Stress in Family Life

Stress is hard, annoying, tiring, and all together it sucks. But in all reality, it is absolutely necessary. Yes this sounds a little crazy because no one likes stress, but let’s think about where we would be without it. So often, stress is our motivator. Through stress comes our greatest accomplishments. Really, it only has a negative effect if you think about it in a negative way. Look at it this way, when you go to a haunted house, you start feeling anxious and jumpy and you get a knot in your stomach. You can either take this in a negative way and spend the whole time being scared to death and screaming at everything and end up with a bad overall experience, or you can look at it in the sense that you are in no actual danger, and have fun with it. Changing our perception, is the best way to change the effect that stress has on you. You can either look at it as something terrible, or you can flip it around and look at the marvelous opportunity that it could be.

Stress in a family brings the family close to one another. It is the glue that holds the family together in a sense. I have never met a young poor newlywed, who said that some of the best memories and moments came from those times. When stress is placed on a family, then it allows each member of the family, to find their own strengths and bind them together with everyone else’s. A personal example of my own happened when I was a junior in high school. A girl my age came to live with us for a year. She was from a different town, and I had seen her around school, and to be honest at first I wasn’t too fond of her. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t like her, she just didn’t see like someone I would get along with. Well much to my surprise, she ended up living with us, and even sharing a room with me. This put some stress on my family, because we didn’t know how well we would get along with her, we were trying to make her as comfortable as we could, and we and to make a lot of changes within our home. Over the course f the year, my family grew together so much more, and this girl became like another sister to us. Something that seemed like not a great situation at first (especially with me, having to give up part of my room, and not expecting to get along with her) turned out to be one of the best years of my life – a great opportunity that wouldn’t have come without the stress.

A crisis is similar, it is something that necessitates change. In a family, when a crisis happens, the family structure can change, such as a divorce, or a father losing his job. Again, there are two options in this situation. You can take it negatively or positively. In Chinese, there are two symbols that make up the word crisis. The first represents danger, and the second represents opportunity. Every little bit of stress, every hard time, every crisis, they all create opportunities for us to better ourselves especially within our families. If we can change our perception and look at it not as danger, but as an opportunity, then we can be happier, more confident, and all together life will be easier for us.