Most people must have thought about what it would take to build a happy home. We must start with accurately understanding the meaning of 'home' to be able to build a happy home. To have a home, we need to form a family with people who live together. You yourself must exist and then the counterparty (spouse, children, parents, and others) must also exist at home. Human beings pursue individual's happiness as a person and happiness in relationships with other people as a person in relationships. Home is a basic social group that exists for happiness in relationships. Your home may be a happy home with reference to your standards but not a happy home with reference to your counterparty's (spouse, children, parents and others) standards since everyone has different standards. To have a happy home in a true sense, it is crucial that each and every member of the family is happy as a person and a person in relationships.
Human beings feel happy as a person when men can generate passion getting immersed into positive moods and maintain the condition, and women can generate love getting immersed into positive feelings and maintain the condition. Human beings feel happy as a person in relationships as a family member when all family members can adequately pursue 'meanings' that lead to feeling happy to be together, and pursue 'values' under the protection and within the safety of home.
It can be said that we have built a happy home when the pursuit of both meanings and values are proceeded in harmony. Some people think that a home with comfort and without turbulence or disputes is a happy home. However, comfort is a clearly different concept from happiness. Also, one person may feel comfortable, but the other may not. If you want to build a happy home, first you need to check for your individual happiness and also check for other family members' happiness. Each family member's happiness can be effectively checked for through conversations.
Many people get engaged in conversations only when they are in a good mood, when they feel comfortable, or when they want to claim for their rights, and their conversations are most exclusively about what they themselves need. In many cases, people initiate conversations in order to claim for their rights and demand for others' responsibilities or in order to impose their moods regardless of others' feelings. This type of conversation tends to be one-sided and cannot be considered as a true conversation. This pattern of conversation causes problems in family relationship instead of contributing to building a happy home. Conversations must be employed to share each member's happiness and unhappiness and solve problems. Conversations must aim for fulfilling not only members' rights but also roles and responsibilities, so each member's rights and responsibilities must be manifested in conversations in a bidirectional way. The amount of true conversations is an indicator of the degree of happiness of the family.
Individual rights are the focus of happiness as a person, and roles and responsibilities are the focus of the happiness as a person in relationships. People tend to think that roles and responsibilities are something huge and grand, and some even identify roles and responsibilities with suppression and sacrifice. However, individual's happiness is the basis of a happy home, so suppression and sacrifice that are opposite concepts of individual happiness cannot lead to a happy home. It will only create an unhappy home. We must neither claim only for our own happiness nor solely focus on roles and responsibilities. Every member of the family has the right to pursue individual happiness and the responsibility to take at the same time. Understanding this basic concept will contribute to smooth and productive conversations among family members.
When we have problems in relationships, we experience stress and wounds. We think that the cause of our stress and wounds is the counterparty since they have occurred from conflictual relationship. However, stress and wounds are generated and sensed only within ourselves, so the counterparty is not likely to recognize our stress and wounds. We demand the counterparty to restore our emotions usually by initiating conversations, but the counterparty has no ability to restore our emotions. Then, more conversations lead to more conflicts than resolutions, eventually leading us to mistakenly sever the relationship itself to eliminate the cause of stress and wounds. We need to restore our emotions by healing stress and treating wounds on our own. It is then when we can get engaged in conversations to talk about rights and responsibilities and promote and reinforce happiness. A home is the most basic social group and when people are happy at home with rights and responsibilities in harmony, they can also fulfill happiness in other social groups and in diverse relationships.
In case of the relationship of adults and children such as a parent-child relationship, the adult must have both rights and responsibilities at home, but children have only rights and not responsibilities. Parents need to rear children taking responsibilities but children are not in the position to take responsibilities yet. They only have rights to be protected and reared by parents in the safety of home. Imposing parents' ways on children is to claim for parents' rights and demand for children's responsibilities, which may lead to diverse psychological problems in children.
We can build a happy home when we accurately understand the operational mechanism of human mind and psychology. A happy home is not something too far to be reached as far as you gather up your will to take time and effort to form new habits and make changes.
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