Week 12: Power

In Richard Miller’s article, "Who is the boss? Power Relationships in Families", I saw a lot of my own family reflected in the points made. Miller states that in healthy families, parents and children know their roles and respect that parents are the leaders of the family. As the children become adults, the parents step out of the power role in their children’s lives to allow healthy relationships to continue.
In my own childhood, I have experienced the chaos that an unclear hierarchy between parents and children can create. My older sister was definitely the ruler of our household; she made the rules and she chose the consequences. It was difficult for us as her younger siblings to watch my parents struggle to parent her and eventually give up on trying to parent any of us.

When I was fourteen, entering high school as a freshman, my older sister was seventeen and a junior. For the majority of our lives we had gotten along, but that soon ended when she became my chauffer to school and events. Without a curfew, (my parents had given up on that long ago), my sister would be out until 2 o’clock in the morning most days which led to us being late to school every morning. On Friday nights after basketball or football games at the high school, my sister would drag me along to boyfriends houses or parties afterwards and make me sit in the car, waiting for hours until she was ready to go home. 

My sister calling the shots in our household brought a lot of chaos into my life and affected the relationships we had as a family. As my siblings and I grew up and started our own lives outside of our family home, my parents panicked and began inserting themselves into our decisions for one last stab at a claim to their power. Luckily, my family has come to recognize our faults and acknowledge a desire for better relationships. Through family council and family therapy, we are working to heal the wounds that improper power relations caused in our home. We are blessed to have gospel leaders who have shared effective family council patterns to follow. As the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles does, we always start our family council's by sharing appreciation for each other individually. As a family who has many hot tempered members, this is a great way to bring the spirit into our meeting. Having the spirit in attendance changes the entire experience and allows our family council's to be productive. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 3: The Sanctity of Marriage

A couple of weeks ago our prophet, President Russell M. Nelson shared a special message with us as church members in a broadcast. My husband and I listened to his address together later that evening when we returned home from work. Being so close to General Conference, we knew his words had to be important if he was making such an effort to share them now. President Nelson shared a message of God’s love and the unchanging truth of His gospel. The words shared were riveting and soul calming, they were truly inspired by our Heavenly Father. As we can see from our reading this week, the world focuses on the now more than on an eternal perspective. Many of God’s children are unaware of His love for them and what that can mean for their personal salvation. As the world gets further away from God’s plan, we can rely on the truths of this gospel to keep us on the right path. The truths of the gospel are unchanging, including those in relation to same sex relations. I would like to share th...
Read more

Week 10: Seeking to Understand

At the conclusion of Gottman’s book, he shares with us his “marital poop detector”. Gottman uses the marital poop detector to find early warning signs of something not smelling quite right in a marriage. When I was reading, I thought of a favorite saying from high school, (back when things like poop were funny). Anytime someone would say, “Does that make sense?” or something of the sort, we would respond with, “yeah I’m smelling what you’re stepping in.” As funny as this may have been, it’s applicable to marriage in that we need to be on the same page with our spouse, especially when things are turning sour. If I’ve learned anything from Gottman and Goddard this semester, it is the importance of communication in any relationship, but especially marriage; the marital poop detector is no different. Being able to sense when things are off in our relationships before they escalate to a point of no return is a powerful tool. But how can we achieve this? How can we smell the poop? (Are yo...
Read more

Week 5: Do You Believe in Magic?

Eight positive interactions were defined and introduced in the blog post, “The Magical Relationship Ratio, According to Science”, from The Gottman Institute. These interactions include: Be interested, express affection, demonstrate they matter, intentional appreciation, find opportunities for agreement, empathize and apologize, accept your partners perspective, and make jokes (but not at their expense). I consciously put these actions to the test in my own marriage this week and recorded the outcomes; here are a few of my findings and experiences. Be interested: My husband loves the world of fitness and spends a lot of his free time working out, studying for nutrition and training certifications, or researching new techniques. He follows the lives of several famous athletes through social media and often tells me about their latest P.R. or torn ligaments. I usually just nod and “mhm” through the conversation until he notices my disinterest and changes the conversation. This week I ...
Read more