Enduring family crisis

No matter how much you love your family members family stress comes into every family. Family stress can come in many ways. Maybe a child is finding a hard time getting money for college or a younger child is being bullied at school. A parent may have lost a job or a family member gets sick and you have medical bills your family must pay now. In each of these situations there is stress put on a family but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have a family crisis. A crisis is an event that causes a lasting change. In Chinese the symbols that stand for crisis mean danger and opportunity. Which means that it there is a huge choice to be made will this event affect you and change you in a negative way or help you to grow to become even better and closer to others.

A good example of a family crisis like this would be the death of a loved family member. An event like this is not only a family stressor but a family crisis because it requires a change in the family unit. Some of these changes include changes in family roles and responsibilities. You may know families or even be a family where this has happened in their life and seen how in different families and different times there seems to be two different reactions to. Either the family brakes apart and things like divorce happen or family members stop talking to each other or the family all seems to pull together and although it is hard to become a strong family that loves and depends on each other. Why does this happen? Is it all just random and you have no control or is there something your family can do so it doesn’t fall apart in hard times.

I have found that there are two answers to this question the first is what you can do before hand to help build a strong family that can be resistant in hard times. This coping or small adjustments in our lives can make all the difference when a stressor or a crisis hits our own family. Think about it, how could you make small adjustments in your life for a finical crisis? Well you could start an emergency savings account and just put in a little each month. And a little less obvious you could learn communications skills with your spouse so that you can talk about how to work though that time. You can think of skills like communication and can help in any crisis and as you develop these skills as a family.

The second answer is found in how you think about a crisis and how you react to it. This is so important. Two families can have the same thing happen to them but depending on how they react and think about the event can be the difference between disaster and an amazing opportunity. For example, if the breadwinner in a home lost their job a family could think “oh no this is the worst thing ever and now if they don’t get a job soon we will go into debt.” But they could also re-frame it and think “we may have to make adjustments until they can get a new job. We can even find creative ways to help some extra money.” Do you see how these different ways of thinking could change the outcome? That is why it matters how you think and also what you do. Do you choose to sit and do nothing and not let others help or do you embrace help and do everything you can with what you have? Of course this doesn’t mean that it will be easy when crisis comes but you can know that there is hope no matter hard it is.