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Equipping Families With Healthy Relationship Skills
Your family is one of your most essential assets in the world. Although societal evolutions have radically changed the structure and dynamics of the family institution, it still holds immense value in almost every culture.
However, today’s fast-paced lifestyle has also made it slightly more difficult for family members to spend quality bonding time with each other. Families seek professional counseling services more actively than they ever did in the past.
The need to formally equip families with healthy relationship skills arises due to the following reasons:
1. The Need to Accept Diversity
In the pre-industrial rural lifestyles, families across communities had relatively homogeneous values. Each family member in a particular society had definite roles in sustaining the family structure, and people hardly deviated from these ascribed and adopted statuses. Hence, family members grew up understanding the obligations and limitations that came with the role of fellow members.
Comparing this to the present-day scenario, we can safely say that a rapid lifestyle requires us to multitask between several roles inside and outside our houses. We’re working as multiple-income earners, parents, siblings, spouses, caretakers, and a dozen other jobs while living in nuclear families.
Every person knows how to play multiple roles, and in such an environment, it’s critical to learn adaptable and flexible relationship skills. Since the fabric of how we’re behaving as a family is changing, we also have to learn new roles that can accommodate multiple jobs and meet various emotional, physical, and psychological purposes at once.
2. Staying Connected With Distant Families
Let’s compare our grandparents’ era to that of ours. When our granddads and grandad were our age, they may recall being pretty tight-knit with even their distant families and cousins. Even their second and third cousins seem to be quite close to them in their pictures and memories, which indicates that they had solid relationships and bondings as a family unit.
As opposed to those times, the era we live in is way different. They had lesser migrations across cities and states. They often had combined income sources where everyone had their role to play.
On the contrary, we have close family members scattered across the seven continents. Parents, siblings, and spouses live far away from each other and have different concerns in life, ranging from studies to careers and lifestyle choices. Naturally, this distance can compromise the strength of familial relationships, no matter how well-intentioned the family members may be.
Therefore, this is one significant factor that highlights the need to impart knowledge and skills regarding changing family dynamics and retaining closeness with family members despite the physical distance.
3. Adoptions and Surrogacies
As people’s knowledge and opinion about family planning grow, more and more couples can plan their families by factoring in surrogacies and adoptions. However, there’s another closely-related phenomenon that many may overlook or may brush off as unimportant; it’s the emotional and psychological complications that arise from building such relationships within families.
The first complication pops up when we see different natures of surrogate or adopting families. Some consist entirely of adopted and surrogated siblings and offspring, while others mix blood relationships with these artificially-formed relationships.
And as much as a family may try, they cannot completely erase the differences that are present in raising your genetic lineage, and raising those who were born outside of the family. This might seem inconsequential, but it can put quite a bit of strain on relationships between non-blood- and blood-related members within the family.
Therefore, a blend of emotional and psychological skills and techniques can help these families pull through the complications that arise in such diverse familial setups and are far better than letting family members suffer from miscommunication and misunderstandings of various kinds.
4. Domestic Abuse
The presence of domestic abuse in a household directly correlates to the absence of healthy and appreciable relationship skills within its members. The basic idea of teaching relationship skills is to help families get through tough times and complex phases. When an individual member of the family goes through something challenging, the entire family feels involved to an extent.
However, when their family members aren’t equipped with healthy relationship closure skills and virtues of compassion and forgiveness, the family might easily fall into the nightmarish trap of domestic abuse.
This abuse essentially implies the absence of appropriate relationship skills and values. Both the abuser and the abused suffer from this lack of connection, and the relations once cherished become a bane.
Therefore, some professional equipment sessions regarding relationship skills or relationship counselors might prove helpful in keeping your family away from the pitfalls of domestic violence and/or sexual abuse.
Conclusion
Family is important in every era and every age. However, it may occasionally become difficult to sustain these highly sensitive relationships. If your family is going through a rough patch, professional session with an expert and couples counselling might help solve these issues.