Family Stress

 Family Stress

Reuben Hill known family scholar developed the ABCX family crisis model to try to help families cope with different crises or stressors in their lives.  I have learned that if we do not have stress or crises in our lives we will not learn and grow from situations to be examples for others.

A – actual event

B – both resources/response

C – cognitions

X – eXperience

Let’s talk about how I am feeling right now with these ABCX crisis models.  The actual event I haven’t slept in about three days.  Both the resources and response are to contact my PCP and find out why this keeps happening to me.  Stop allowing social media to be my outlet. Cognition is to process my mental ability to deal with no sleep but learn from this experience so that I won’t keep going through this lack of sleep and be truthful with myself so my stress won’t last long, and I can get better.

What I just analyzed was just my stress, what do you do when it is family stress.  Will all members of the family recognize that a family member is going through stress?  It is important to recognize the place of pileups or prior strains.  A stressor does not occur in a vacuum but in the context of ongoing life.  (Lauer and Lauer’s chapter 13 Challenges to Intimacy page 286). 

Human beings try to hide their stress from family because they don’t want the family to worry.  They will find an outlet to help them control their stress, some will eat, some will excise, and some will do drugs.  Others will be abusive or become alcoholics.

There are different kinds of stressors.  Internal events that begin from someone inside the family such as getting drunk, suicide, or running for election.  External events that is something outside the family, can be earthquakes or inflation, which I believe everyone is going through now. Normative events are expected over the family life cycle, such as birth, marriage, and death.  Nonnormative unexpected events dying young, war, or being taken, hostage.  Ambiguous events for which you can’t get the facts and that are so unclear that you’re not even sure that it’s happening to you and your family.  Non-ambiguous event for which clear facts are available. (What when how and to whom).  Volitional events that are wanted and sought out such as freely chosen job change, college, or pregnancy.  Non-Volitional events that are not sought but just happen like lay off, or sudden loss.  A chronic event is a situation that’s too long to handle such as disease, addiction, or discrimination.  An acute event that lasts a short time but is severe, such as breaking a limb, losing a job, or failing a test.

Most of us as human beings experience all of these at the same time.  I found it funny that the last type of stressor is the one most used.  Cumulative events pile up, one right after the other, so that there is no resolution before the next one occurs, a dangerous situation in most cases.  The isolated event that occurs alone, at least with no other events appearing at the time, can be pinpointed easily.

Today I went through an isolated event, and I couldn’t shake it off me.  We learned that we must be truthful with ourselves in order for the stress to be relieved.  Learning how to cope with stress can be stressful.  I believe Heavenly Father wants me to learn how to control my stress because I am not only learning about how to control my response in college I am also learning how to do so at work.