Family fighting.  It can be excruciating.  A feeling of the walls around us caving in and crushing us.

Dreams of happy homes, conflict-free.  What would it even be like?  Is there such a thing anywhere in the world?

Generations of parents in the front seats on car trips, desperate for the bickering, pestering screaming fighting behind them to just stop.

Family conflict can be so overwhelming and so enervating, there is no energy left for parents or kids to recognize that fighting is developmentally important, perhaps even necessary.  Like tissue culture media in which cells can divide, anger is a medium of INDIVIDUATION, separating off from what we are part of.   We figure out–we create–the boundaries of our beings partly through conflict:  I’m not that!  I’m this!  I hate that!  That is nothing like me!

In childhood, parts of the self get born through conflict.  Coming into being is a violent act.  Skin is torn, blood flows, pain surges; screaming, crying, tears.  Differentiating one’s self from those one is closest to can be violent.  New beings are not smiled into existence.  Transformation is upheaval.

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A pear is a pear.  It cannot become more orangey.   Nor, it seems, could it want to.  A giraffe is a giraffe and cannot become like a zebra.

Being human is different.   We have “will power,”, which is wonderful and frightening.  Will:  the ability to desire new possibilities.  Power:  the ability to DO things to achieve our desires.

   ‘I wish to be a parent.’    

  ‘I want to become an excellent marksman,’

  ‘I like spicy food and want to eat it often.’ 

  ‘I want to grow my hair long and change the way I’ve always looked.’

   ‘I want a job where I work with my body.’ 

We have such desires and the abilities to work towards them.

Imagine a creature who could think:  ‘How lucky they are, those humans!  They can desire to change, to grow, to be different.  And they can DO it!’

Yet these amazing human potentials can be overwhelming to live with.  It is hard to figure out what we truly want, sometimes harder than it is to bring about what we want once we know what it is.  It is hard even to feel our own feelings.  They so easily get buried beneath expectations, roles, duties, guilt, conditioning.  Our open-endedness, our expansiveness, our freedoms:  they can be terrifying.