Autonomy And Connectedness Essay

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Relationships are the foundation for the society we live in. They exist everywhere and relationships are not confined to be strictly romantic. Whether it be with your roommate or your parent, everyone that you have a connection with, you also have a relationship with. With each relationship you will encounter “a unity of opposites,” known as dialectical tensions, which will either break that relationship apart or build it further (Baxer 2004). I will be analyzing the relationship with the person I have experienced the most tensions with over the course of the last seven years, my mother. One of the largest dialectical tensions that almost every parent-child relationship faces is the Autonomy and Connectedness dialectic. Autonomy and Connectedness …show more content…

While this was occurring I didn’t look for a solution nor make any compromises. I took on the attitude that “this is what I want and I want to have it—why can’t she understand that?” I took on the selection strategy, choosing only to satisfy my dialectical need for independence. This significantly hurt our relationship and more so her feelings. But it wasn’t until I moved away from the house and into college life that I began to have a different outlook on our relationship. It took me having distance from this relationship to realize the importance of it and the affects I was having on her. This is when I decided to make compromises in order to sustain a healthy relationship with the person who champions me most in life. Choosing the neutralization strategy helped out relationship tremendously. We ended up talking the situation out and I agreed to tell her more about my life and she agreed to give me the space I needed. I met her need of being connected, knowing a little bit about my life, while she met my need of being autonomous, allowing me to have my space. With neutralization I didn’t fully meet her needs and she didn’t fully meet my needs, but the balance we found was perfect, the balance we found was harmonious. Had I approached the situation with the neutralization strategy early on, the tension would have ended sooner and smoother. But, I would have never learned the process on reaching that

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