Stress and Coping
Military families have a wide variety of unique challenges that they have to learn to cope with. While other families may have similar challenges, military families often must learn to cope with many of these challenges all at once.
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Stressors are events that happen in every person's life; all families experience stressors. They are not necessarily good or bad, just something that disrupts the status quo and has the ability to cause change.
Normative events are events that happen in all families, may be anticipated, and is short term.
Examples of Stressors
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Loss of job/ Change in income
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Moving
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Deployments
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Illness
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Non-breadwinner goes to work
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Discipline problems due to one or more parent's absence.
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Financial struggles
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Lonliness
Examples of Normative Events
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Having a baby
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Moving (if this is an repeating occurrence)
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Long distance relationship
Okay, so what do I do about it?
Ruben Hill created a family stress model in 1949 and called it the ABC-X model around 10 years later. It was developed and became the basis for many family stress models. It’s main focus is on pre-crisis variables.
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What in the world does that mean? How you and your family act in the pre-crisis stages determine whether or not your stressors lead to crisis or healthy coping.
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According to this model, A is the stressor, this is the thing that happens before a crisis. B is the family's crisis-meeting resources. In other words, the resources and avenues that a family can use to cope. And C is the family's perception of the situation or how they define it. Lastly, X is the crisis.
Stressors do not have to lead to crisis. How a family reacts in the other phases of the model, B (using resources) and C (defining the event), dictate whether or not the situation becomes a crisis, X.
A The stressors we talked about at the beginning of this lesson.
B The resources available to your family can do much to help you deal with stressors in a healthy way.
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Ask yourself:
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What can I do? What can't I do?
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Are there people who can help? Family, friends, therapist, teachers, community members, etc.
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Are there community programs I can look into?
Are there books, articles, other people etc. that could give you valuable information to help you through your difficult situation?
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Apply: Make a list of 10 resources available to you and your family
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C How the situation is perceived by your family will have a large impact on how you decide to react to it. If they feel like it’s not a big deal or that they should shove it under the rug so to speak, they may end up with a crisis later. If they react too negatively and adopt a fixed-mindset, they may also lead themselves into a crisis due to lack of planning.
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Cognitive re-framing: Your attitude is everything in coping effectively. If you can change your attitude and mindset your family will be able to cope in healthier ways.
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Apply: Try to take a step back from the situation and redefine the situation.
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X Crisis: This is when your stressor(s) turn into crises. The great thing about this model is that it is all about avoiding this stage. Being proactive in stages B and C will help your family to keep crises from coming.
Families that can identify stressors and come up with proactive plans for coping with them, will be able to avoid crises. One way to do this is to build up resilience and resilient qualities/characteristics. But we’ll get into that in our next lesson.
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Lesson 1 Takeaways
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1. Identify Stressors in your family's lives
2. Identify Resources that can help your family cope in a healthy way
3. Define the situation- be on the same page as a family
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Check out these links to some possible resources for your family:
