What Feeds Family Conflict?

By Carolyn L. Rosenblatt, R.N., B.S.N., Attorney at Law

There are a lot of kinds of conflict, but some of the very worst are the kind that occur in families. Why is this? A long history of interacting in ways that don’t work, family members who are totally closed to change, lack of self-awareness and self-understanding, and fear are among the things that can maintain patterns of conflict for years on end.

Psychology teaches us that all behavior is motivated. That is to say, from that perspective, everything we do comes from some reason, some conscious or unconscious place within. If people behave unreasonably, there is a cause for their behavior. Knowing that may not change a thing about family conflict, but it can help us deal with it a little better. Dealing with family conflict is essential as our elders age and family members have to step up and make decisions about aging parents.  Everyone may not get along so well in this situation.

In our practice of elder mediation, fear seems to be the single biggest motivator that drives the conflicts we see. It can be fear around money, or control, or change. It can be fear of being found out, exposed. It can be fear of being asked to do something one is not competent or willing to do. It is one of the most basic of human emotions, but an emotion that causes extreme self-protective reactions. These reactions sometimes manifest in strong words, violent behavior, or generally hostile contact with others.
Mediators work to help participants at mediation find ways to agree and to make compromises. The stronger a participant’s fear, the more difficult it is for that person to give in to anything, or to make agreements that touch upon his or her fear.

What can we do about all this? Perhaps we can start by recognizing that no one enjoys being horribly difficult at mediation or any time. Behaving badly is simply what shows on the outside. What just might be on the inside is a person frightened of losing control, security, money, the family home, an inheritance, the right to make decisions, or anything.

Compassion and understanding can do a lot to uplift the process of working with persons who are showing their worst side in a dispute. It does not change the difficult person’s behavior, but it can cause the whole tone of a mediation to soften. Understanding that emotion feeds conflict can cause one to step back and try to imagine what it is like to be the person who is acting out.

If one is able to imagine that, to “walk in someone else’s shoes” for the moment, it makes it a lot easier to compromise or try to figure out what would work for that difficult person. I guess you can call it being a little less selfish in a dispute.

It works. This, of course doesn’t apply only to mediation of disputes involving elders. It’s a general concept, and can apply to any kind of conflict. Difficult as it is to see the other’s side of the story in any clash of ideas, working at doing just that is essential to getting things resolved.

At the risk of sounding too philosophical here, I conclude that elder mediation can uplift us if we are willing to put forth the effort to stop thinking of only our own point of view. It’s not easy. The upside to the effort is that your dispute could be over with, or at least down to a workable level. Were we all able to see past the specifics of a family conflict to the underlying emotions we would surely be more peaceful.

To learn more about family conflicts and aging loved ones, sign up for our free newsletter at http://www.AgingParents.com.

© 2009, AgingParents.com

The thing about this kind of mediation practice is that, invariably, emotions are high. The dispute may not be about money, but sometimes it is. Money is emotional for lots of people. We find that families in dispute about their parents or other loved ones often fall back into patterns of behavior they have been in with each other since childhood. As immature as it seems, the players can’t seem to break the patterns. Some have observed that siblings even assume the same places around a table at mediation that they had at the family dinner table growing up. Talk about being stuck!

We find that for mediation to be successful for anyone, whether an elder is in the mix or not, one must be willing to give up one’s position, or to be able to view a problem from someone else’s point of view. Why this is so difficult seems to be rooted in the emotional attachment siblings, or others have to their Positions. (I’m right, I know I’m right, and I don’t care what you say!)

So, if one wants to mediate a dispute and has any hope of success, one has to come into the mediation willing to have some flexibility about the problem at hand. If one expects all the changing to be done by the person(s) on the other side of the dispute, it is a sure-fire way to fail at mediation.

Mediators work with participants to try to help them see things from each other’s point of view, but no one can force a person to compromise. A mediation is helped by participants who work at making “a deal”, whether it’s about money or about control, or a place to live, or whatever. Siblings fighting about their elders have a choice about whether to make their best effort to work it out, or to spend their time trying to make each other wrong. Likewise with the elders themselves. Some are just plain difficult, and compromise is not something they want to explore.

People have many reasons for holding onto their positions in family conflicts. Sometimes there are old resentments dating back to childhood. One mother who said she didn’t trust her son to manage her money wouldn’t give a reason until pressed. Her son was a responsible businessman, and likely could have done the job. He managed his own money responsibly, as reported by all and agreed to by the mom. As it turned out, he had gotten black oil on a favorite embroidered towel she had when he was a little boy, and that was her basis for not trusting him.

She was not about to give up her position. She had a very difficult time in her life, and though she made agreements at mediation, she spent a lot of time afterwards, we were told, undermining that to which she had agreed.

She’s a good example of a person who wasn’t likely to succeed at growing old gracefully. She also wasted thousands of dollars on attorneys, courts and got minimal value out of mediation. However, most of the time, mediation does work. People make agreements, they figure the way out of the mess. And sometimes it doesn’t, about 20% of the time. These are some of the reasons why it sometimes doesn’t work.

To learn more about how to handle family disputes, see How to Handle Family Conflicts About Elders, Vol. 7, The Boomer’s Guide to Aging Parents, available at http://www.AgingParents.com/familyconflict.

Elder mediation has finally gotten a little respect. National Public Radio did a piece on it, and it seems that people are finally learning about this. What is it? Elder mediation is a method of resolving conflicts about elders, their families and those who are responsible for them. Mediation, in general, is vaguely familiar to many people, because sometimes, it’s in the news. A Federal mediator is on the scene to deal with the labor dispute about Federal employees. A local mediator is trying to negotiate a crisis in a city. But in everyday life, especially family life, it may not be a familiar way of trying to get through a dispute.

Mediation, in general is a very effective way to help people who are stuck in their differences, filled with emotional disagreement, or unable to think past their own opposing positions learn to find a way out. A mediator is a guide, a facilitator, and a neutral person regarding the dispute. The mediator usually sets up a meeting, in which the people who are in a conflict agree to come together to try to resolve the conflict. It can take place anywhere. It’s totally voluntary. Courts are not involved, and no record of what happens is kept, except for a written agreement or settlement, if one is reached. The best news is that mediation is effective in resolving disputes about 80-85% of the time, regardless of the kind of dispute. Those are much better odds than people have when they sue each other or go to court.

When it comes to families, their long patterns of relating to each other can get in the way of dealing with an aging parent, and many kinds of conflicts come up. We’re elder mediators at AgingParents.com. We see legal disputes about whether the elder is competent, fights about who should take care of Mom, siblings at war over how money should be spent, and many other family fights. We’ll share some of what we do in this blog. We hope to generate more interest in using elder mediation to break through the logjam families get into when they get stuck in conflict, creating such stress for everyone. We’re in the stress-relief business!

Tell us about the family disputes or other conflicts that are affecting you.
Carolyn Rosenblatt, R.N., B.S.N., Attorney, Mediator, AgingParents.com.