Post Holiday Test for Dysfunctional or Nearly-Normal Family

Take this test about what type of family you and you siblings are in after spending the holidays together.

From who brings what dish to the holiday dinner, where holidays are celebrated, do you do a secret Santa or not - how much money to spend on gifts - adult siblings can lock arms or pit themselves against each other.

Holidays are a great test for families and individual sibling relationships.

When you and your siblings ran up against problems over the holidays you were:

• compatible or conflictual
• cohesive or fragmented
• productive or non-productive
• stable or rigid
• flexible or rigid

All families are unique, including in their ability to collaborate, make decisions spend time together, especially during the holidays when everything tells you should get along and be happy.

Nearly-normal families, as I call them, are close-knit, well integrated, highly functioning, and sufficiently resilient. These family members can communicate well enough with some help at times and can they can make wise decisions about complex problems. Nearly normal families accept differences of opinion as inevitable and a normal part of decision-making or, in some cases, as opportunities to expand their individual thinking, thereby enabling them to make better-informed decisions. They “lock arms” to address the problems they encounter.

Dysfunctional families, and individual family dyads like siblings, at best, simply cannot collaborate. They have old intractable, interpersonal conflict that create additional problems every time they spend time together. Instead of viewing any decision as a problem to be solved together with locked arms, they pit themselves against one another, assume they are right and the others are wrong, and assume the roles of adversaries in their individual quests to solve the problem.

If you and your sibling - or siblings - pitted yourself against each other instead of locking arms over the holidays, maybe your New Years resolution should be fixing your sibling relationship.

This can start by looking into sibling forgiveness - and the ten steps to achieve it -

http://www.amazon.com/Mom-Loves-You-Best-Relationships/dp/0882823213