5 Ways To Keep The Peace At Family Functions

Posted by fxckfeelings on March 26, 2019

If, like our reader from earlier, the only thing more reliable than your parents fighting is how much pain it causes you, you can feel like it’s up to you alone to relieve everyone’s suffering. As many problems as their conflict may cause you, however, solving the problems that cause that conflict isn’t actually within your control. So instead of continuing to feel hurt and frustrated by endless parental arguments, here are five ways to figure out when your attempts at family peacekeeping are making the war worse, and what you can do instead.

1) Carefully Assess Their Compatibility

Pay attention to whether or not your parents function as a couple, ignoring their complaints. This doesn’t mean you should look for times and ways they get along, but to really investigate how and if they work together; if possible, determine whether they do or don’t share or interfere with one another’s spending on essentials like housing, food, travel, and taxes. Note also whether they travel or socialize together, act independently, or interfere with one another’s ability to do so. Conflict is always a part of relationships, but so is cooperation; without that, you’ve got real trouble.

2) Gather Whether Advice Gets Through

You may have spent years trying to get through to your parents, but odds are you’ve never really paid attention to whether any of your pleas or guidance has actually gotten through. So take stock of whether either of your parents really seems to listen to your advice or ever really seems to take it. Either way, ask yourself how they manage to cope when you’re not available and whether either is really helpless or at risk of harm when you’re not around. Of course, if you believe either is in danger of being harmed, you should get professional advice and consider reporting abuse. In all likelihood, however, each has found good ways to manage conflict when they’re without you but, when they have your ear/a captive audience, they take the opportunity to stress their unhappiness.

3) Recognize Responsibility

Notice how much accountability each parent takes for dealing with what he or she doesn’t like vs. just complaining about it. Notice whether their complaints just put responsibility on you as the listener and/or on their partner for abusing them, rather than either accepting some responsibility for what bothers them or for the fact that no one’s really to blame. After all, it’s quite likely that whatever’s causing the conflict between your parents—like a bad habit or irksome personality trait—isn’t going to change. So if neither parent can either own their faults or resign themselves to them, then they’re never going to stop bickering, either.

4) Generate A Realistic Goal

Don’t assume that your objective is to help them get along better or ease their pain, because, as the previous steps should reveal, that’s completely outside of your control. It’s natural, of course, to want to find a way to make your parents listen to you, heed your advice, or accept each other’s faults, but since doing so would require magic or mind control, it’s time to reassess your endgame. Instead, try to protect yourself from their conflict while encouraging each of them to develop his and her own way of managing their feelings that doesn’t require raised voices, especially with you as the audience.

5) Assemble an Exit Strategy

Once you’ve realized your goal isn’t to keep the peace but encourage them to keep quiet, prepare a statement asserting this truth and rejecting personal responsibility, saying, in effect, that you wish you could help them, but their unhappiness together is beyond everyone’s control, so you think it’s better not to talk about it and instead think about ways to make life better. Then prepare to be tested and to follow through on your exit plan, without any appearance of hesitation or guilt, if they misbehave. Just because they’re constantly in conflict doesn’t mean you should be about the smart decisions you’ve made.