Tell a kid today we grew up without TV’s in our room…
As a family therapist I want to put a blog out there to help people identify a split in thinking before it happens. Divorce cases and family relationship issues are now back on the rise since a dip occurred after lockdown.
Once upon a time a family would spend time together in the living room and discuss their opinions about the same content. Cousins tend to live in close proximity to each other and catching up with people resulted in new findings because you had news feed of their lives. All of this meant people’s thinking was continuously matching your perception of them. Fair enough, conversations about mental health never used to happen but there was a closer sense of identifying when something is off about someone.
As things have changed and screen based influence has an overriding control over people’s thinking. Comments like ‘this is not the person I married’ or ‘something’s just changed about this person and I don’t know how to talk to them’ etc are flagging up more often. This is because the rate of change in how we are thinking is happening not on a yearly basis but on an hourly basis. Whereas 25 years ago, it was much slower.
Families that have the following two tendencies have a great relationship culture within their families:
- Freedom to speak their mind regularly on non-serious topics.
- Casual together-based activities e.g movie nights, outings and meals together.
If you’ve experienced split thinking between the family to a problematic extent then it’s a different process to clear it.
No family situation is the same but the causes tend to be the same for families that have had no threatening/drastic event take place but still found themselves disconnecting.
Happy to speak further deeppsyc (dot) com
