Spending all your time with your ‘Nearest and Dearest’ by Russell Grieve
In response to COVID-19 the ‘Live Up’ COVID COMMUNITY was set up to support our communities with practical wellbeing resources that can be used for these extraordinary circumstances of social distancing, community lockdown and quarantine. This article from Russell Grieve looks at the ‘connect’ aspect of the 5 ways to wellbeing, specifically dealing with being in such close quarters with the people in our ‘bubble’?
Spending all your Time with your Nearest and Dearest...
Nearest and Dearest
During this unprecedented period of time, over 2 billion people are spending all their hours with their nearest and dearest in close quarters. To say that this is unnatural, I believe, is a gross understatement!
Families usually separate after breakfast for 6+ hours as they study, work or play before catching up again at various hours of the evening - likely an average of 3-4 waking hours together each day. Compare this to the gruelling 24/7 contact we now have and there may be some relational friction with those who we are closest to.
Wellbeing research says that the greatest predictor of wellbeing in one’s life is a network of thriving relationships - how do we feel then, when the relationships that matter the most are being strained due to this enforced confinement. I have come up with three tips to help us turn this time into a cloud’s silver lining rather than an extra difficulty in 2020’s storm.
Know your early warning signs
Take notice of your behaviour when you are getting wound up. These times are stressful for a variety of reasons and most of us will be feeling heightened emotions - which is fine. What are your early warning signs when you start to get stressed? For me, I realised that when I was spring cleaning the house early in the morning with passionate judgement towards those who had “left their clothes in the bathroom AGAIN” that the sergeant major begins to appear - one of my early warning signs. If we are able to identify what our reactionary behaviours are, we are more likely to be able to catch it before it causes any relational damage - I was able to clean up the clothes from the bathroom quietly without interrogating anybody!
2. Appreciate their differences
We are all so very different with our personalities (extrovert vs introvert), daily patterns (morning lark vs night owl), goal focus (driven vs relaxed), disposition focus (people focused vs task focused) cleanliness (ordered vs non-ordered) etc, that we must attempt to see the world through others’ eyes. What better opportunity to practice seeing the glass as half full through appreciating the differences of our loved ones. My wife has been exposed to a whole new level of goal focused behaviour through my desire to get some sort of house maintenance completed during down time each day - She has been forced to appreciate my differences!
3. Give them what they need
Often in life we have small (or at times larger!) niggles between us and our loved ones. I have found that these niggles are often due to a difference in expectation because of a lack of communication. In this season of extended time together, why not gently explore how you can support your nearest and dearest by being very clear in communicating (with words or through actions). Within the first few days of our time locked away from the world, it became clear that there was a niggle developing between my daughter and me. This was because she thought that I was judging her for not doing things in the same way that I would. I realised that we had not spent much quality time together of late and her expectations of my fathering were likely different to what she was experiencing. I quickly tried to disarm this situation by connecting with her one-on-one several times a day (something that was impossible pre-lockdown because of the busyness of life) and making sure that I was showing her love using multiple forms of communication. This fatherly love is what she really needed during this time, and what an amazing opportunity to be able to use this time to provide that to her.
I hope that this unprecedented time produces stronger families across our planet and that we will reap the benefits of the season of living in each other’s pockets for a few weeks. My wife and I were recently talking about the positive progress that we have seen in the family relationships, especially around our daughter and my wife’s final comment was “Yeah, she’s finally learnt how to handle your personality”… Maybe, my daughter is learning to see the positives too…
Sources: Denise Quinlan, NZIWR