Abbie: Hello and welcome to the CosmoParenting Podcast brought to you by the CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution. In this space, we invite you to see yourself as someone who is curious about and actively participating in creating your own meaning around parenting.
Today, we are beginning a new month and new theme, so this is our ‘Appreciate’ episode, where we introduce the theme and offer questions to reflect on that help us appreciate where we are and where we’ve been. Let’s begin.
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Abbie: This month is about conflict. What we will cover related to conflict today is that conflict can be destructive or constructive, and also conflict is composed of differing forces or needs.
Many of us function under the assumption that conflict is a bad thing and we try to avoid it at all costs. This is us taking for granted the story we have that conflict is a negative thing. We might believe this story if we only ever saw our parents have destructive conflict that went unresolved and made everyone feel bad. But, I’d like to challenge that belief for us today. What if conflict has the potential to be constructive? What if it helped us?
Now, this will take some imagination and creativity on your part, but one way to start changing the story we have around conflict is to change the way we understand conflict to simply be differing needs or forces. For example, maybe your child really wants a phone and has been begging you to get them one, citing that all their friends have phones. But perhaps, you as the parent have concerns about what having a phone will do to your child, and whether they are too young, or any number of very real concerns about children’s mental health and social media or not being able to control what children see on their devices. You are not wrong for having doubts, but neither is your child wrong for wanting a phone. Later this month we will talk more in depth about different ways to approach conflict, but for now, I just want you to start playing around with this idea that conflict isn’t always bad.
It's easy for me to sit here and say that, but I know that it is a lot harder for us to learn to believe that in our minds and in our bodies. I'm especially looking forward to our episode with Stephanie this month because there is a lot to explore when it comes to the ways that our bodies become activated and the ways we become dysregulated during what we perceive to be conflict.
But okay, I don't want to get too far ahead of myself. I just want to ease us into this new story that I'm hoping we can tell ourselves and our families- trying on the idea that conflict isn't always bad. When we use the language of conflict being differing forces or needs, that makes it a lot more neutral. So just one small step in the right direction towards a new story for today.
As we wrap up this episode, I do want to offer questions for you to reflect on for yourself. I am going to ask the questions here, but you can also find them written in the show notes, or on the Substack.
Have you ever witnessed a family (parent and child, caregiver and child, siblings, two co-parents, extended families, etc.) engage in “healthy conflict?” What did that look like?
What would conflict need to look like in order for it not to feel “bad” or destructive for you?
What kind of stories do you hold about conflict? What kind of stories do you want your children to learn about conflict?
Okay, those are the questions I will leave you with today. I invite you to spend some time in reflection after this episode ends and throughout your week thinking about these questions. I’ll also point you toward the additional resources we have at www.cosmoactivities.com and encourage you to do some of your reflecting on the CosmoParenting Substack so you can be in dialogue with our community! That is such an important part of this experience- being in dialogue with each other. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of the CosmoParenting Podcast. We are so grateful to be with you on this journey. And we’ll see you next week to hear a parenting story.
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