Within The Family There Is No Need For Heroics
Question: As a specialist in personal coaching, I can attest that over fifty percent of the people come to courses specifically because they have difficulties in building connections as couples.
This is a very painful and difficult topic. People don’t understand how to build and maintain the most important connection in their lives. Sometimes they are in despair and throw up their hands, but deep within their hearts in spite of it all they yearn for this closeness, even though they don’t know how to build it….
Answer: First of all we must understand that we constantly pass through a series of changes. It is impossible to compare modern couples and old-fashioned couples who lived a half-century of a century earlier, and even more so those who lived even before this. People communicated much more easily then; they married fellow villagers, they knew all the families, were familiar with their characteristics, culture, and education.
Therefore there were no surprises in marriage, even the future family menu was known from the start. People were more dependent upon each other; they required more mutual help. Due to a lack of time, people could not take care of themselves alone; they could not build their lives, run the household, cook, clean, do laundry, and so forth.
In short, a couple needed each other to survive. A person simply didn’t see a future without marriage and a healthy family. He could not even provide himself with necessities.
It was the same regarding children. In general, the entire society was built on clear patterns of family with three generations often living together. The young and the old depended upon each other, and in fact, they were an inseparable unit.
On the other hand, today, because of technological developments and global communication, everything has become mixed up and different. A person no longer needs a “second half”; he can easily be concerned only for himself and live alone. As a result of this, we don’t depend upon a partner anymore and already from the age of 11 to 12 children are waiting for the opportunity to escape from under the care of their parents. In addition, we don’t have time to devote enough attention to them, not to mention the fact that they are not involved in running the household as they were before.
Therefore, if in the past the couple supported a shared home together, today we don’t really have anything in common. The modern family is easily “broken” into two parts and each part can get by on its own. Modern laws contribute to this and public opinion doesn’t see anything wrong with the absence of a family. He has a job, a hobby, a life ambition that is primary in his eyes, and a host of temptations, against which the family seems like an unnecessary hindrance.
We see that people change spouses and build a number of families throughout their lives. Studies indicate that a modern person cannot remain within the framework of a family for more than ten or fifteen years. It is no wonder that today changing one’s family is just a matter of time.
And therefore the conditions for family life have changed drastically. But on the other hand, the concept of “family” still remains an inner demand (more pronounced in women and with men subconsciously). People want this, yet they don’t know how to manifest it. They have not been taught what a family is, how to build it, and what is possible to require from it. This is because it is talking about a complex partnership between a man and a woman in which children and parents from both sides also participate.
They don’t teach this in schools, and television shows and jokes are strewn everywhere, often creating a dismissive attitude. Everyone wants to look like a hero, and in our day a “hero” is someone who radiates indifference.
In the end, we don’t know what a family is. We have some kind of dream about this, but there are no true examples from life. When the young look at their parents, they don’t find anything particularly attractive in their shared life; they live in separate “niches,” barely intersect, and apparently they have difficulty finding the time to “create” it, and that is as far as their shared efforts go. Where is the family household? Where is there something in common, mutual support that obliges them to work in order to survive and to continue living together? There is no mutual commitment between them.
Industry and technology, life on the Internet, all these have expanded the borders for us. In the past people lived in the framework of family and work; they were strongly linked by the shared management of the household economy, but suddenly the wide world now comes directly into our homes and we have moved to “vague,” unclear relationships.
It turns out that if people think about family today, they have no education and no example in front of them. They need to clarify anew what a true family is for themselves. So a person will change so that he can gain enough from building family life, we must convey this through special practical courses based upon psychology and encompassing every variety of familial relationship. Nothing can be done here without real educational resources.
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From Kab TV’s “A New Life” 6/09/2013
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