What Is A Healthy Family Relationship?

What is a healthy family relationship? Do you sometimes wonder? Because right now, the society that we live in is full of dysfunction. In fact, our culture, in Western culture, has spent decades now trying to normalize family relationships that are not healthy. To try to suggest that, hey, it's okay, everybody's relationships are like this. But what if we're not okay with them being like this? What if we want something better for ourselves? Well, that's okay. When I started parenting troubled youth and also raising my own children, I looked at the way that these troubled youth were interacting with me and trying to have family relationships in dysfunctional ways. And I thought, this is going to mess up their future friend relationships, work relationships, romance relationships. Are they gonna be able to get married if they're treating people like that or if they're distancing themselves from people like that? We've gotta work on that. So it became a really high priority for me. And I decided that deliberately determining what made a healthy family relationship and then making sure that I purposefully helped teach my family members and the people that would come to my home for treatment what that looked like so that they could work toward it was going to be my goal. And so I'd like to share with you what I did to do that. All right, so what are the tenets of a really healthy family relationship? So one of the ones that I think should not be a surprise to anyone is honesty, is really healthy in a relationship. But let's be really careful with that one because that one can cut two ways, right? And when I say cut, I mean cut. You can sometimes use honesty as a weapon and that's when it's not good for your relationship. But honesty should always be a way that you communicate with other people so they know where they stand, where you stand, so that they feel like you're genuine, sincere, and that you're real, right? So how do you be honest but not be cuttingly honest, right? Well, part of that has to do with the health of the relationship. There does get to be a point in a relationship where it's healthy enough that you can go to a person and say, you're doing something that is really hard for me. In fact, this thing that you did is really not appreciated and most people don't like it. In fact, I've noticed that this other person is having a hard time with it, so could you make the change? When you are in a healthy relationship, you can go to somebody and you can say that and they can, it might feel like a teeny bit of a sting, but it's not gonna feel like you've cut their arm off and you don't wanna have a relationship because they're gonna think they love me, they care about me, it's okay. They're trying to tell me something to help me, especially the tone in which you convey that type of communication, it's gonna make all the difference, right, as you're trying to pass that along to them. So honesty is a really big deal. We wanna make sure that we are communicating honestly with each other. So often in family relationships, we emotionally vent and then we assume that that's honest. And where it might be an honest representation of what you feel during the moment, oftentimes emotionally venting is a type of manipulation to get someone to feel something, do something for you, think a certain way about how you feel. It's actually oftentimes a control tactic and it feels that way for the other people around them. So getting overly emotional with other people can actually decrease the feeling of trust. Now I know that, whoa, this is getting really deep, right? Like, wait a second, I wanna be able to share my deep feelings with other people though. Can I not share them? Yes, you absolutely can. In fact, within a family, you should be able to share the things that you worry about, that you're afraid of and the things that are concerning to you. Those family members, those are the ones who should care the most and you should be able to express them to them. But are you expressing your feelings and emotion to someone out of frustration or because you're really wanting to talk about something, seeking help, maybe even being willing to be told that you're doing something wrong? If you have charity that is a companion to your honesty, you can correct anything. But developing a habit of charity and honesty in the family can sometimes be something that people don't know how to do. But lucky for us, parenting in its historical understanding actually gives us the model for how to develop honesty, charity as we go along. So what do I mean by that? Well, parenting offers us the opportunity to bring in so many principles that actually lead to this honesty and charity, but also to a really robust relationship. Now I know that family relationships might be different. You might be having sibling relationships, but you could be having mother-father relationships or maybe it's a relationship with your aunt or with your cousin. There's a lot of different relationships that we have in families. But that parenting model of the parent-child actually really does help us recognize how to create a good relationship. Now you might be thinking, oh no, the parents in my family did not do a good job, so I don't have a very good model there. Okay, well let me help you have a model. I mean, this channel, Teaching Self-Government, has a ton of videos on it related to parenting, good principles of parenting, good communication, which obviously impacts our parenting. One of those things that you do is you recognize that all of your communications with people have a certain structure and they have a certain tone. So the structure is like the way in which you talk about certain things. Maybe every time you are telling somebody something about how you feel, you do it with a certain wording, right? You say, can I talk to you about something? So that's your structure. Your structure is you go to somebody ahead of time, before you just lay it on them, you see if they're ready, you see if you can set a time, and then you calmly ask if they're okay being a sounding board before you just dump it at them. Maybe that's your structure. There are a lot of different structures of communication. Some of them are very productive and healthy, other ones are nonproductive and not healthy. You need to understand what your structure of communication is. And I'm not gonna go into every piece for that right now because this whole channel is about communication and family relationships. And so you'll be able to find tons in the videos here. But the second thing is tone. Tone, that means how that communication or how that structure feels when it's coming through to other people. Does it feel like you care about them? Does it feel like you wanna understand them? Or does it feel like you just wanna get everything that you have to say or all the thoughts in your head out? If it feels like it's all about what you have to say, then the relationship is suddenly not feeling as healthy or as connected. So when we're talking about a healthy relationship, we're talking about a type of connection or bonding that we have, a trust that we have also in that relationship. So when you are developing a good relationship, you wanna be able to do a variety of things. You wanna be able to have fun together, work together, have learning experiences together, make sure that you're able to talk about the hard things and the fun things, and that you're not just only keeping in one line, like just the hard things, just the chores, just the... There's gotta be a variety there, right? And you need to be willing to hear other people's points of view. Now, I do know that some people don't know how to express their points of view in a very diplomatic way. And even within the family, we can learn to be practicing diplomacy. On this channel, there is a skill called disagreeing appropriately. That skill can be used by everyone. Grandma and grandpa can use it together. Husband and wife, aunts and cousins and everyone, siblings can use the skill disagreeing appropriately. It's a way that you seek to understand another person's point of view and then share your point of view, listen to what they have to say, say okay, and then drop the subject. It's a way to step out of your own brain for a minute to really invest in that moment of communication in the relationship so that the other person knows how much you care. I know that there are occasional people in a family relationship who actually might honestly not care. Maybe they have some neurodiversities that make them very myopically focused on themselves and their feelings and all of those things all the time. That can be difficult, but you can still train a person that is socially acceptable to try to care. Even if you don't, you need to learn how to communicate in a way as if you do because otherwise it's gonna hurt all of your relationships. And in the family is the perfect place for that type of practice to happen. Now, one thing about a relationship that's super important to understand is that the relationship is actually one-sided. So right now you have a relationship to me. You see me in a certain way. Maybe you trust me, maybe you don't. Maybe you think I'm too old. Maybe you think I'm not old enough. I don't know. That's all a conversation that's going on inside your head. That's your relationship or feeling or perspective and lens of me. Well, I have a relationship to you too. Even though right now while I'm filming this, I can't actually see you. I know the type of people that listen to the videos on this channel and I'm envisioning what your struggles might be in your family relationships. I'm hoping in my heart that I can help you and thinking about how much I love you and the work that I do to try to help families be happy. That's my relationship to you. Even though I can't see you, it should hopefully come out in all of the words and things that I share. With our children, with our spouses, with our extended family, we can start fixing a relationship just by choosing to think about the other person in another way. I know sometimes we get offended. Sometimes we feel like that other person has wronged us and we don't wanna be wronged again. So we put up walls, we put up barriers of protection. I understand why when maybe occasionally that might be necessary, but usually it's detrimental to the relationship for the long term. Forgiveness is important. Telling yourself, okay, that happened. That person wasn't kind. They didn't know the skills. Just kind of give them a little bit of the benefit of the doubt that they're a person who's learning and they're not perfect yet, right? And so instead of taking offense, just say, okay, it happened, but I'm dropping the subject and I'm going to choose to love them instead of to carry this weight around with me of what has happened in our relationship. And what do you do if they do something that you don't like again? How do you handle it in a way that preserves your relationship? Now, if you're a parent, there's a lot you can do. There's many videos on this channel about correcting and pre-teaching things so that children know what to expect from you and then you can just, you know, follow right into the planned communication for how to solve that problem. But let's say that the person is not someone that you're parenting. Then what do you do? Well, you still use a parenting skill, but they don't have to know that it's a parenting skill, okay? So lots of times when people do something offensive, so person number one does something offensive, person number two gets offended and pushes back. So then we have both people pushing at each other, but it doesn't have to be that way. You can have one person doing something they shouldn't do, being offensive, and you can have another person standing there thinking, I love you. I see you're trying to get a point across to me. This is not a good or healthy way to do it. They're thinking this in their head, right? This is their inside dialogue. But I know you're trying to get a point across, so I'm gonna try to help you. So then person two is gonna say something. This is something that I talk about in my book, The Power of Calm. I talk about how you don't ever wanna try to solve a problem until the person is in the prefrontal cortex. So instead, you describe and you say, I can see that you really feel passionate about this. You wanna talk to me about who's cook night it is or whatever the issue happens to be. And I wanna have that conversation with you, but I'm not gonna do it until we're calm. So let's get calm first. So now you just developed a little bit of a boundary. You're not pushing them completely off. You're saying, I wanna have the conversation, but you're saying, let's just get over this barrier of calmness first. Let's just take a deep breath so that we can have a good conversation and really understand each other. Cause I wanna understand you, but I'm having a hard time understanding with all the emotion that's in it. So let's do that first. So that's step number one, that you would say that. Then when you are solving the problem together, be sure to use your teaching self-government describing skills. So instead of reacting to what somebody else is saying or doing, listening carefully and then describe. This helps you with active listening. So you can say, so it sounds like what you're telling me is this. So that's gonna help. And you describe the things that they're telling you, right? But the other thing that you can do is you can say, okay, so right now you're raising your voice, which tells me that things are getting a little emotional and I can understand feeling emotional, but let's take a breath first and then we'll get back to the conversation. So you can just describe and then point the direction toward calmness and good communication. Now, if you've got those skills and principles of communication, it is going to help you a ton. I would like to help you with that, but this video is already long enough. I have a full length class here on this channel that's called the Not So Known Secret for Parenting Success. It's a full length class that will teach you skills and principles of good communication that you can do, not just with your children, but with any relationship. I mean, sometimes if it's an adult and an adult, you modify it a little bit, but principles are principles, which means they work for anyone. So go and get the principles and the skills that you need at the next video, the Not So Known Secret for Parenting Success. I'll see you there.