Unlocked Essential Keys to Manage Family Conflict

Enhance your understanding of family dynamics! This impactful book will help you understand how we manage conflicts within our own families, and serves as a reminder that everyone has their own way of handling difficult situations. Whether you are a student using this book resource or someone who has faced a fair amount of conflict in life, this book will be a valuable guide to help you and your loved ones manage disputes and achieve resolutions!

Family. The very word means different things to different people. For some it is a reminder of a warm and nurturing environment they long to return to; for others it is a reminder of a tumultuous and contentious environment they ran from as soon as it became possible.

Addressing and reconciling conflict within families is challenging. There is never a single solution. Those seeking to assist families in crisis, be it friends, clinicians, mediators, etc., must have a wide and varied selection of skills and tools at their disposal. The chapters in this book contain a treasure trove of these tips and tools presented as keys. As the authors discuss these keys, they occasionally elaborate on a specific clinician, researcher, or author who has influenced their work. However, the foundation for these keys is their personal and professional experiences.

The authors hope and pray that this book will not only educate and equip readers to handle conflict more effectively, but also teach that conflict is not necessarily a bad thing. When conflict is viewed as an opportunity to grow, learn, heal, and get to know one another more intimately, it can free a family from the destruction that conflict can potentially bring. Conflict is normal. As long as we have breath, we will have conflict. Let's learn to do this better.

Angela teaches graduate courses in mediation, family conflict dynamics, and gender and culture conflict management at the Southern Methodist University (SMU) Master's Program in Dispute Resolution and Conflict Management. She is also an adjunct lecturer for Abilene Christian University's conflict resolution program.

Prior to her work in Texas, Angela worked within the legal and dispute resolution fields in Singapore, where she resided for a number of years. In her native South Africa, she was an attorney. She has over 25 years' management experience in the legal and dispute resolution fields internationally.

Angela has also worked with high schools, locally and internationally, to train peer mediators and implement peer mediation programs. Together with her husband, Angela is also a pre-marital counseling facilitator and earned her Master of Science in Counseling at SMU in 2021.

Angela has a passion to impart critical life skills to others in order to equip them to navigate life more effectively in a world often filled with conflict and pressure. From personal experience, she believes these skills can be learned, practiced and applied successfully.

Angela has been married to the love of her life, Michael, for 30 years. They have two darling children, Keziah and Matthew, and the family resides in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Shannon earned her Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the University of Washington. She worked at an inpatient facility before moving into Personnel Psychology for city government. Following the birth of her first child, Shannon left the traditional workforce but continued her passion of helping others through church ministry, as a natural childbirth instructor, doula, and childcare provider.

Shannon loves hiking, music, reading, blogging and spending time with her family—particularly in a mountainous locale. Being the child of a Coast Guardsman, Shannon lived in several different states, but claims Alaska as her home. Married to her college sweetheart, Aaron, a pilot, shortly following graduation and are the parents of Sierra, her husband Jayson, and Tanner. They currently live in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.