Stop Arguing and Start Understanding: Nine Steps to Solving Family Conflicts

By David C Hall MD

In "Stop Arguing and Start Understanding: Nine Steps to Solving Family Conflicts," discover a transformative guide that paves the way to harmonious relationships within the family unit. This book offers a practical roadmap for navigating the tumultuous waters of family dynamics, presenting a comprehensive framework to replace heated arguments with compassionate understanding.

Through insightful anecdotes and proven strategies, this book equips readers with essential tools to defuse tension, communicate effectively, and resolve conflicts in ways that foster empathy and respect. Each of the nine steps is meticulously designed to unravel the knots of disagreement and reveal pathways to mutual understanding.

With relatable scenarios and actionable advice, this book empowers individuals to break the cycle of repetitive arguments and embrace a new approach to conflict resolution. "Stop Arguing and Start Understanding" is an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to build stronger, more cohesive family bonds while fostering an environment of open dialogue and genuine connection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Olympia Book Writing
• Release date: Sep 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223220084

David C Hall MD

An experienced child psychiatrist shows parents how to end conflicts in their families. He inspires parents with real-life examples that change the way parents think about and solve family problems, and teaches better ways to communicate, recognize roots of trouble, negotiate, generate support, and reach for outside help with a note to outside helpers. In response to growing cultural divisiveness, he goes on in this Second Edition to invite families to bring what they've learned at home to help community-based initiatives heal social and cultural wounds. Includes a comprehensive appendix with numerous helpful resources.

Book preview

Foreword

Introduction

Step 1 Accept Responsibility:

Lead Your Family’s Journey to Health

1 Getting Started

2 You Are Responsible (but Not to Blame)

for Your Family’s Suffering

Step 2 Identify the Roots of Your Family’s Conflicts

3 Individual Temperament

4 Mental Disorders

5 Emotional Legacies, or Ghosts.

6 How to Recognize Your Ghosts

7. Current Culture

Step 3 Put Your Own Life in Order First

8 Heal Thyself

9 Five Basic Skills of Good Parenting

10 Reaching Your Goals

Step 4 Create the Family Culture You Want

11 Gentleness and Tenacity

12 Encouraging Humor

13 Recruiting Allies

14 Treasuring Your Children

15 Sharing Your Stories, Sharing Yourself

16 Teaching Discipline—Building Self-Esteem

17 Privacy—We All Need It

18 Inspiring Your Children’s Imaginations and Reach

19 Expecting Excellence and Appreciating What You Get

Step 5 Ask for Help

20 What’s Missing

21 Seeking Help

Step 6 Find Friends for Yourself and Your Family

22 The Need for Friends

23 Caring Together

Step 7 Pursue Spiritual Health

24 Belonging

Step 8 Refuse to Give Up

25 What to Do When Resistance Persists

Step 9 Reaching Beyond Your Family

26 Culture 2023 — the Society We Live In

27 Global warming

Post Script for Outside Helpers on Treating Trauma

Appendix A Comments on Parenting Questionnaire

Appendix B More on mental disorders — Finding help

Appendix C Mental Health Resources

Appendix D Recommended Readings

Appendix E Gravest threats to human health

Appendix F Coping with Controlling or Abusive Partner

Appendix G Searching for your next step: How to thrive through healthy advocacy

Appendix H. A cultural crime: Imprisonment in America

Index

Afterword for parents: My wish for your journey

About the Author

Endnotes

Dedication

To two incomparable mentors and apostles

for healthy families:

Eyad el Sarraj, MD1

Michael Rothenberg, MD2

To my colleagues and patients for forty years of shared

creative problem solving

and

My companions and readers in activist advocacy

Acknowledgments

For the two decades leading to the First Edition, my patients and I have battled their legacies of violence and mental disorders. We worked steadfastly to reclaim their right to live with hope, respect, kindness, and peace.

I remain grateful to the people who waded through more than twenty drafts of the First Edition. They added wisdom, inspiration, friendship, and love—Paul Herstein, Roy and Leigh Farrell, Jon Hall, Judy Lipton, Cindy Russell, Deborah Hall, and my beloved soulmate, the Rev. Anne Hall.

My editor with the First Edition, Sharon Goldinger, taught me to write for a general audience. Her colleagues at People Speak gave me invaluable guidance in organizing my passion for helping troubled families and writing a good book. We won a new publisher's Ben Franklin Gold Award for best first book non-fiction.

Writing the revisions and additions for this second edition has been a solitary endeavor, using memory to tell the stories from the second half of my career.

Iris Graville gave valuable early feedback on the expanded scope of this edition. Anne has encouraged my writing with reliably helpful feedback throughout both editions.

Thank you, John Kydd, for your introduction.

FOREWORD to the First Edition (2001)

by John Kydd, MSW, JD

DEALING WITH FAMILIES in conflict is like passing through a jungle. There are no clear paths, just a floor of surprises. Each step must be taken cautiously; fear and danger lurk in every shadow. Most people hurt as children do not want to re-enter the jungle of their past.

Dr. Albert Schweitzer left his lucrative European medical practice to work in the African wilderness. He found the wilderness to be a place of great healing. Dr. David Hall, a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Washington Medical School, could easily have had a lucrative and comfortable practice anywhere he chose. Instead, he decided to work with the most challenging cases where there was the slightest hope. He has worked with victims of severe child abuse and neglect for decades. There are no quick fixes or miracle drugs for these cases.

Few clinicians have the skill and compassion to help their clients dig deep enough to heal such wounds. David Hall is one of them. The tools he has found for healing the most profound emotional injuries are very effective for family problems.

David Hall’s book is essential for what it is and is not. It will not mislead you with trendy labels or quick fixes that, like plastic wrap, cover problems but do little to heal them.

This book does not trumpet any shortcuts were altering one part of your life will somehow fix the rest. It also does not make problems so technical that nothing can be done without therapy. It takes the difficult path of addressing you as a whole person with a unique perspective.

Few clinicians are sufficiently skilled to help family members recover from the worst injuries. And only some of them can distill what they do and write about it in an accessible manner.

David Hall has done this and more: he provides a set of tools born of twenty years of medical practice that extends far beyond psychiatry. Many books push beleaguered parents to buy into new techniques when the parents barely have enough energy to keep going. This book does just the opposite: it empowers by bringing greater tenacity and compassion to what you are doing before considering different ways of parenting. The gentle wisdom flowing through these chapters makes rereading as beneficial as the first reading.

In both layout and content, this book is a wise friend who listens without lecturing, supports without judgment, and honors your commitment to parenting.

Good books on parenting help you see your problems in a new way, while great books help you see yourself in a new way. Dr. Albert Schweitzer wrote, You will never find true happiness until you determine how you will serve. David Hall has been serving parents and families for over thirty

years. His work helps us find our unique path through the jungle of doubt and frustration into the happiness of knowing that we truly served our children, our communities, and ourselves.

John Kydd, MSW, JD

Past President

Association of Family and Conciliation Courts

Introduction

This 2023 Edition of Stop Arguing and Start Understanding: Nine Steps to Solving Family Conflicts is leaner and more challenging than the First Edition. This 2nd Edition adds two new sections inspired by a growing urgency for citizen action to reverse dangerously unhealthy trends in national and global politics.

I invite families who have benefited from the Eight Steps to explore outside the comfort of their immediate family for a community dedicated to helping all families be safer and healthier.

Post Script for Outside Helpers is for therapists and others, offering ways that helpers outside the family system— therapists, teachers, public servants, and friends—can better reach and teach difficult children and their families.

This 2nd Edition strives to reach families in pain by offering inspiration, information, and ideas for change. Engage the Eight Steps, then go beyond your family for a community you admire that speaks to your values and your dreams for a better world.

The Eight Steps offer guidance for your family's ultimate journey to health. They will help you change how you think about your family problems, show you where you can find the help and strength you need, and inspire you to keep going for as long as possible, keeping your family safe and loving.

You either have the energy to heal your family or are too stressed, depressed, or overwhelmed. If you fall into the latter, check out Chapter 4 to understand what's got a grip on you and how to get good help.

These updated Eight Steps will guide you to refocus your energy on actions that create hope and success rather than wasting your potential on dead-end arguments and other contests of will.

Bring happiness, love, and understanding to your family with a workable plan and the tenacity to see it through.

Six principles for healing your family:

Every person is precious and deserves a healthy family.

Anyone can change for the better.

One determined family member, especially a parent, can make a difference.

Good information gives us better choices.

Life gets better as we learn to work together.

What helps us grow spiritually helps the family find fulfillment and peace.

Fortunately, families don't get into serious trouble whenever something goes wrong. We get into serious trouble when we can't break the habit of hurting each other.

There are more reasons than rainy days in Seattle why people and families commit to hurting each other. I group

these reasons under four headings: individual temperament, mental disorders, family legacies, and cultural environment.

Temperament is the first category of potential trouble in an individual. From birth, we develop our patterns of relating. Mothers often know a child’s temperament while the baby is still in the womb. Right from the start, some children are mellow, anxious, or easily frustrated as part of who they are. This is nobody's fault, but it makes parenting more complicated especially when family temperaments clash. The mother’s mental health through her pregnancy and how caregivers react can reinforce or amplify the baby’s temperament.

Mental disorders like depression, anxiety, or substance abuse introduce various challenges. We will visit these frequently. For the more severe forms of these conditions, you will benefit from specialized help.

Family legacies, our early childhood experiences that shape how we think and feel in familiar settings, have lasting effects on how we see ourselves and relate to others. If our parents routinely yelled at us, their legacy to us is an urge to yell at our children. If our parents are always calm and loving, then quiet and loving responses to our children may surface automatically. We learn how to parent from our parents, and they from theirs, for better and worse.

The cultural environment is the ocean we all swim in. It generates an uneven current of support and distress. Family problems can arise regardless of a family's financial means,

starting with our culture's noisy and materialistic ways of undermining loving and respectful relationships.

Based on my many encounters with families in crisis, we follow three families throughout the book to illustrate how families get into trouble and how they can get out.

The McGraths struggle with family legacies of alcohol abuse,

Margaret Hazen tries hard to be a good mother but is hindered by a severe mental disorder, and

The Durrens show that even healthy families get into trouble sometimes.

As you meet these families, notice how the parents contribute to the problems their children act out and how they learn to change and heal. Notice that children frequently offer helpful new perspectives on their family’s distress.

If you see the family conflict through your child’s eyes, you will realize how easily parents start or fuel fights without consciously meaning to do so.

Examples of family problems shared here are hopefully more severe than you are experiencing. If not, be sure to stay with me. Learn from the starker examples so that the subtler ones in your family become easier to see.

Remember that these problems may be those of your neighbors or coworkers or the families of your children's friends. There is a world of hurt hiding behind designer doors

and luxury cars, as well as in workaday bungalows and the chaos of poverty.

Your broken family will mend when you develop a plan and carry it out faithfully. But don't be fooled—you may have to work hard to create and sustain an atmosphere of happiness, love, and understanding in your family. I hope to provide you with encouragement, inspiration, and direction to keep you on track.

How to use this book

This book is an introductory guide to solving complex family problems. The first eight steps are focused on overwhelmed parents who need inspiration and ideas before they can organize a campaign for positive family change. Real change in a family starts when one person, usually a parent, says, Enough!

Step 1 is about accepting responsibility. Step 2 helps you to identify the roots of your family’s conflicts and is an introductory course on how families get into trouble. Step 3 is about getting ready for the work you choose to undertake by first putting your life in order. Step 4 discusses basic good parenting strategies and ways to overhaul a chronically tense or hurtful family environment. Step 5 explores when and where to seek help. Step 6 presents essential information and encouragement to build your social support network, without which your family problems will become bigger and more

difficult. Step 7 explores ways to find meaning and inspiration in the world immediately around you so you have the energy to create the changes you want. Step 8 provides more help with negotiating difficult relationships and an inspirational story. Seven appendices provide information for further study, special help, and new ways to reach outside your family to expand the space for families to live healthy lives.

The new 9th Step invites you to take a risk — Reaching Beyond Your Own Family: Activism as a Way to Thrive.

Peruse the entire book, then go back and study the parts that resonate with your concerns. Not every strategy or solution will fit your unique situation. Look for answers to your questions, new ideas, and new sources of energy to tackle the troubles you face. Be gentle with yourself. Remember that nothing about good parenting is simple or easy. The book will help you develop effective ways to win cooperation from family members so you can heal old wounds and resolve the problems you inherited from your family and community.

Families facing any of the more serious difficulties addressed in this book may not realize that good help is available. You may need extended family, friends, teachers, pastors, family physicians, therapists, or others to offer hope and convince you that change is possible. And please recommend this book to another hurting family.

Different cultures raise healthy children differently. I welcome input to help translate these essential truths about

loving and respectful parenting into other cultural contexts. Email me at [e-mail].

A note of caution

As hard as I worked to make family healing easier for you, doing the work in your family will be up to you. No one else knows your family as well as you do, so be cautious about advice from others, even from me.

Listen and learn, then be sure you choose what to try and decide what works and what does not. When you decide what to do, you learn what works in your family and what doesn't and build your confidence.

This or any other book is no substitute for carefully evaluating situations where the problems just won't go away. Don't be afraid to seek outside help if you need it.

Take the following quiz to learn how far you have come to healthy parenting.

My responses to the parenting questionnaire are shared in Appendix A. If you get through Step 8 and are inspired to do so, dive into Step 9. There is joy in finding like-minded companions on the road to redeeming our troubled world.

Parenting Questionnaire

Circle the question numbers to which you would say YES, X for NO.

I want to be a good parent.

I love my children no matter how badly they misbehave.

I feel out of control with my children too much of the time.

My parents gave me good models for how to be a good parent.

My ideas for dealing with trouble usually help improve the situation.

I can enjoy rebellious children.

I can be firm with my children when necessary.

I can often redirect my children from their misbehavior.

I can get my family to solve problems together.

My natural tendency is to give my child a second chance.

My children can make me laugh.

Sometimes, I dread being with one or more of my children.

I have physically or mentally injured one of my children.

I can predict when trouble will likely erupt in my family.

My partner and I work well together in raising our children.

There are alcoholics in my family.

Serious depression or anxiety problems run in my family.

I had some very rough times with my parents.

Someone in my own family was sexually or physically abused.

I would seek professional help if my family needed it.

My parents encourage my efforts to be a good parent.

I have a supportive extended family available to help me.

I have supportive friends who sometimes join in my family activities.

I have meaningful friends and activities separate from my family.

I belong to a community of people where I feel safe and accepted.

My family belongs to a community of faith or mutual support.

I notice beauty when I encounter it.

I find life miraculous at times.

I can raise healthy children.

I believe I am a good parent.

See Appendix A for Dr. Hall’s comments on these questions.

Step 1

––––––––

ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY

TO LEAD YOUR FAMILY"S

JOURNEY TO HEALTH

––––––––

Family healing starts when one in the family

sees the need for change and commits to

finding and pursuing healthy solutions.

WHERE DOES AN overwhelmed or highly stressed parent or family member begin? Your invitation is right here, right now.

Taking responsibility for healing your family may well start with you feeling bewildered and isolated. That's where this book comes in.

Parenting is difficult—there is nothing easy about it.

As a friend, I would offer to comfort you with a hug if you wanted one. Then suggest taking you to a pleasant place and pampering you while you rest and regain your sense of humor. We'd find a place for you to yell as loudly as you needed. (Yelling alone or with a friend can be satisfying and perhaps make you too hoarse to yell at your family.)

And I would listen— as long as you need me to hear— while you discuss your frustrations and brainstormed ways to create a family atmosphere of happiness, love, and understanding. As a therapist, it's physically hands-off, but emotionally we're ready to listen deeply to know your soul.

You want a healing atmosphere at home. If you don't bring it on, who will?

Chapter 1

Getting Started

A young father confided a week after his first child was born that the idea of dealing with family problems petrified him. A mother told me that she felt desperate every time her four children fought. They wanted their families to be healthy but believed they were helpless. Rest assured that with good help, stressed-out parents will find the vision and energy to create healthy family relationships.

How Change Begins

Families begin to heal the moment one family member commits to change. A young mother in a grocery store with her screaming four-year-old decides this time to pick him up and walk out of the store. She notices knowing smiles (and a few grumpy stares) as she leaves. Her action is a radical departure from her customary helplessness.

When we are determined to change, the usual ways we frustrate ourselves will no longer feel so inevitable.

Our behaviors lead the way to family change. We always have choices. $Stop whining! becomes I know you want my attention. Hang on. Ill help you in two minutes, then be sure to do it! You stupid little jerk! Becomes $I'm listening carefully now. Slow down. Tell me again what you need."

Acting with faithful love and respect toward everyone within your troubled family gives you a solid foundation for orchestrating change. Say only encouraging and caring words to your children. They will eventually reward you with cooperation. The few times they don't assert their independence or respond to negative messages, be aware you may be sending difficult messages unconsciously.

Whatever they do, treat them lovingly, respect their integrity, and listen to them with your fullest attention. Figure out what they need and help them to achieve it.

The McGrath family’s story

Kenny McGrath was so socially awkward that the first time Jeanne drove into his gas station, he couldn't speak to her. She felt drawn to him but, out of nervousness, didn’t look at him when she paid for the gas.

Kenny married someone else and had two children. His marriage fell apart eight years later because of his heavy drinking. He and Jeanne met again by chance and started dating.

When Jeanne got pregnant with Sarah, they chose to get married. Rusty was born four years later. They struggled throughout their marriage over Kenny's excessive drinking and Jeanne’s temper. Talking about feelings remained hard for them.

Two years ago, Jeanne told Kenny to leave. He was furious about being told what to do and stubbornly refused to stop drinking.

Early in the separation, Jeanne and a teacher she had known for years had a baby boy named Stevie. That's when Kenny realized that Jeanne would divorce him and that he would lose Sarah and Rusty if he didn't curb his drinking.

Jeanne agreed to meet with him in my office on his promise to remain sober.

It’s Up to Us to Fix Our Unhappiness

The more severe the emotional childhood injuries we carry into adulthood, the harder it will be to parent well. We learn to parent from our early caregivers. I watched a father slap his crying toddler on the cheek and