Family Under Stress

This week as part of our preparation for class we had to make a list of ten crises that our family experienced and write what made them stressful. When I first sat down to do this assignment I thought that I wouldn't be able to think of ten things because I thought that my family never had any stressful crises. Wow I was so wrong. I realized that every family has crises. When I got to class my teacher started talking about how a crisis provides danger and an opportunity for a family, depending on how a family reacts to the situation. We then created a few categories on the board and ranked the list of things in each category. The categories we used were: That stunk! It's ok. We Managed. We're Better. Thank You! As we processed this as a class we found that the experiences we listed in the That Stunk! category a lot of them contained isolation and human error. We also noticed that the categories were progressive, some things may have started in the That Stunk! category but with time and perspective they may have moved up into the other categories. We found that the experiences in the Thank You! category were the ones where we had reached out for help from others, had an eternal perspective throughout and had respect for one another. One experience that I put in my Thank You! category was when my brother totaled our car with our younger brother in the car. As a family we went through the categories very quickly. At first we were all thinking This stinks, our car is totaled and the insurance is going to go up. Then after looking at how the accident happened we realized it was a miracle that both of my brothers were still alive and so was a man that had been walking his dogs on the sidewalk. We were so grateful that they had been watched over and that we were still together. It didn't matter that the car was totaled or that the insurance had cost more, what mattered was that we were still together and I feel like this experience brought our family closer together. The thing that I took away most from this lesson was that every time there is a crisis there are basically two roads to take: it can be a danger to the family and pull the family apart, or it can offer the family an opportunity to come closer together and build their relationships.