Cracking the Code of Family Conflict

Cracking the Code of Family Conflict 
John Mader, LMFT - dbtfamilyskills.com

What if you were able to more effectively engage challenging family interactions or relationship conflicts? What if you employed four powerful perspectives that could guide your responses to be more effective?

​This blog is going to offer some clues to begin to crack the code on problem relationship patterns.  These clues are waiting for us in the potent, yet frequently underused DBT practice of dialectics. 

Here is how Marsha Linehan described "dialectics" in her memoir, "Building a Life Worth Living."
"And I had never even heard the word dialectical. Two things make DBT unique. The first is the dynamic balance between acceptance of one's self and one's situation in life on the one hand and embracing change toward a better life on the other. That is what dialectics means--the balance of opposites and the coming to a synthesis.”  (pp. 7-8)

In "Building a Life Worth Living," Marsha Linehan describes her journey of creating DBT as an inspired outcome of her personal escape from a living emotional hell.  And here are the four ideas of the dialectical perspective that we can use in our difficult interpersonal situations. 

Idea One. For everything that exists, there is an opposite. Consider that you could readily see different viewpoints on the situation with more than one way to effectively approach, and perhaps solve, the issue. For example, you might engage your wise mind and ask "what am I missing?” Recall a situation where you feel stuck and can now choose to hold the other’s point of view as well as your own. This invites a synthesis that Linehan was pointing toward, and now we are experiencing how change is indeed possible. 

• “Thinking about my relationship with my mother, what I can miss is accepting that what she does is valid in terms of her history. Then her behavior makes sense, I can understand her ways and then I have better choices in how I want to respond.”

​Idea Two. Everything and everyone is connected in some way. Back to our difficult relationship and the possibility that you could understand how each person in the situation is connected to the issue at hand and to each other. From this understanding and recognizing we are “in the same boat,” you might respond to others as you wish they would respond to you. And this usually prompts more care and respect.

• “Think about how your partner is troubled by this conflict, imagine what they may be thinking and feeling, how this weighs on them, how they worry about what to do or say, wondering what might help. Just like you, said my wise friend to me.”

Idea Three. Change is the only constant. We can increasingly recognize how our experience and each person's experience and the situation itself is changing with each moment. With this perspective, you might make an effort to embrace the change that is present, to allow it and not fight it, to more effectively work with the current reality as it is.

• “It's very easy for me to just give up and be hopeless about the way things are, and think this is the way things always will be. But now I see this is me ignoring the truth that things can never stay the same and will always be changing. And honestly, this can be really scary for me too.”

Idea Four. Change is transactional. That change is an unfolding, transactional cycle where each of us reciprocally influences each other. What we do as an impact on our environment and other people in it, just as other people impact us. Here, you might let go of blame and pay more attention to the outcome of my behaviors with an openness to being more effective.

• “I see how my mood affects other people. When I’m cranky or my partner is prickly, we’re just constantly reacting to each other, and then reacting to their reaction.”

Applying these powerful perspectives, we can better understand how we get polarized in key aspects of our closest relationships. Let's get started: Consider when you can get unbalanced and have ineffective responses in the following areas of family life. You may recall specific times when stressful events were leading people into their red zone emotions and polarized, reactive behaviors.

Applying Dialectics to Family Life…
We are going to look at four common areas of family life where behavior can become polarized and lead to ineffective family functioning. When we identify our personal/family challenges, then we can practice our dialectical strategies to move toward balance and synthesis. The following table and discussion is based on the work of Alan Fruzzetti, Perry Hoffman and Charlie Swenson in adapting DBT to support effective family interventions in DBT Family Skills Training, 1999.
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• Independence vs. Closeness  🠞  Dialectical synthesis in finding a balance between individual autonomy and family connection.

It is not uncommon for some family members to prize independence (perhaps in some aspects of life, yet not all) and other family members to prioritize closeness. Independence to an extreme might lead to painful disconnection and even schisms in the family.  Excessive demands for closeness might produce enmeshment where family members become overly involved in each other's lives and have a hard time expressing their personal needs and limits. Families who support a working balance of autonomy and connection tend to be healthier.

• Structure vs. Flexibility  🠞  Dialectical synthesis in establishing routines while allowing for spontaneity.

Structure can support stability in family life, reliable routines, and consistently caring relationships that foster safety in our relationships.  Flexibility helps us to navigate life’s changes and have healthy continuity. At the extreme, structure can becomes excessively rigid or controlling. Unbounded flexibility or an absence of basic structure becomes chaotic, unpredictable, and potentially unsafe.

• Responsiveness: Under- vs. Over-Responsiveness  🠞  Dialectical synthesis in navigating stress effectively without becoming overly reactive or passive.

How do we cope with stress? Are we able to respond to it effectively? The extremes can lead us to over-reaction on one pole or to non-responding on the other pole. This could be understood as extremes of the acceptance/change dialectic: accepting to the point of complete passivity/surrender or having an excessive change focus that is hyper-active to the point of exhaustion/destruction.
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• Communication: Dysregulated vs. Avoidance  🠞  ​Dialectical synthesis in effectively expressing thoughts and emotions while also respecting limits and regulating emotions.

How do we effectively communicate our emotional awareness and what we're thinking? We know from DBT, that a balanced state of mind that holds both the knowledge of our emotion mind and reasonable mind is possible. And beneficial. We also know we can become dysregulated in our emotions or hijacked by excessive conceptualizing and intellectualizing to the point we can become avoidant of our experience, and cut off from the insights of our emotions, our body, our intuition, our wise mind.
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Personal/Family Challenge: We are going to overlay these four areas of family life with the four ideas of dialectics discussed at the beginning. 

• Identify which of these areas of your family life manifest struggles with problematic extreme behaviors. 
• Next let’s explore which of the four perspectives of dialectics can support you so you can replace the conditioned, reactive behaviors with skillful, goal-directed behaviors to build more balance. 

​These dialectical ways of thinking are vastly different from how many of us were raised. At times in our past, the main question might have been “what is wrong?” or perhaps “who was wrong?, which is a long way from a dialectical approach of “what am I missing?” or “together, how can we understand our different needs? 
How do we hold both acceptance of ourselves and of our family members or friends? For example, when one of us needs structure to cope with the demands of relocating or just taking a vacation, while the other needs flexibility. How do we make room for change that supports a loved one to take some independent initiative and also respect our value of family connectedness? What changes do we need to make and what changes do they need to make? 
There is never one answer, yet fortunately we have some powerful allies in our dialectical perspectives.

PRACTICE - How are you going to use these dialectics to work more effectively with your chosen, challenging family interactions?

• Choose one of the four dialectical perspectives (multiple viewpoints, connectedness, changing reality, change is transactional/reciprocal) 
• AND one of the four areas of family behaviors (interdependence, flexibility, stress tolerance, communication). 
• Apply these perspectives to several relevant life situations and then look for how you can use additional DBT skills, such as to create a “Cope Ahead” or “DEAR MAN” plan.
• Evaluate what worked and what needs troubleshooting.

​Let us know how it goes!

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References:
Linehan, MM. (2014). DBT skills training handouts and worksheets. New York. Guilford Publications.
Linehan, MM. (2020). Building a life worth living. New York: Random House.
Hoffman PD, Fruzzetti AE, Swenson CR (1999). Dialectical behavior therapy-family skills training, Family Process, 38, 399-414.