Family Stress
What is the difference between stress and crisis? Stress is mental or emotional strain on someone. Crisis is a dangerous or critical situation where our circumstances has changed. It’s probably safe to say that all of us have experienced both stress and crisis in our lives and in our families. Every family experience what we call “Family Stressors” this could be a number of different situations that create tension. Often, we might find that we experience both stress and crisis at the same time, like the death of a loved one, addiction, natural disaster, divorce, where we experience stress from the situation, but our circumstances have also physically changed.
Reuben Hill created the ABCX model, for families. This model was created to help us understand and process what happens when crisis’s hits. The model looks something like this
A ctual event
B oth resources and responses
C ognitions
Total eXperience
When a crisis happens, we have to process these 4 steps. (A) How did the actual even happen. (B) What were our resources or response for help. (C) How did we process what happened. (X) What was our total experience. What don’t realize is that crisis creates opportunity. These experiences have the potential to either pull us apart or draw us together depending on how we deal with everything.
Stress has a bad connotation, but the truth is that we need a healthy amount of stress in our lives for our minds and our body to function properly. Our bones need the physical stress from our weight for them to be strong and stress can be a motivator for action. When we think about it like that, stress can be our friend and not our enemy. Then why you might ask, is stress and anxiety so hard to overcome? Well it might be that when your brain starts to say “what if” in any given situation like, what if I don’t get my homework done, what if I don’t have enough money, or what if everything blows up in my face, that’s when the stress and anxiety comes and we still suffer from the outcome that didn’t even happen.
Some might say that that any disaster or crisis is never a good thing, which I agree that the act itself probably is never good, but the after effect can be amazing. This is when we see communities’ and more importantly families come together. There can be a great uniting that happens from crisis.
My niece Maddie was born with a serious heart condition and we didn’t know if she was going to make it or not. Right after being born she was rushed off to a bigger hospital about an hour away. There she would undergo open heart surgery. As a family I don’t think we have prayed more in our lives than in that situation. After Maddie had her surgery, she was okay, but she would have to stay in intensive care for about three months. This was hard on our family for the next few months as there was a lot of driving back and forth between the hospital and we were now the temporary care takers for Maddie’s older sister Kenzie. But I noticed something through all of the stress and little sleep, there was a newfound love and closeness that hadn’t been there before this all happened. My family had always loved each other but now we were showing and expressing that through our actions. I could physically see how we were strengthening and lifting each other as we when through this traumatic experience together. I wouldn’t ever wish for bad things to happen, but I am grateful for the lesson I have learned.
This is Our Happy Place 