Danielle's Blog #2

One of my most important interpersonal relationships is my family. My family has been there with me every day through the hard times and the good times.

The family relationship theory applies to my family. My family is crazy and Disney freaks (including me). My sisters occasionally bicker with each other, but we still love one another. We make mistakes and learn from it. We ask each other for advice and have family get-togethers weekly. We are really close; however, sometimes that is not always good.

^---Family at Disney World enjoying snow cones :-)

Over the past six years, there has been an ongoing family feud (no, not the game show – I wish) between my aunt on my mother’s side and my sister. My sister, Grace*, offered a place to live (in one side of her townhouse) to my aunt, Sarah*, and her family after she was evicted out of her house eight or nine years ago. Grace has been more than generous to Sarah and her family when it came to late rent (a month or three), when her husband got fired, or even during the holidays. They both maintained a healthy relationship when Sarah’s family lived in the townhouse.

When Sarah and her family moved out of Grace’s townhouse three or four years ago, Sarah and her two daughters started to post negative comments on Facebook about Grace trying to “run their life.” Also, stating living there felt like living in a “h*** hole” and Grace was a “controlling b**** with a blacken heart and evil soul.” These hateful comments escalated when Grace tried to confront them about these comments. This situation happened because of other personal situations that had happened. Other situations like Grace providing money to Sarah’s husband to fix a minor hole in the ceiling and finding out they did not fix it after they moved.

It was Sarah’s interpretation of the events, good and bad, that led to her family to alienate Grace. This real situation reflected cognitive conflict (Sarah’s misinterpretation of events) resulting in the dominating strategy (Sarah’s family alienating Grace) and obliging style (Grace’s attempt about the situation and relationship with Sarah’s family). I just scratched the surface of this family feud. There is so much more to this feud that includes more family members that are not even involved (including me). To this day, Sarah’s family has not made any contact with my mother’s family in three years. There has been on and off conversation between my mom and Sarah; however, it has resulted in more feud about the past. 

Applying interpersonal communication conflict theory to this family feud made me understand more about communication in my family. My family has communication issues and these theories made me realize that conflicts can be good in order to manage the conflicts in my family.

^---Spending time with the family with movie night!

*This asterisk means that the names above are not the actual names of the people mentioned. Their actual names have been replaced with Grace and Sarah.