If You’re Throwing Dirt, You’re Losing Ground

Audio By Carbonatix

Everybody is gathered in the kitchen as usual. There’s a snack bowl on the table with a hand deeply implanted in it. Laughter surrounds the small, intimate area. It’s a celebration and the whole family has gathered together.

Then she walks into the room with her family obediently trailing behind her. A pall settles across the room. The laughter dies. Bodies suddenly stiffen and become rigid. This always happens when your sister joins the crowd. Ever since that blow up over the family cottage, gatherings with the relatives are tense and joyless.

When fighting over trivial issues, families will often throw dirt at each other. They will argue over money, land, or property, and ridicule each other for actions taken. Instead of sitting down and trying to rationally talk about how to be fair with all the things that are involved, the tendency instead is to poke fun (or not so fun) at each other.

They mock how each other acts. They put down each other’s kids. They belittle each other’s family. When someone has a big blow up in their family, the others watch with a satisfied grin on their faces. The problem could be a sarcastic sister, but it might be a bullying brother, an arrogant aunt, a selfish in-law, or a meddling cousin. Their branch on the family tree is not as significant as how they are behaving and the effect of their behavior on the entire family. While the comments and joking may seem harmless, it starts to put a crack in the family’s foundation.

If you’re throwing dirt on people in your family, you’re losing ground. It’s never to a family’s benefit to bring destruction upon itself. It also makes getting together extremely difficult.

Instead of throwing dirt at people, the better action to take would be to sweep it away by putting it out of your mind. Think of it like taking a broom and cleaning off your front porch. This will give you a cleaner surface to work from as your mind will be clearer to address the issues that are important. Then you can attempt to sit down with family members and work out the differences. It might take more than one discussion to iron out the wrinkles, but there is a far better chance of it working with this approach instead of throwing dirt and not caring where it lands.

There are two possible outcomes from getting together to talk. One is that the family talks everything out, mends their ways, and everyone is healed. Life continues and family gatherings are fun again. The other ending is that nothing gets resolved, people continue to argue, and everybody goes back to throwing dirt.

If that happens, resist the urge to continue that behavior yourself and stop it even if others don’t. If the family can’t work out their issues after a few meetings, consider hiring a professional mediator. Bringing an objective party into the mix can be very helpful. A mediator will be able to see things that everybody else is blind to and can ask difficult questions without being accused of having a bias.

If you can’t get everybody to come to the table, start with the ones who are willing to meet and continue to wait for the others to put down their bucket of dirt, pick up their brooms, and join the rest.