There they sat in front of me - she was from a rural village in Sudan and he was from Dublin*. Their skin colourings were as contrasting as the backgrounds in which they had grown up: her home country was rural, dry and dusty, his urban, green and damp. Yet they shared a common experience in having migrated to Australia some 10 years ago, and met as they were both coming out of failed relationships.
As they began talking about the problems in their relationship, I must admit my heart sank a little. Their ways of thinking about life and relationships were so contrasting I could see we were going to have a long and arduous time together to try and reach a position of mutual respect and understanding. Yet there were three children as the issue of this relationship, and both of them wanted to fight to provide a family for their much loved children: they weren't sure they were fighting to be with each other.
Over the months of counselling, each conversation involved a tortuous process of not going down their previous reactionary and conflictual pathway, but rather stopping to examine what was actually happening in their thought and feeling processes. What assumptions had been made unconsciously, how were statements being misunderstood as they were heard through the lens of culture? How could they begin to see and value aspects of each other's way of doing things when it contrasted so strongly with that in their families of origin?
In essence we followed a tried and tested pathway used by counsellors and others when working in a multicultural context, using these steps:
"¢ Recognising the values/cultural bias conflict and bringing it into the open
"¢ Checking out how unconscious assumptions are being challenged
"¢ Not simply setting out to change the other person's values to your own.
"¢ Attempting to understand and "get in the other person's shoes": to see the issue from their viewpoint
"¢ When there is real conflict of values ask 'can I put my own values to one side in order to join with this person or not?'
"¢ If answer 'yes', the process can proceed
"¢ If answer 'no' you need to put the different views on the table and work out with the person how the differences will interfere in the process and how to negotiate.
In effect most relationships are "cross cultural" to some degree, in that every family unit has its own way of looking at the world and responding to that. I sometimes ask couples to contemplate how differently their families of origin conducted Christmas Day. My husband and I had serious differences here to negotiate. His family's Christmas day present opening was ordered, regulated and careful; my family had an, exciting, chaotic tearing of paper under the tree at 6 am in the morning. As a couple, we had to negotiate a new way of "doing" Christmas day that drew wisdom from both of our backgrounds.
This may seem a trite example, and in no way reflects the complexity of the couple described above, but following a process of firstly recognising difference, seeking to understand the difference, respecting both perspectives and then seeking a creative "win/win" outcome can be a way out of these difficulties. Not always easy, but worth it to solve relationship difficulties.
P.S. I still miss my family's chaos on Christmas morning - just don't tell my husband!
* This is a fictitious couple drawn from stories I have heard from a number of couples during my counselling career.
