3 Tips For Talking About Sensitive Topics With Family Members

Whether your family agrees on most topics or no topics at all, there are bound to be a few conversations that everyone needs to gear up for in order to be able to be productive and respectful. But just because these conversations can be hard doesn’t mean that they can’t be worth it or aren’t necessary, especially when they have to do with things like caring for elderly family members. Luckily, there are things that you can do to increase the odds of these conversations going well for everyone involved.

To help you see how this can be done, here are three tips for talking about sensitive topics with family members.

Give Everyone A Heads-Up

The last thing you want to do when you’re planning to have a hard conversation with your family members is to make them feel ambushed. So to help ensure that you don’t put people on the defensive from the get-go, it’s wise to give everyone a heads-up about what you’re planning to discuss when you all meet together.

By telling everyone what you plan to talk about when you sit down together for this conversation, you’ll be giving them a chance to get their thoughts together and come into the conversation ready to share what they think while also having an open mind for what everyone else is planning to say as well.

Try To Stay On Topic

When having tough conversations, things can quickly spiral out of control. Old hurts and previous conversations can get brought up and really derail the point that you’re trying to convey or the decisions you’re attempting to make when things like this happen.

To avoid this, try to do your best to stay on topic with the specific reason you met with your family to have this conversation. If other things start to get brought up, try to bring everyone back to the matter at hand and leave these other conversations for another time.

Don’t Make It Just One Conversation

While you probably don’t want to have hard or uncomfortable conversations with your family members every time you see them, sometimes making these potentially taboo topics more commonplace in your routine conversations can help them be easier for you to broach together. So if there are things that you don’t typically talk about but that everyone could benefit from being a bit more clear on, consider having these types of conversations more often so that some of the weight of them can become easier for you all to bear.

If you want to have conversations with your loved ones about sensitive topics and have these conversations end well, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you make this happen.