The Family Under Stress

For this week’s discussion, we focused on the families under stress. There are countless numbers of things that give us stress in life whether they be good for our health or bad for health. To be better understand how these stressors affect families and individuals and how they ended up coping with these occurrences, family scholars created a model. This model was called the ABCX family crisis model. A represents the events of stress and the difficulties it produces. B represents the resources that the family uses to cope and it also represents how the families respond to such situation. C represents what cognition of the family and how they define the events that happened. X is the result of A, B, and C when they interact to produce the crisis. A, B, and C are all crucial to the outcome. Some stressor events can include the death of a family member, a severely injured child who is placed in the hospital, or a loss of a job while providing for a family of nine. Stressors can be both internal and external. Some internal stressors are mental health problems and a moment in time where you are unable to think clearly to decide. Something that we need to understand is that not all stressors are equal, and the impact that it deals with an individual may not be the same as it would for you. A big part of stress is what we do with it.  We can cope with it or we can just get by. Coping and getting by are two different ways to react to stress. Coping is when we make fine changes to be able to be proactive to react in a manner that will allow you to deal effectively with something difficult. While getting by results in dealing with things that do not result in much, in the end, it does not result in helping at all. There are many ineffective coping patterns some of them are denial, avoidance, and scapegoating. Denial could be one of the most common ineffective coping patterns, it is when people will not believe what they observe. An example of this is when someone is married to a person who has drinking problems, but they refuse this person as a drinking problem. This can be useful when it is used as a temporary measure that enables family members to prepare their resources. Although if it is used for the long term it can be very destructive. A way to break out of denial is for family members to openly admit that there is a problem or that they have a problem. Sometimes when people openly recognize their problems it can lead to their avoidance of the problem. Avoiding usually is counterproductive. So those who abuse drugs and avoid making any actions to stop can increase their risk for more health problems. Another occurrence that can happen is that when people admit their problems, but they direct someone to put the blame on their problems. Unlike the other two, in a short time, it does not provide a use to the benefit to the family or individual. Scapegoating is a way of shifting responsibilities to another person or thing so that they do not feel guilty or responsible for dealing with the crisis. What I believe that families need to understand is that nothing can truly be resolved with action. If we leave something to be how it is, it will never help the family to grow in the way it should. This family would be shackled by what happened and will drag them until the very end. It may seem hard at the beginning, and it may produce problems and stress, but in the end, it will entirely worth the risk to do.