ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three potent family processes: (1) establishing and exerting power, (2) making decisions, and (3) dealing with confl icts. If not overt processes, power, decision making, and confl ict show up in underlying ways, sometimes too subtle to be recognized even by family members themselves. An important point of this chapter is that power, decision making, and confl ict are ongoing communication processes , even though lay people often speak of them as discrete events (e.g., they say “We made a decision” or “We had a confl ict”). A process perspective focuses attention on what “has happened, is happening, and may happen” in the family (Sprey, 1999 , p. 668). For example, what causes a family confl ict to develop as it does? Is there a chain of events that predicts confl ict intensity and kind? What direction will the confl ict take in the future?
