Six Stage Relationship Model: My Dad and I

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Often times relationships with parents tend to go through a rocky phase during teenage years, in the “know it all” phase. However, my relationship with my father very seldom gets out of the rocky phase. We have gone through many up and downs in the years of my life my father has actually be around for. In this paper I will analyze my relationship with my dad using the six stage relationship model, listening barriers, and both of our self-esteems. Being my dad, the contact stage in our relationship began quite long before I remember. However, our involvement stage did not reflect the average father daughter relationship. Not long after my birth my father became a recluse and had no true involvement in my life. Partly based on the fact that we did not have a traditional family, as we did not have a shared living space. Often times though, he would blame his lack of involvement on his low self-esteem. He periodically would have some involvement such as times when my grandma would provide him money to take me for activities so he could get to know the girl I was becoming. However, I never received the same involvement from him, any time I began to self-disclose I would hit a brick wall. This would often resulting in me crying to someone, typically my mother or grandmother, about how upset it made me and further drove a wedge in our relationship because I never would talk to my dad about my frustrations with our relationship but rather other people. Because of the lack of involvement on his end it was very difficult to reach the intimacy stage, however with a little probing from my grandparents and my mother we slowly reached it around the time I was six or seven. We began social bonding, we would go out to movies and he often times ... ... middle of paper ... ...rs I would never self-disclose to my dad and he would find out from other people important information and events occurring in my life, which often hurt or upset him. So, in this case my self-esteem issues as well as his caused major problems within our relationship. As seen through my analysis, my relationship with my dad over the years has not been an easy one. We have both faced personal issues with self-esteem that has affected the relationship, listening barriers that have caused communicate issues rather than facilitate them. However, we have also been through every stage in the six stages of the relationship model, and remained by each other’s side through it all. Even though my dad and I have experienced many up and downs in our relationship, the roller coaster all seems worth it most days, as long as my dad is around to continue working on our relationship.

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