Arguing is not allowed in some families. Family members are expected to be agreeable at all times. The rule is: If you get angry, go away until you have cooled down and come back with a smile. In other families, conflict is the only acceptable way to relate. The rule is: Arguments are better than being too cool and indifferent; you show you care by fighting it out.

       QUESTIONS

      1. What were some of the openly acknowledged and spoken rules in your family?

      2. What were some of the unspoken rules about having and expressing feelings?

      In Joe and Sara’s fights over money, their different attitudes toward spending money is only part of the problem. They each also learned different rules for dealing with conflict in their families of origin.

      As it becomes clear to Sara that Joe doesn’t want to save, she gets more upset and emotional. She is angry and hurt. She says, “You don’t care about our future.” This is upsetting for Joe who isn’t used to such behavior in his family. He gets tense and attempts to calm her down by saying things like, “Let’s talk about this when you’re calmer.” When that doesn’t work, he refuses to talk to her at all and says, “You’re being crazy and irrational. I’ll talk to you when you make sense.” Sara thinks he means that he’ll talk about it when she’s ready to come around to his point of view. She then gets even more upset over both what she considers his condescending style and his refusal to settle the issue with her. That’s when she starts to feel like throwing things, and often does.

      In Joe’s family, conflicts were not argued emotionally. People had a brief confrontation and then went to their separate corners until they could come out smiling. The issue was rarely discussed again, and few clear, joint decisions were made. In Sara’s family, when there was a conflict, people dealt with it then and there. After the shouting, it was over, and people were friends again. Often, a decision was made at the end of it all.

      In this case, Joe and Sara have different expectations about how they should deal with conflict. The two family mobiles are crashing into each other. Joe thinks Sara is not living according to the rules. “If she loved me, she wouldn’t shout at me. She’d be more considerate. Love is not getting angry and shouting.”

      And Sara says to herself, “If he really loved me, he’d deal with my concerns about this issue instead of ignoring me and putting me down. He’d be more considerate. Love is letting your partner know how you feel, even if you have to shout.”

      Both think they are loving and the other is unloving. Both think they handle conflicts correctly and the other doesn’t. Both think the other is breaking the rules. They have assumed that they have the same definition of love and that the other is purposely being hateful. This simple example shows what happens when the unspoken rules are controlling behavior — no one really knows what’s going on.

      The basic purpose of all these rules is to control the way people in the family relate. They keep things in balance if everyone plays the game. Each person added to the family gets a lesson in the rules. Children in the family learn them in two ways. One is by experiencing their own anxiety when a rule is broken and the other is experiencing a parent’s anxiety.

       QUESTIONS

      1. What were the spoken and unspoken rules in your family about handling differences and conflicts between family members?

      2. Were there different conflict rules for different people or different sexes? Did age affect the rules?

      3. Have you continued to have the same rules for conflict in your present relationships, or have you changed them? Are your present rules just the reverse of the old rules? Are they really new?

      4. What are the rules for conflict in your partner’s family of origin and how do they conflict with your own?

      Anxiety is not a nice feeling. It is basically a fear of the unknown, which is worse than an ordinary fear of some specific thing. Anxiety leaves you feeling vulnerable and powerless. Most people, especially children, will do almost anything in order to avoid it. So we all learn to behave in a certain way to avoid feeling anxious, even if that creates other uncomfortable feelings. We will choose to feel depressed or paranoid, for example, rather than to feel anxious. The person who can make you feel anxious is in control. Parents learn this early in dealing with their children. When children break a rule (spoken or unspoken) parents may use physical punishment, but the most effective punishment is the withdrawal of love (or the threat of withdrawal). This punishment plays on the fear of abandonment that everyone has when young. The threat of abandonment usually provokes enough anxiety that a child will change in order to avoid it. A common example of this is when a father tells his two-year-old son it is time to leave the park. The child says “no” and won’t move. The father could just pick up the child and cart him off, but instead uses psychological force. He walks away and says, “Okay, you stay here, I’m going.” After the father gets several yards away, the boy begins to follow.

      In different guises, this same threat of abandonment is used to control many aspects of a child’s personality. Because young children need their parents so much, they will suppress the parts of themselves that the parents find objectionable rather than experience the anxiety. In effect, children say to themselves, “I can’t make it on my own. I need my parents, so I better not do anything that will lead to losing them.” This is how we learn that it’s often dangerous to be ourselves.

      Even if a parent doesn’t use physical or psychological punishment when a child breaks a rule, the child can learn about the rule because the parent becomes anxious. Young children have to be extremely sensitive to anxiety in their parents for the sake of their own survival. Just as young children keep tabs on the physical presence of their parents, they develop an awareness of their emotional presence as well. They know, whether anyone says it or not, when a parent is upset. Frequently, children feel responsible for their parents’ anxiety (of course, sometimes they are the trigger for their parents’ anxiety). If a child has done something and the parent then feels uneasy, the child will feel uneasy, too. If it happens often, the child will probably stop that behavior. The child tries to be self-protective by following the rules and taking care of the parent.

       QUESTIONS

      1. What happened to the level of anxiety in your family when unspoken rules were broken? Who would begin to object, make an issue of the behavior, or become anxious? For example, if anger was not acceptable, what would happen if someone began to openly express anger in the family? How would it be controlled?

      2. What would happen if a spoken rule was not observed?

      3. What rules do you think you are still observing? How do you react when they are broken?

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      You Never Talk To Me — Closeness And Distance Among Family Members