The Power of Conflict

Have you ever stopped to think that conflict could actually be a GOOD thing in your relationships? I know I never really thought that way before, until my class this week. My teacher really brought to light the great advantages to having conflict in a relationship and I'll discuss a few of them. The interesting thing about all of the advantages to being exposed to conflict is that it all kind of weaves together. When you are in a conflict and you are in it with a humble heart you begin to learn more about other perspectives or information that you never thought about before. Along with learning new things from a different perspective, this allows you to become more humble or teachable. When you are teachable, you begin to learn more and you become closer to your spouse. There's an analogy that my teacher talked about that helped us to really understand perspective. If you stick your hand out and have one person sitting on opposite sides of your hand, both people will see it differently. However, it is a description of the same thing; the hand. Often times when we get into fights it is only what we see but if we can broaden our minds we can try to understand where that person is coming from.

Family Crisis

When you first hear the word coping what do you think of? Maybe the reactions you might have resulting from difficult situations or is it learning to accept a crisis and learning to get through it. In class we took a little different perspective on coping, in order to get a better understanding of what it means. We talked about the coping that is done in order to put up crowning in a home, usually a decorative part joining the ceiling and wall in an elegant manner. With this type of coping you must have very precise cuts in order for the pieces to join together, not only cutting but the amount of pressure that needs to be applied in order for it to work correctly. When applied to the family in a crisis you need to work together in order to become unified and strong. If only a couple people are working at the problem then the problem will only continue to stay. Another example of coping is the coping you would find on a pool, it almost kind of looks like a lip over the pool. This coping is also very strong so that people of all shapes and sizes can easily come in and out of the pool safely. When applying this to the family we could say that we need to formulate good boundaries with who we allow to come into our crisis (or the pool). We might also say that this coping allows a sort of safety for the family in order to stick together within the pool. What great analogies formed in order to understand coping and the fact that a family needs to stick together in order to fully resolve a crisis. We must stick together no matter how much pressure we might be feeling and want to just curl up in a ball and not discuss anything.