Stress and Family Crisis

 Hey everybody! I hope you all had a fantastic week that wasn’t filled with this week’s topic. It is something that we are all very familiar with. It is stress! It is a major part of our everyday lives. We feel it when we have a big test coming up, when we are late to work, or even if there is conflict within the home. Stress can be a good motivator to get things done. However, if we have too much stress in our lives, it can be harmful to us and our relationships. Within the family, everybody deals with their stress in a different way. This can lead to conflict if misunderstood. For instance, when a woman needs to deal with her stress she will often try to talk it out. When a man needs to deal with stress he will often find something that will help him focus on something else. These are very different coping methods that can be misinterpreted by the opposite sex. The man might think that the woman is blaming him for the problems. The woman might think that the man is ignoring her when he is trying to forget his problems. These miscommunications during stressful times can lead to conflict within the home. What we want to avoid is turning these conflicts into family crises.

A family crisis is a danger to the family. That can be anything from divorce, loss of job or home, or loss of a family member. Each family deals with these dangers differently. In 1918, there was a sociologist who studied families during the spanish flu pandemic and World War One. This was a challenging time for many families and many were facing the same issues. He found that although they were all going through similar trials, most families responded differently from the other families. Some families were able to recover and others were not. SOme families came out even better than they were before. So what was the difference? A few years down the road, a man named Robert Hill asked the same questions and conducted the same experiment. He came up with the ABC X Model. This model explains why families react differently. The A stands for “Actual Event.” This is the event that triggers the stress or crisis within the family. This could be a loss of a family member or loss of a job. The B stands for “ Both the response and resources available.” How families respond to a situation varies depending on past circumstances and experiences. The resources available is what is available to the family that could help them through this challenge. This could be the help of family or friends or the economic resources available to them. The C stands for “Cognition” or how we perceive a situation. Everybody depending on their circumstances responds differently to situations. For instance, skydiving doesn’t scare me at all so that wouldn’t trigger a fear response. However, for somebody else standing on a 10 foot platform could be terrifying. And finally the X stands for the total eXperience. He found that depending on those factors explained in the model, determined how the family was doing after the crisis. This mode can help us during times of crisis by helping us understand what parts we are in control of. We can’t control the stressor event or the amount of resources available at the time, but we can control how we think of the situation. Our brains are wired to perceive everything it thinks as true. What we think becomes our truth. If we learn to take a step back and control our thoughts during hard times, we will be better prepared for those challenging times.