The Family Under Stress

 Hello everyone! I have been looking forward to my blog this week because I think it’s such a unique topic that we don’t talk about a lot. This week in class we focused on stress in the family and I was very interested in the idea that not all stress in the family is bad. It was such a cool experience for me to reflect this week on my own personal family stress and see how it has shaped my family and our relationships with each other. I used to think that any kind of stress was bad because it can lead to so many different things that typically have consequences. It’s easy to get overwhelmed when things become stressful which can then cause tension, arguments, hard feelings, etc. In my opinion I believe that the positives outweigh all the negatives. 

While reflecting on my own family, I’ve thought of a couple different experiences that I want to share. My dad has struggled with an immune deficiency most of his life. This alone has caused some stress within my family. My mom is constantly worried about my dad getting sick because something that is normal for us could put him in the hospital. He receives treatments each month which are very experience. They typically try to find a study that he can be in so that it’s free, but it’s not always easy to be accepted. In elementary school, my brother and I woke up one morning and found our grandma at our house and not our parents. My dad had been admitted to the hospital due to an intestinal problem. My dad was in the hospital for a few weeks which put extra stress on my mom to provide for our family and she was obviously worried about my dad. I wasn’t completely aware of what was going on, but I remember being so scared because my dad and I are very close. The doctors didn’t know in the beginning how to help my dad which made the situation even scarier. Looking back at this experience I’ve noticed how much it brough my family together.  At a young age I realized how important family is and that you never really know what the next day will bring. I still fought with my parents and brother, but I valued each day I had with them. Despite the stress our family was somehow brought together through the tough times. 

Our reading this week said, “The point we wish to stress in this section is that whatever the particular crisis you face, there are always alternative ways of dealing with it. You can’t control all of the things that happen in your life, but you can control the way you respond to them. This doesn’t mean that you can avoid the trauma of crises. It does mean… you can avoid long-term, adverse consequences. In fact, it is possible to turn the crisis into something that yields long- term, positive consequences.” I love the idea that we can control how we deal with crisis. In my personal example I shared above, my family could’ve shut down. I could’ve been angry that my mom wasn’t around much because she was busy working and staying with my dad, or fought with my brother more, or been angry with God for allowing something bad to happen to my dad. Instead we chose to support each other and look for the positives within a terrible situation. There’s no way for families to avoid crisis, so I believe it’s important for parents to show their children how to react and be open to talk through what is happening.