Family Under Stress

Many if not all of us are well acquainted with stress. Stress is a part of life and often there is no avoiding it. But what is stress? Some might say that it is pressure, others might say that it is our emotions or thoughts while some may say that it is what happens around us. Regardless of what it is we can be sure that all of us have felt stressed at some point in our lives. We might have even have felt stress that seems to make us feel helpless, in despair or depressed. It is because of this kind of stress that some may fear marriage. We may have heard stories from friends or loved ones that when life got hard they drifted away from their spouse or other family members. We may have heard that others have had a great marriage but when life events happen they are not able to maintain their marriage and they get a divorce. My goal today is to help people know that life will happen and that we do not need to grow apart from others when it does, in fact that is when we should turn to others. I also want to provide a perspective on why we have such trials and a way to look at them positively.

One problem that many couples have as they experience life events is that they settle with trying to get by instead of trying to cope. Getting by can be referred to as surviving or just going forward when life isn't getting much better. Many couples resort to this method of recovery from life's attacks because they do't know any better. Ways couples "get by" can be avoiding the problem, denying the problem and then using scapegoats. An example of denying the problem can happen when a family member or relative dies. For example, my grandfather passed away over six months ago. At first when I heard that he passed away I did not feel that it was real. If I had accepted this as reality and believed that my grandpa was still alive and refused to accept the fact that he had passed away then this would be an example of denial. Denying may be helpful in the beginning of grieving but overall it slows down the process of coping because in order to grow from the experience couples need to accept the reality and turn to each other.
People also tend to avoid the problem instead of resolving it. This could happen when a couple has a disagreement and it causes contention. An internal problem or life event causes a lot of stress that can make people want to avoid fixing it. They think that if they can just not resolve the conflict then it can go away. In truth, when people leave problems go they become like wounds and can fester and not get any better. Confronting internal problems often scares people but it is the best way to resolve issues. A marriage and family expert Gottman says that most interactions in resolving conflicts will end how they started. So it is important to be patient in loving from start to finish when confronting issues.
The method of using a scapegoat is perhaps the most harmful of all methods. A family may be a scapegoat when a mother loses a child at birth and blames it on her poor decisions in her diet or being too rough. This is not only damaging to the mother but it is not always true. Blaming people is hurtful and it is rarely the solution to overcoming the difficulty. It is important to turn to each other in difficulty and not falsely blame outside sources for the event.
The last thing I want to offer is a useful perspective on coping. I believe that we are meant o outgrow our trials and not just endure them. If we face all of our difficulties with an attitude that we want them to end and we want them to go away we are missing opportunities to be stronger so that we can bear our burdens. When we approach our difficulties with an attitude to learn and to grow then we will receive more strength to outgrow our difficulties instead of suffer them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sexual Intimacy and Family

Many of us remember "the talk". Whether it was from mom or dad, friends or our health teacher we may have felt uncomfortable or uneasy. We may have felt uncomfortable because our parents or teachers may not have known how to teach us about sexuality. As we have gotten older and had our own experiences we may have had difficulties because of the ways that we were taught. Many of these difficulties could have come up because of the way we were taught. The truth of the matter is that many people do not know how to talk about and to teach about sexuality and its aspects. My goal today is to talk about the fallacies of many of the teaching models in sexuality and also offer the proper way to teach children and to lean about sexuality. First of all, there are many ways that parents and teachers teach sexuality. One of the fallacies that we often see in teaching sexuality is that we often see fear-based metaphors. A fear metaphor is not when parents or teachers use fear to teach ot...
Read more

Divorce, Remarriage & Aging

Many of us have heard stories where people are married and remarried over and over again. Maybe you have an uncle or aunt that has been married three or four times. Something that may scare us out of getting married or pursuing a relationship is that we may have a relative or know someone who has been through similar experiences.  Divorce is something much more common these days than it was in the past. It has become much easier for couples to get a divorce now because of the no-fault divorce. My goal today is to talk about divorce openly. I want to talk about possible reasons for divorce and what we can do to avoid it. Many hear the statistic that 50% of marriages end in divorce. While this may be true it is not a complete representation of marriages that end in divorce. Many assume that if we take 100 people and survey how many of them will get divorced that we think that 50 of them will. But this is not true. Only about 24% of people go through a divorce. But that 24% of people...
Read more

Fathers and Finances

Are fathers even important? What good do they do to families and to the world? If mothers are better at nurturing and can also hold  stable job then why do we need men in the home. With almost forty percent of children being born into fatherless homes and fifty perfect of all marriages ending  in divorce less and less children are having exposure to fathers in the home. Fewer and fewer children have the positive influence that a father can have on the home. Many people today say that this isn't a big deal. Many claim that fathers don't contribute much to the home and that they are not needed. But are they helpful or needed? Though the world may disagree the fact is that they are vital to a child's healthy development. My purpose today isn't to prove that fathers are useful but to talk about effective ways of connecting with family members and things that fathers can do to connect with their kids. My hope is that this will help fathers know how to be better fathers and t...
Read more