• Routine behaviours of life that carry us through each day, usually in a patterned and often unreflective way.  
• We maintain our families through everydau interactions, but sometimes stop and focus on a specific relational tie responding to situations and issues.
• Huge area where relationships continue to exist between the point of their initial development and their possible decline.

1. In existance
2. In a state of connectedness
3. In satisfactory condition
4. In repair

• To maintain the quality of relationship one must maintain the quality of communication. 
• There is a lot of grey are, things that work for some, don't work for others.

1. POSITIVITY: Be polite, cheerful, avoid criticism.
2. OPENNESS:Discuss the relationship & use self-disclosure.
3. ASSURANCES: Give partner confidence about the relationship; expressions of love and support.
4. SOCIAL NETWORKS: Family and friends have to be part of the picture 
5. SHARING TASKS: Do your fair share of the work; domestic chores can be very sensitive and damming. (Txt UNDERSTANDING)

• When the child is very young it starts as vertical communication.
• As a child develops there is a shift from vertical to horizontal communication styles, and the responsibility for communication becomes more shared.

• Typically represents the longest relationships a person has.
• Initially involuntarily linked, but most report having a commitment to this relationship beyond obligatory ties.
• Sibling liking is predicted by use of positivity and network.
• Girls engage in a higher level of maintenance behaviours.
• Blended family siblings add a lot of complications, and take about a year to positively adapt to.

• Money
• Legal complications
• Social barriers
• Network of people who would be negatively affected
• Shared friends
• Family pressures

1. Confirmation
2. Respect
3. Rituals
4. Relational Currency

CONFIRMATION MESSAGES: Communicates recognition and acceptance of another human being.

1. Acknolwledge other person's existance.
2. Affirm the other's communication by responding relevantly to it.
3. Reflecting and accepting the other's self-experience.
4. Suggesting a willingness to become involved with the other.

1. RECOGNITION: Indicates a willingness to be involved with each other.
2. DIALOGUE: Implies an interactive involvement between two or more persons.
3. ACCEPTANCE: Occurs when we allow others to be themselves; understand the other's perspective even if we don't agree with it.

• Respect involves acting in a way that demonstrates honouring and caring for another and his/her well-being.
• Support the choices, actions, values even if you view them as unwise and/or problematic.
• EQUALITY/MUTUALITY: Implies a horizontal relationship characterized by treating the other as a valued person.
• CARING/SUPPORTIVENESS: Engaging in behaviours that are reciprocally thoughtful and considerate.

• A symbolic form of communication that, owing to the satisfaction that family members experience through its repetition, is acted out in a systematic fashion over time. 
• Contain a variety of meanings and messages in patterned and emotionally powerful forms.
• Rituals connect family members in meaningful ways.
• Remind families who they are and how much they care about each other.
• Helps members make sense of their lives.

1. Family celebrations
2. Family traditions
3. Patterned family interactions

1. COUPLE TIME: Enjoyable activities, togetherness rituals, escape episodes.
2. IDIOSYNCRATIC/SYMBOLLIC: Private codes, play rituals, celebration rituals.
3. DAILY ROUTINES/TASKS
4. INTIMACY EXPRESSIONS: Physical, symbols, verbal exchanges. 
5. COMMUNICATION
6. PATTERNS/HABITS/MANNERISM
7. SPIRITUAL

• Rituals that serve as a way to bond family members of all ages across generations providing a sense of family identity and linkage.
• As families and societies change, rituals are dropped, altered since people are inventing new families to live by as well as with.
• Rituals can reflect societal change.

• The challenge is to embrace certain 'old' family rituals and combine them with 'new' family rituals.
• Ritual practices help well-functioning blended families accept the historical roots of each family and create new ones.
• When one parent has died:

1. INTEGRATED: Create new rituals and honour old ones and deceased parent.
2. DENIAL: Do not honour old rituals.
3. SEGMENTED: Struggle with the precense-absence tension, often engaging in rituals that avoid direct acknowledgement of the deceased parent.

• Rituals that may have a negative impact on family members.
• Family dinners/holidays may be destructive and painful.
• Family weekly clean after a drunken father's rampage.
• Incest becomes ritualized.

• Communication behaviours that carry meaning about the affection or caring dimensions of human relationships.
• Many come from Family-of-Origin patterns because every family implicitly and explicitle teachers its members way to show and accept caring from others.
• Some are more straight forward and some are more subtle, harder to interpret.
• Accurate interpretation occurs only when both parties agree on the meaning of the act.

1. Positive verbal statements
2. Self-disclosure
3. Listening
4. Positive non-verbal affect displays
5. Touch
6. Sexuality
7. Aggression 
8. Gift
9. Money
10. Food
11. Favours
12. Service
13. Staying in touch
14. Time together
15. Access rights

• If meanings are shared=>rewards are experienced
• If meanings are missed=>Costs are experienced
• Without common meanings members may feel taken for granted or rejected.
• Exchanging relational currencies benefits all family members.  
• Meanings of currency exchange change because a family system is continually evolving.