How well do family members know each other?
How well do family members know each other?
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How well do family members know each other?
One would think that family members know each other best for they live together day and night; parents remember their children’s incidents, their little habits and tics, their laughter and tears their first everything. Brothers and sisters sometimes know one another’s secrets, they often share rooms while growing up, they rebel together against their parents… or so is commonly thought of a family. However, do parents really “know” their children as they like to pretend? Do brothers and sisters also know each other as much as they would like to think they do? Not being a question that most people would ask themselves, family relationships mostly come down to one very simple question: How well do family members know each other? Most people do not even think about that matter for it does not cross their minds to wonder whether or not they know their own families. Yet knowing ones family members goes beyond the simple facts of knowing whether blue or purple is one’s child’s favorite color or knowing whether or not one’s sibling ever broke his/her arm.
Knowing ones family goes beyond the actual meaning of the word; knowing one’s family requires understanding one’s family. As Alfred Adler explains in his Understanding Human Nature, a lack of understanding results to difficulties and thus our actions towards people and situations are influenced by our understandings of them. This understanding of people is the basis of social relationship; so like any other relationship, good relationships among family members can only be achieved if family members have mutual understandings of one another. This mutual understanding, however, is rarely fully reached for people grow up to be who they are based on many internal and external factors that are always different from one person to another. Who one grows up to be is a result of the many experiences that one faces as well as the many biological and inherent factors that one acquires at birth. Further, Adler believes that the traits from one’s adult life are projections from past experiences; thus everyone perceives the world differently than any other person for no two people ever have identical experiences and even if they did, they would always perceive the same experiences in different ways. Therefore, in some way people always stay somehow egocentric in their perceptions for they do not always try to understand others perceptions.
Based on that people in general do not understand fully one another, it could be said that even though families tend to “know” each other in the basic sense, they do not always “know” one another in the deeper meaning of understanding one another and their different perspectives. Parents believe that they know their children because they are their parents and brothers and sisters believe that they know each other because they are siblings. More often than not, the idea of knowing one another is an illusion as people never really try to understand each other; yet people never really try to make other s understand them either so it is a continuous circle between one another. When conflict arises between parents and children, each side tend to get angry for they do not understand the other side, yet most of the time neither side tries to either understand the other side or even explain their perspectives so that a common understand could be reached. As a result of this, family members remain constantly ignorant of others. They would rather live in their understanding rather than in the true understanding of each other. This is however mainly unconscious behavior for people might think that they are trying to understand but are really just understanding through their perspectives instead of others perspectives. Thus this is the same as not understanding one another at all.
So how well do family members know each other? No specific answer can really be given for it all depends on the families and whether they are willing or not to admit that there is more to just knowing one’s family. A person’s mind is too complex to ever truly understand everything that forms a person’s perspectives as that person might not truly know why s/he perceives the world the way s/he does.
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The above essay was written by a college student and merely states opinions of a college student. However, if you feel strong about responding to the opinions stated, please write to articles@directorym.com and express your concerns.
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