in your life, it may be the best option. That’s not to say it is optimal, but sometimes in life the best we can do is not an ideal solution.”

Many people estranged from their families will say that separation is the best solution. After all, the news is filled with stories of families that ended up resorting to violence. One notorious example is the recent altercation between the Barretto sisters at their father’s wake. The fact that even the presence of the President of the Philippines himself didn’t give Gretchen, Marjorie and Claudine pause or shame is testament to a deeper rift than the public suspects. No one wants that kind of ending or worse, so staying away from each other is a reasonable solution. Ahn said, "The effects of family conflict are wide ranging, from temporarily hurt feelings, to long-term damage to self-esteem, to violence, and in more extreme cases, to disownment or even murder.”

RESOLVE, MAYBE EVEN FORGIVE

Leo Tolstoy starts his novel Anna Karenina with the immortal words, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That simply means there are many reasons for people to be unhappy but happy families have found ways to work and live with each other.

"All families have conflict,” Ahn stated as a matter-of-fact. "One of my favorite experts on family relationships is Dr. John Gottman, a psychologist whose 40 years of research have led him to identify the elements it takes for relationships to last. His research indicates that 69% of problems in a relationship are unsolvable. These may be things like personality traits that bother a family member, long-standing issues around spending and saving money, deep differences of opinion about childrearing, or very different morals or values. His research findings emphasize the idea that families must learn to manage conflict rather than avoid or attempt to eliminate it. Trying to solve unsolvable problems is counterproductive, and no family will ever completely eliminate them. However, discussing them is constructive and provides a positive opportunity for understanding, growth, and empathy.”

For peace to reign, we must accept that we will never be truly compatible with anyone on the planet—whether that person be our neighbor, parent, our children, or even our spouse. We simply have to accept that everyone is different and that should be okay. The trouble with family is we assume that we will get along because we share the same blood or last name, so when we have differences, these can be intolerable.

While avoiding family seems to be the easiest solution, Ahn suggested ways to resolve family conflict, especially for those times you’ll need to be in the same room for the holidays, a wedding, or a funeral.

APPROACH WITH CAUTION

Before an upcoming get-together, Ahn suggested addressing the conflict. "I recommend having a discussion, starting with attempting to get agreement that additional fighting will not be positive for anyone involved and that one thing all parties want is peace at the event. If you can’t get agreement on that, the rest doesn’t matter.” Don’t pretend there’s nothing wrong. You can call up the person you are in conflict with ahead of time and extend an olive branch, if only for that day.

FIND NEUTRAL GROUND

"If you all can agree that peace at the event is mutually desired, a conversation about ‘neutral ground’ or a ‘truce’ is in order, with the idea that fighting publicly will cause harm to other family members as well as additional stress for the ‘combatants,’” Ahn said. This will involve asking family to not discuss certain things (such as politics or sexual orientation), or perhaps even asking to at least not fight in front of the children or aging parents.

HAVE A PLAN FOR RETREAT

Ahn emphasized, "One should approach such situations from a ‘conflict management’ perspective, by having a realistic plan in place for how one will handle it if the peace is broken: the sister who may bring up the humiliating story that triggers your anger, the ex-spouse who may insult you in front of others, the parent who likes to belittle you. You need to hope for the best, but plan for the worst, anticipating such potential problems and knowing in advance what you will do if they occur.

"This plan needs to be realistic, meaning that if you know you have an immediate, loud, angry emotional response to your mother telling an embarrassing story about you to strangers, your plan shouldn’t be to smile coolly, listen politely, and then crack a self-deprecating joke. You won’t be capable. It might be more realistic for you to plan to leave the room as soon as she begins the story. You can’t stop her but you don’t have to be present, and your exit quietly signals your protest. Then any emotional escalation happens internally and you don’t have to deal with a potentially uncontrolled reaction in front of her and strangers.”

For me, estrangement was the best option for many years until my sons started asking about their grandfather. "Why don’t we see him as often as we see our other family?” I was honest and said, "Mama and Lolo don’t get along that well so I found it best that we distance ourselves from each other.” My kids of course replied, "But why don’t you work things out? You always tell us we should talk and forgive each other.” Though I want to retort that things are complicated, children have a way of stripping away the bullshit. They were right. Papa and I should just fix things.

We never got around to talking until we were forced to do so by Papa’s illness. In that dark room lit with flickering headlights, I finally realized that it didn’t matter. My resentment, his rejection. Of course these had shaped our lives so yes, they matter, but in the big scheme of things, love should’ve been the best answer. Papa may not have been interested to know his grandsons but my sons should have at least been given the chance to know him and decide for themselves. In protecting myself and my sons, maybe I lost my integrity as a parent when I say conflict must be resolved and hurts should be forgiven.

After many years, all the pain bubbled up then melted away. I apologized to Papa and I heard the words I’ve always wanted to hear, "I’m sorry, too. I forgive you. It’s going to be okay.”

Papa died a few days later. We may have only had those few days but we were finally at peace—a happy family at last.