What Is The Problem?

Unless you are caught in the middle of a situation, one of the entertaining aspects of human behavior can be to learn how a number of people can all look at the same object or situation and yet see it completely different.

An example can be family communication.  Individual A likes to interact frequently by email, phone and visiting.  He/she likes to share what is happening in his/her world and learn what the other members of the family are doing, planning, fearing, celebrating, wishing for, etc.  Knowledge and frequent communication builds stronger family bonds for this individual.

However, this person can be placed into a family that views this behavior in a completely different manner.  These other individuals see contact with family as being reserved for special events like birthdays or when there is some major news or illness to report.  Individual A can see their interactions as more like an exchange of newsletters than anything else. 

These other family members have lives and friends of their own so they see family as only a portion of their social world.  Infrequent family contact meets their needs at a very satisfactory level.

So, while Individual A is venting his frustration that his/her family cannot be more like what he/she would like for them to be in communicating, the remainder of the family members are saying something similar to: “what is the problem?”

Unless the family members come to accept each member as they are and remove his/her set of expectations, each will be unhappy. Often whatever we call a ‘problem’ is a set of attitudes and expectations that we carry toward ourselves and the other people in our world.   Some will immediately see a situation as being a problem while other looking at the same situation are wondering:  what/where is the problem?

 It is often helpful to recall that we cannot make another person value what we value in a relationship.  People still do what will meet their needs as they live their life, not what will meet our needs or solve our problems.

Naturally, this same behavior can carry into all aspects of our lives other than just with family communications.   It can enter the world of our work, participating in social organizations, and even such areas as to how we drive on the highway. 

We are all different and unique from each other.   This can bring happiness by the appreciation of diversity or conflict when others want to behave in a way different from our expectations. 

Each of can be confused and irritated when someone sees us as being “a problem” when our response is more likely to be “What is the problem?  I don’t see any problem.”   Or, we have the choice of becoming angry when we can see the problem so clearly and other do not see what we see.  We may be tempted to yell “why can’t you see this problem like I can?” 

Of course we can always choose to turn the interaction into a blame-game by saying something like “you are the problem, not me.”  That is practically guaranteed to leave all participants with defensive feelings of anger and a low outlook for resolution.

We can conclude that since we are unique and individual, we will probably be in a large number of situations where we see something different than another.

Recalling that “different strokes for different folks” can be helpful in assisting us to resolve a situation rather than deciding to play victim and/or blame psychological mind games with others and ourselves.  The first helps us find win-win resolution while the second usually ends with lose-lose outcomes.

Comments welcome.  Email:  silverchatline@gmail.com