top of page
Writer's pictureVidya Yedavalli

Conflicts in Families & Relationships – A Spiritual Perspective


Human being is a social being, longs for staying with the fellow human beings in various formats like families, friends, and societies. He strives for other’s acceptance and recognition of his contribution to himself and to others through his action and work. He expects reciprocation of his love and affection and derives satisfaction of leading a healthy life under this social umbrella.


Obviously, life’s experiences come along with some learnings that are sometimes easy and sometimes hard. How much of it is processed positively for self-growth and objectively depends on one’s maturity and higher perspective. Whether one realizes or not, the only purpose of human life is to learn life’s lessons and grow internally for self-emancipation. The quicker one does that better for him.


Families are medium of emotional gratification

Historically the civilizations were designed around family boundaries. The attachment to various relationships such as parents, siblings, spouse, children drive one to do many things for their loved ones accepting them as their responsibility or as one’s expression of care and concern for other family members. Along with this care and concern comes the expectation for acceptance and recognition of these efforts by other family members. When these expectations are met, one derives happiness otherwise the same thing leads to unhappiness and misery.


Human Beings love family bonding

Though everyone wants freedom in life, human beings unknowingly create emotional bonding and perform actions and expect reactions to strengthen this bonding with different people. The people living with families secretly love this emotional drama and create many engagements around this.


These knots of actions and reactions become so complex after some time that one feels suffocated in the whirlpool of meeting expectations at work, home, relationships, and society. However, it is found to be hard to break these chains and even if one breaks them, one does not know what else to do in life as wherever one goes one has to deal with fellow human beings in some way or other.


Ego is the root cause of all conflicts

When two people come together, conflicts are most common to happen as they can never align at all times appreciating each other. The values, likings and disliking, difference in habits, aspirations, etc., cause conflicts. Each one feels one is right and getting acceptance of one’s ideologies becomes a stronger reason for conflict. Self is placed above all, and this comes naturally to all human beings. Hence, conquering self is the biggest achievement for anyone. This innate selfish nature of human being which is its survival instinct also becomes the cause to prove itself superior to others. The irony is healthy relationships are formed when people are equal, have freedom of expression with mutual respect.


Apologizing is not easy for many

To apologize, one has to submit to the other person accepting there was a mistake on one’s side which could be just an incident of many incidents of life. In reality, it is the easiest solution to many difficult situations of life. Saying a genuine apology and moving on makes life easier. However, the ego does not permit this as ego believes, one never makes any mistake, and he/she is perfect which is only a myth most of the time.


Value conflict are the root cause of many Conflicts

A human being is a bunch of personal values. Just as honesty, care, happiness, positivity, health are values for some, things like money, power, dishonesty, easy going are values for some others. A murderer kills the other person as he does not find it wrong. If he genuinely finds it wrong, he will find ways not to perform such action even if he is placed in a compelling situation. How the mind is trained and how one controls emotions is totally in one’s hands.


In moments of value conflicts, it is better to understand that our values are for ourselves and let others live their values. Imposing one’s values on others is a futile effort however best that value is. One changes only when one honestly feels so.


Attaining Freedom within bondage

True freedom is a mental state. When the mind is focused on something ‘Higher’ than the mundane, many battles of life become inconsequential. That something ‘Higher’ has scope to get much higher each time one works on it. For instance, love is higher than emotions, greater good is higher than individual good, spiritual is higher than material, Dharma is higher than justice, so on and so forth.


Right in the middle of staying with one's family and in relationships with people of different mindsets, one can achieve true freedom of purity without losing the essence of love by internal renunciation of ego and attachments to outside. By simply performing one’s duties with love outside and internally abiding in higher consciousness makes the spirit free of all bondages whatsoever of all the three worlds.