Interactional View

Observation #6
February 24, 2015
Interactional View

I briefly described this situation in class, but basically I have come to accept a sequence of events in my family.  When I come home for breaks, my family likes to ask if I have changed my major yet (I have a history of changing it a lot).  When they realize that I have not changed my major, my mom complains that I never call home, then my brother complains that I have downgraded from my initial major of Actuarial Science.  I am not sure who decided that my happiness should not be considered in how good a major is for me, but I bite my tongue and play along anyways.  He is a third year law school student anyways, so he clearly knows more than me about life.

This is a game that my family likes to play.  When I come home, I already know the sequence of questions I will be asked along with my stock answers to every question.  The rules have been set from day one.  I once tried to rock the boat and give a response that would be unexpected, but it was reprimanded and I have since gone back to my usual responses.  This is how my family operates.  We have a certain family homeostasis in our family and I have been pegged as the child who will not stand up for himself or rebel.  This made it extremely difficult for me to defend my decision to change to a Math Education major during my freshman year and now makes it difficult to defend my decision to change to an Org. Comm major.

We talked about how the only way to break the family homeostasis is through metacommunication, but I do not think that this will ever work with my family.  I am not extremely close with my family and it still feels awkward when they want to have a group hug or chat about life.  I can only imagine the awkwardness that would ensue if we ever decided to look at the problems within our family's dynamic and work to break away from them.