In relationships and families, difference is both a source of strife and our emotional lifeblood.

Sometimes it is important to resolve difference and sometimes it is important to accept difference as a fact of life that cannot be resolved.

The resolution of difference may not be everything it is made out to be.

Negotiation and acceptance may be as significant as resolution. Maybe the secret to resolution is in the acceptance of difference.

Certainly the acceptance of difference and the acceptance of dispute is one of the keys parents use in managing some of the difficulties ordinarily associated with adolescence.

In relationships and families, dispute is preferable to indifference. That is, if the dispute is not violent.

In many instances, the� dispute over difference actually connects the people concerned. It doesn’t always disconnect in the way many people fear.� The� dispute doesn’t always divide people.

Perhaps difference needs to be more celebrated.

Indifference may in fact be the problem. Indifference is associated with disconnection and alienation.

The last thing most parents want is for their adolescent son or daughter to become indifferent to them and the family. Perhaps parents need to learn how to dispute more carefully, cunningly and� intelligently so that they can use difference and disputation as a form of genuine connection and to ward of the threat of indifference.

There are predators in this world who can ’smell’ the aroma of indifference on a young person. Indifference is the void into which these predators� can sing a new, more attractive and dangerous song of life and death.

It takes two to make it work and one to stuff it up!

It takes two people to make a committed couple relationship or marriage successful!

It takes just one person, acting all alone,� to make a good and successful� relationship fail!

It is difficult to see how one person alone can make a couple relationship or marriage work. Perhaps one partner’s relentless accommodation and selflessness in putting the other partner’s requirements forever ahead of their own could conceivably make a relationship survive, but I doubt it.� I don’t imagine there are too many people left in the western world who now accept that kind of Neanderthal survival as their definition of a successful relationship. Maybe there� are a few crazed rampant right fundamentalists in the intellectual and social backblocks who still believe in this I suppose!

What I do know is that most of us know how to stuff up a perfectly good relationship� and most of us know how to do it without any assistance from anyone else. What’s even more disconcerting is that most of us, in perfectly good and successful relationships, have made a reasonable tilt at stuffing things up without any consultation with our partner at all. It’s true and we did this without even thinking twice about it. Yes! “Look Mum, no hands!”

The common idea peddled by the marriage counselling and therapy industry� throughout the western world, for the last one hundred years or so, is that it takes two people, acting in some kind of concert, to produce a relationship or marriage difficulty. This is� patent nonsense! This idea does my own unique ability to screw things up, all by myself, a complete and total disservice. I need no help in this and neither do you!

I have at my disposal a whole repertoire of ways to stuff things up. I have my whole family history to call on. That’s why it’s great having a wild and vast extended family as I have. They are an endless source of fascination and inspiration in ways to� achieve this. Perhaps stuffing things up has genetic characteristics. Perhaps it is imprinted on our DNA!

Go on, go to the bathroom and have a long hard look at yourself in the� mirror, for� maybe ten long minutes, and contemplate your own personal power and one off brand of stupidity in this regard. That’s a good place to start. As you gaze into the depths of yourself, just for� one moment reflect upon the fact that your partner has made the most amazing� decision to live with this. Get grateful!

“You know I’m right”

Perhaps a useful task for most people in a good and successful relationship would be to make a full inventory of the ways in which they alone, without the collaboration of their partner, could totally wreck this perfectly good and successful relationship over the next twelve months. Make the list and put these ideas and practices in rank order of preference! I’m sure you could come up with all kinds of unique ways to achieve this ignoble end.

Post your list to this site and lets see what we get.

Remember, you have to be in a perfectly good and successful relationship to participate in this exercise. Experienced wrecking ball experts stand aside! Your turn will come later. When we need your advice we will certainly call for it.

Please leave this to those who want to explore their outer edges, their own unique capacity to stuff things up; those who haven’t done so yet and those who may just be contemplating it without really knowing it.

And one more thing. Please don’t fake it, don’t cross dress� this as your partner’s repertoire, and no photographs or video clips!

When a person, a couple, a family, a father and son, a mother and daughter, a parent, any relationship at all, decide to change ’something’, the ’something’ they usually try to change is too big or imposing. That ’something’ is often a ’something’ that won’t easily give way to a ’something else’, it won’t budge or shift.

That is a problem!

When that ’something’ won’t budge most people try harder and harder to make that ’something’ change and when it still doesn’t change they become frustrated, blame others, get depressed, analyse the problem more, yell at it, blame themselves and� abandon hope.

Not a good idea!

What should a person or a relationship do under these circumstances?

Try changing something else! Make a small change to something else in your relationship or life. Make such a small change to something you hardly even notice the change happening. Allow the change to sneak up on you. Trick yourself into change.

A small change generates a ripple that can influence other parts of a person’s life or relationship.�

Several small changes can make it difficult for a bigger problem to remain immune to influence.

Most of these things take time.

In our take away world of instant solutions, ’small change’ does not offer instant gratification, but it may be worth a try.

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So change happens! Change happens naturally in the course of an ordinary life and relationships.

Change also happens through the decisions and choices individuals, couples and families make. These decisions and choices usually require a person or a relationship to actively do something different to bring about change. What is that ’something different’?

Broadly there are two ways a person or a relationship can do something different.

The first and most common way is to actively and positively do something different by doing something new, such as ‘going to the gym’, ‘taking a daily walk together’, ‘allocating time to talk’, ‘noticing small changes in the other person’, ‘complimenting that person’, etc. There is a large body of literature, both academic and popular, that directly addresses what people should do with their lives in this regard. It makes sense!

The second way is for the individual person or the relationship to cease doing something that they are already doing such as ‘yelling’, ’swearing’, ‘interrupting’ etc. This is less common except in its more gross forms such as dieting and these still usually require the person or relationship to actively do something.

Determining ‘what not to do’, what to cease, is as difficult as determining ‘what to do.’ It may appear self evident but rarely is.

In counselling a chronically obese man a therapist asked the man to consider ceasing doing something that he was already doing, something that may make a very small difference but not a large difference. The man immediately said that he should cease eating certain fat laden foods. The therapist disagreed. Too big a change! How about something smaller, less significant to you, something you would hardly notice?� Eventually after an intense period of negotiation, the man and the therapist agreed that, for the next two weeks, the man would cease staying up late at night, he was a ‘night owl,’ that he would go to bed earlier in the evening, at 11:00 pm instead of midnight or later.

The man did this and noticed that he felt more rested in the morning and more energetic. The man reported that feeling better in the morning altered his breakfast routine. He appeared to consume less, ate different food most mornings and on a couple of occasions spontaneously did a little exercise. This change was mildly encouraged and coupled with another more profound change. The man was then asked to consider ceasing weighing himself. He reluctantly agreed to this but did it. This was difficult. After some time the man appeared to be more energetic and less preoccupied with his weight. The man began to notice minute changes in his body shape, changes other people did not appear to notice.� He was tempted to record these changes but after some thought decided against it. Instead, the man decided to walk up the stairs at work rather than take the elevator. Eventually the man gave up dieting. He maintained a regular sleep pattern, did more exercise, changed his eating habits and alcohol consumption, and lost most of the weight he had wanted to lose for as many years as he could remember. Of more significance to the man was the fact that his body shape changed and other people began to notice this.

The man was pleased!

It took a while, two years all up, before the man and the therapist could really begin to feel comfortable that they were on the right track. The man did not create a group for formerly obese people and� he did not take up marathon running! When asked about his weight loss by others wanting to follow his programme, the man told these curious people that he did not have a programme. He usually advised these people to get an early night, to sleep on the problem, and then he would change the topic of conversation away from himself.

A small change can lead to a major change if it is only given a reasonable chance to complete the job it started.

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A 51 year-old man who lived alone consulted a therapist about his 26 year-old alcoholic son. The man’s wife, the young man’s mother,� had died some years earlier.

“What can I do to help him?”� The man asked the therapist.

After a careful process of enquiry and discussion the therapist suggested to the man that he (the man) give up alcohol until his son had successfully addressed his own alcohol problem.

The therapist suggested to the man that it would be prudent not to tell his son about this decision to give up alcohol, but to let him discover this for himself through the ordinary passage of time. He also told the man to stay close to his son and to immediately cease all attempts to influence and change his him.

“What do I say when my son finds out?”

The therapist wrote a note for the man to be carried on him at all times. The man was to read the note every day, as a form of meditation, and then he was to read it to his son when� the young man discovered his father’s decision to give up alcohol…BUT…the note was only to be read to his son if it was in fact ‘true’ for the man.

The man followed the therapist’s advice. It wasn’t easy. He gave up alcohol for an indefinite period of time. He read the note to himself every morning and it remained as true for him each morning as it was the morning before. He gave up trying to persuade his son to stop drinking alcohol. This was very hard indeed, much harder than giving up alcohol, requiring great self discipline on the part of the man. Self discipline had not been the man’s strong point through the passage of his younger life.

The man watched in silent anguish as his son faltered and his heart broke open even further than he ever imagined any heart could.

Time passed as it does. The young man eventually found out about his father’s decision to give up alcohol. They were having dinner together at the man’s home. When he questioned his father about this, the man opened his wallet, carefully took out a now very well thumbed note, and read slowly and carefully the following to his son.

“Allow me to read something to you. I am your father and I speak to you now with the heart of a father.”

The young man winced, looked down and away, waiting for the next lecture. His father continued.

“You are my son. You are now a man. I love you with all my heart. My heart hurts for you and my heart breaks for you when I see you drinking the way you do. I know that there is nothing I can do to change you, there is nothing I can do to influence you, and there is nothing I can do to help you make the decision that you will inevitably have to make in the years that lay ahead. I know you will make the decision you have to make. All I can do as your father is to wait, to remain as still as a stone, to remain as close to you as your mother would have wanted me to, and to continue to love you as I do. Because there is nothing I can do for you I have decided that, as a man, I must do something for myself to ease my way through this pain.� So my mind is made up, I have decided that I will not drink alcohol again until you have successfully dealt with your problem with alcohol. There is nothing more for me to do. I love you.”

The lecture the son was expecting never happened. The young man was strangely moved by his father’s words and tears welled in his eyes. The man remained still and said nothing in response to his son’s distress. The son cross-questioned his father as a way of relieving his discomfort. The man told his son that he had been so worried about him that he had been to see a therapist who had given him some helpful advice and he was now following that advice, absolutely� to the letter.

“Could I have that piece of paper you have just read from?”

“No!” Said the man “I need to keep the note because I read it to myself every morning as my meditation to you. I am more than happy to copy it for you.”

Some time passed and nothing really changed.

One day, many months later, for no apparent reason, and when this moment had appeared to be long forgotten by both father and son, the young man asked his father for the name of the therapist.

The son went to see the therapist and showed him his now well thumbed copy of the note and asked him if he had anything to do with the writing of this note.

“Yes, it is true. I hope I helped your father by writing this.”

The young man began to address his alcohol problem with the therapist. The father remained close and still. Eventually, after a long and tortuous struggle, with many false starts, the son was successful.

Some years later, after he had taken up a new form of daily meditation, the man recommenced drinking alcohol in great moderation. The son was pleased that his father could drink alcohol again.

The man never attempted to influence his son again. The young man still does not drink alcohol.

Change happens naturally in the ordinary course of everyday life. Change is an integral part of� every persons physical, relational� and psychological development.

Relationships also transform with the passage of time and the ordinary press of daily events. Individuals, relationships and families all have their own developmental cycle.

Change is contained and constrained.� Change is not unlimited. Humans are social beings. We are designed to change throughout the lifecycle in a way that complements our social environment. Change is constrained by that social environment.

That does not mean that the social environment is always right but it is true that the social environment is always there for all of us. It is there in fact, in our heads and usually both.

The social environment is powerfully present and represented in each persons life through the ‘family’,� the world that a person is born into, the world that a person is attached to, and the world that claims that person as their own.

What constitutes ‘family’ for one person may be quite different to ‘family’ for another person. Culture has a significant bearing on the composition of ‘family’ for each person.

Change and constraint go together. Individual change and relationship change complement each other. Too much change is difficult for a person, a relationship and a family. Too much constraint is difficult for a person, a relationship and a family.

Difficulties, problems and symptoms often appear in individuals when personal, relationship and family change is too slow, too fast, out of� sequence or out of� its socially and culturally ordained order.