Do you really have close family ties?

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I am a Filipino and I believe that we are known to having “Close Family Ties” compared to other countries. Well, how can I say we don’t if I have grown up to a family where our neighbors are my cousins, aunts and uncles, even my grandparents were living with us. Most of my friends are also in the same situation so I have grown to believe that we really have close family ties as I often hear it from other people as well. It is until recently after hearing from someone that I came to realize that this might not really be the case. We were discussing the topic about truth and lies when this has been brought up. We came to realized that most families were not really discussing most important topics about the family. Most of the time, we are afraid of confronting our family to address issues. Do we have a family member with drinking problems? Or maybe a gambler, unemployed without doing any effort, drug addiction, irresponsible, addiction in computer/mobile games, and many others. In short, those issues that making an unhealthy family but we are often hesitant to confront them. We do love our family for sure but how many of us are afraid to talk about these issues thinking that we offend and end up arguing or worse even start to hate each other. To think that we are known to have close family ties, yet we are not that confident in speaking the truth for our family issues. So I learned that the key really can be called “CAREfrontation”. I know there are white lies when we try to avoid hurting our love ones, but telling the truth doesn’t have to be offensive. We can confront the issues on our family with care. We just have to select the words carefully and tell them in the most gentle way that we can.