Family Stress

 

Hello, welcome back to my blog. Today I would like to talk about stress within families. Family stress is defined as a disturbance in the steady state of the family system. The disturbance can emerge from the outside or inside the family. Family stress can come from being under a lot of pressure, facing big changed, worrying about a problem, not having any or much control over the outcome of a situation, having responsibilities that you’re finding overwhelming, not having enough work, activities, or change in your like, financial hardships, death, divorce, and work. Many families are affected by multiple stressors at any given time. My personal family has been faced with many of these. My family has experienced the death of love one’s multiple times throughout my life. I have had all my great grandparents die in my lifetime, and many cousins. These stressors can cause a lot of chaos on a family unit. I remember when one of my cousins died when I was nine years old. This cousin was someone who I was really close with and he lived one street away from us. He would often come over and spend time with us. He was close to the age of one of my older sisters. When he died, we were living with my grandparents. We were living with them because our house was being remolded. This had already caused a lot of stress on our family because the entire remolding processes took over three months. So, in my grandparents four-bedroom house there was, my grandparents, my parents, my two sisters and I, and one of my cousins named Joni. It was a full house. On top of the stress of our living situation, my parents had to tell us that our cousin, Joseph was dead. They also had to explain this to our cousin Joni who was his sister. There was a lot of stress in the house at this time. My grandma was Joseph’s aunt, and she was helping plan the funeral. My mom helped her the best she could. I remember feeling the pain that was in the house from everyone. I remember that no one wanted to talk about what had happened. This was hard for me to process since I was only nine years old. I remember being confused and wondering what was going on with our family and why the dynamic was so different. Once we had the funeral things seemed to go a little bit back to normal but the next week my dad told me before I went school that our family dog got ran over by a car that night before. This again changed the dynamic of our home. Not only were we still grieving the lost of our family member but now our dog too. I remember going to school and telling my teacher and she made me talk to the school therapist. A few months later my family was able to move back into our house. This was right before the holidays and money was tight. My parents explained to us why money was tight, but it was still hard for us young children to know what exactly was going on. It was a hard year for our family, and everyone was a little on edge, but we eventually got through it. It was a stressful year, but we often talk about it now and we have been able to find the moment throughout that year that has brought us joy. Every family goes through stressful situations and experience, but they don’t last forever and sometimes joy can be found in the stressful situations.