Family Stressors/Crisis

This week was about stresses and crises in the family, and how you respond to them. There's a model called the ABCX and it breaks down a stress in a way. This is how Brother Williams presented it to us. A=the actual (stressor) event. B= both resources and reactions. C= cognitions and X= the total experience. We talked about how what you think about your situation has in large to due with what you get from the experience. Usually people will say that events trigger your emotions, but in actuality, events trigger your thoughts which trigger your emotions.  There is a saying which I'm going to totally butcher, but in essence it says how nobody (or event) can make you feel a certain way. We choose how we respond. We tend to be aware of things consistent with our emotional state. He gave the example of watching a scary movie. After a scary movie you come home and all of the sudden you hear little noises in your house and freak yourself out even more. When actually your house probably makes those noises all of the time, you are just more aware of those noises now.

Families that are strong typically do better in high stress situations. They do well because typically there is more communication, there is cohesion, flexibility, and resilience. Families that aren't that strong will typically fall apart after a huge crisis instead of come together. Families need to be flexible at times. We had the example of spatulas. There are the ones you use for flipping eggs lets say, and then the rubber spatulas you use. The one you use for eggs is pretty useless in scraping out a bowl for example because it's not flexible. I feel like there needs to be more of an effort in every family to be flexible with each other. More fights are prevented when a family can be flexible. The excuse of you need to act a certain way with someone because "that's just how they are" is a poor excuse because in order for a family to really be strong then EVERYONE needs to be willing to bend at some point. Not saying at all that you should just go with the flow of everything and not have an opinion, but it's important for there to be leeway between people instead of one person always catering to the other.