Sometimes We Are The Problem

Family Values

While growing up, every human being passes through many forms of socialization, ranging from the family to their places of religious worship, school, etc.

The earliest socialization period, which usually starts from the immediate family (mustn't be with mom and dad), tends to mould the child the most. I mean whatever beliefs and perceptions we hold in life are usually learnt in our immediate family.

As we grow older with these values, beliefs and perceptions, they tend to guide our actions and inactions in life.

The tricky thing about these first values we have learnt from our family is, much like religious doctrines, they needn't be generally acceptable to everybody or even make sense, but because we have been taught to accept them, we see them as the perfect way of life and we uphold them like soldiers.

Some of these values I write of arent necessarily taught as you may have in your conventional school settings. We see how mum relates with dad and vice versa and we take mental notes. We see how our parents relate with our other siblings and how our siblings respond, we take note of these actions and inactions, archive and internalize them.

Another tricky thing about this stage of socialization is, something has to fill the void of this level in a child's life. Whether the parents do it, or aunts or uncles, or older siblings or school...somebody or something is certainly going to do it.

And whatever fills this level with its "truth" in a child's life, is what would guide that child into adulthood. In a familiar where everybody is thrown big parties on their birthdays grow to attach great values to such days, they almost always remember their relations birthdays because birthdays are special days in such families.

In families where domestic abuse happens between parents, the kids are bound to internalize and re-enact them later in life, not because they think it's right or wrong but because they have been taught directly or indirectly that physical(sometimes emotional) is the way to respond to some situations.

When kids who have been taught these family values finally step out of the family into the world, with their life's "manual" in hand, they reproduce all which they have learnt in their families.

Into The Society

Now, here is where it all gets interesting. The complexity of interpersonal relationships is made so because people from these many different family backgrounds and setups have converged and are living life how they know best.

When conflicts arise, probably born out of a clash between all these varying individuals traits, because we have been raised to behave in a certain way and we are sure there is nothing wrong with behaving that way, we usually think we are totally innocent of those conflicts.

We go about pointing fingers at the rest of the group when the problem might just lie with us.

Take for instance, people who have been taught (indirectly) to internalize their distaste in other people's actions instead of expressing them openly and immediately are bound to cause further frictions with their sour demeanour within any group they find themselves in.

For the fact that they refuse to point and kill a particular problem, it lingers in their hearts and festers. That problem might not be all that serious, but it snowballs into something bigger and kills the energy in the environment because of how they have handled it.

While the person in question all the while acts like the victim, he is actually the reason there is so much shit all over the wall.

It is easy to think that other people are the problem when there is conflict within a group because from where we stand, our shit really don't stink but when we do some deep reflection, that's if we don't let our stubbornness get in the way of personal truth, we would see that we have played a good part in creating the problem and a great part in making it bigger.