Just the other night I was visiting a friend at her apartment and I had trouble finding parking. Lots of student housing here in Rexburg has designated spots for permit parking and visitor parking. If you park where you're not supposed to you get booted. It was around 8pm that I gave up waiting for a space to open up in the visitor section and decided to park in a permit spot and hope for the best. When I came back out to my truck a couple hours later I found that I had indeed been booted. It's not fun when the consequence to your decision - something as simple as parking in the wrong place - costs you $70.
This little experience isn't a family crisis, or, to be frank, a crisis at all. It's just one example of a time this week where things didn't turn out the way I wanted them to.
Life never goes the way we plan. No matter what, there will always be bumps in the road and lots of stress, especially for families because it's not just one person's well-being you have to worry about, it's everybody's. This week I'm going to talk about different types of stressors and crises that families encounter and the effective ways of responding to these events which can help the family come out stronger in the end.
Getting booted might be a stressful event for a college student, but it doesn't even compare to the levels of stress that families experience when going through a crisis. The table below not only demonstrates the types of stressor events but also their different characteristics, such as coming from within or outside the family, expected or unpredictable, etc.
As you can imagine, some stressor events are harder to cope with than others. Something like losing a loved one may have more long-term effects than breaking your arm. Still, effective coping patterns can be applied to both types of events to allow families to still function after a crisis, and maybe even function better than before.
First, it's important to recognize that "a family is most likely to cope effectively with problems or crises when the members have worked together to develop certain family strengths. The strengths become a foundation on which the family can stand together and deal with crises" (Lauer & Lauer, 1990).
One of the tools to effective coping is taking responsibility. Many people's instinctual reaction to a crisis might be denial or avoidance, which might be okay for them, but it ultimately doesn't benefit them in the long run. Accepting responsibility for yourself and your family means that you will not deny or avoid the problem and you won't play the victim game. Another tool is affirming your own and your family's worth. Our self-esteem often takes a beating when we go through these difficult experiences, so it's important to continue to believe yourself and your ability to overcome. The next tool is finding a balance between self-concern and other-concern. This is especially true in families since it's common for individuals to feel like they are always putting so much into a relationship yet getting nothing in return. Also, crises tend to cause people to shut down and kind of block out the people closest to them. We have to find that healthy balance so that relationships within the family don't suffer.
Next, a tool for coping that I've found very effective in my own life is reframing, or trying to gain a new perspective on the situation. This tool is illustrated well in the story that is told in the video "The Refiner's Fire" that I've attached below. I strongly encourage you to watch it. The woman in the video talks about how because of the trials she went through she is now able to help other people struggling with similar things. Redefining the meaning of the situation that we find ourselves in is not denial. Rather, it is simply acknowledging the fact that people can look at a situation various ways. Hopefully we can learn to look at a crisis as an obstacle that will lead to our growth as we overcome it.
The last effective coping tool is finding and using available resources. While life was designed to test us, we were not designed to go through it alone. There are many resources available to us such as family, friends, support groups, and therapists.
Before I learned about all of this I had no idea how important it was for a family to try to prepare themselves for when tragedy strikes. Obviously there's no way to know when and how some crises will come, but we can still prepare by establishing a strong foundation to base our family upon. Also, the type of outcome you get after encountering a crisis matters because a family takes that with them as they face their next crisis and so on and so forth. It's a cycle that just keeps repeating itself. So do what you can to yield an outcome that propels you upward and forward on your family's journey.
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