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.