Family Conflict Analysis

Meet my family: my dad, mom, half-sister, brother-in-law, half-brother, sister-in-law, niece, future nephew-in-law, great nephew, nephew, niece, step-nephew, and step-niece – Steve, Kathy, Karen, Frank, Brian, D’Anna, Jailen, Travis, Carson, Wyatt, Alyvia, Kolten, and Aleynah. My mom and dad have been married to each other for twenty-five years. My mom was married previously and had two children, Karen and Brian. My sister, Karen, had Jailen at the young age of eighteen before getting married to Frank and having a son, Wyatt. Jailen repeated the process of having a child, Carson, at age eighteen, with her now fiancé, Travis. My brother, Brian, had a daughter, Alyvia, before getting married to D’Anna. She has two children, Kolten and Aleynah, from her first marriage. My dad is one of ten children; one was killed in a motor vehicle accident in 1987 and the rest are still living. My mom is one of five children; all are still living, but most are in conflict with each other most of the time. This analysis …show more content…
My family has a notorious history of having conflict; most long-standing is the conflict between my mom and her four siblings. To understand my family-of-origin’s conflicts, it is important to understand the basic process of conflict. Galvin, Braithwaite, and Bylund (2016) define conflict with four pieces: expressed struggle, interdependent parties, perceptions, and goals and scarce resources (p. 211). Conflicts must be expressed and all parties must know about them. Conflicts must have interdependent parties, where outcomes affect other members in the system. Each party may have a perception about something, that may cause the conflict, or due to a difference in values, a conflict may arise. Each member in a system may have different goals for the family or is trying to have control of scarce resources – space, attention, money, or time – may cause conflicts (Galvin, Braithwaite, & Bylund, 2016, p.