Family Troubles

How many of you also come from families that are just dysfunctional? Perfect, glad I’m not the only one! A lot was discussed that was just amazing but one that truly just stuck out to me was crisis vs. stressors.

CRISIS:

Here below a not perfect chart that was shown in class and I’m going to describe it because this is in all families and it’s how we handle crisis’s in our lives.

Alright, thanks for accepting my horrid attempt at drawing that. As I explain it I want you to refer back to it.

1.    This is where all families start.

2.    Here is the crisis.

3.    We all get defeated during hardships and fall down.

4.    We bounce back and do even better than where we started.

5.    We bounce back and are just a little above where we started.

6.    We bounce back to the same place that we started.

7.    We don’t bounce back.

I found this so extremely powerful because it’s so accurate, for me at least. During each family crisis or even my own personal crisis I have hit each of these. Not always have I bounced back to where I was or above but stayed lowered or not even bounced at all. Each of us will have different hardships and crisis’s, that’s what makes life fun and exciting. We get to learn from each other and depend on others.

STRESSOR:

Now this my me to a T. I am a huge stressor and as we discussed this in class, I realized that there are so many things around me that could aid me to overcome and change some of the things that I might be stressing over.

But first, an equation.

                        A
                        B
            +          C
             ------------------
                      X

Y’all ready to have your mind blown?! Okay, here is the graph again, I’m going to add what they all mean.

                        A  = Stressor event
                        B  = How we cope
            +          C  = How we view the event
      --------------------------
                      X  = The end result.

This is simply put how handle stress. I wanted to put it this way because it makes to me a little more sense but here is how my teacher, himself, remembers it.

                        A  = Actual event
                        B  = Both resources available and responses
            +          C  = Cognition
      --------------------------
                      X  = Total experience

Which I also love. A is pretty obvious to figure out and it depends on who you are and the situation that might stress you out in life. B is how we handle the situation. Do we use all the resources available to us to help us get through said event? Some of those resources could be; family, friends, faith, community, etc. It’s also how we respond to the aid and to the stressor. C is how we see it. Do we put it in a light that will allow us to move forward and overcome the situation or are we such a Debby the Downer that there is no moving forward? Add all these together and we get X, the total experience. It’s all wrapped into one. I’m going to try and make you another chart to see that stressors are always going to be part of our lives. They are all connected and sometimes feel like they have been merged into one. 

P = Pile up. Sometimes stressors pile up leading to an event that causes a hardship. As you can see it never really ends. They are all connected and sometimes it will feel like we can barely stay afloat. As you can see in this display above you can see for some of the arrows, they go both ways. The way we cope and handle the situation can affect the event making it easier to handle or affect it to be become much worse. They all play apart in the total experience.