ABSTRACT
To be in a family is to experience conflict: it is an unavoidable feature of family life. However, families vary tremendously in how they handle conflict. Episodes of conflict can be productive, helping to facilitate communication, or they can be damaging, destructive, and even dangerous. For researchers and clinicians who focus on families, theories of why conflicts develop, how they unfold, and how families resolve them (or fail to resolve them) warrant close attention.
