A very common phrase that everybody seems to say is life is hard, or something of the sort. Why is life so hard? Why do we get stressed over certain events? Or why is this happening to me? There are some common questions that have been said. The thing to consider is what can we learn from those stressors and hardships? What are they supposed to teach us? We came to this earth to learn and grow from our experiences.
There are many types of these challenges that affect both individuals and families. Challenges such as financial stability, moral trust with your spouse/partner and the typical break downs and inconveniences of everyday life piling up. This can be especially difficult with couples cohabiting or those who get stressed easily or have anxiety attacks.
Inevitably, problems that don’t get resolved with a partner while they are small will then grow up to be major problems that could lead to contention and stress within the family. That’s another set of topics to keep in mind, the stressors outside and inside the family. The outside stressors being financial problems, coworkers, etc. Then the inside stressors consist of relationship problems, family members picking up bad habits that that are hard to break; and lacking necessities such as sleep; health and needs and expectations being met by your partner.
Something that would be beneficial in a relationship is knowing what makes your partner upset or disappointed and learning to avoid those things as much as possible. Then knowing the cooling mechanism of both you and your partner.
Now we may complain about all these struggles that happen to us especially in our family, but isn’t that the best way to grow stronger? Take a muscle for example, the more you cause resistance you put on your muscles the stronger it becomes. Why is that? It makes room for improvement in the relationship. You can’t find out how much someone really loves you if you never have to go through any trials that test that love. The more we love our partners the more committed we are at working out problems. It essential that we can talk through struggles and not ignore the problem or avoid the problem. There is a speaker that talks about the importance of communicating with your partner to limit the need for assumptions and disappointment; his name is John Lund and his talk is “For All Eternity”, I would highly recommend checking it out. He talks about content communicating which means to talk openly with your partner about you expectations, love languages, using appropriate language and so much more. I would like to just paraphrase and touch on these topics but it will only be a sample. For the most part when you assume something about what your partner is thinking or expecting, you are wrong. It is important to communicate so clearly your expectations and what you are feeling in a way that there is no way you can be misunderstood. Knowing your partner’s love language is very important, because you will know how to connect with them better, and they will appreciate your effort to appeal to their emotions. Lastly, the way we communicate is very important; there is parent language which consists of “do this….”. There is also permission language which consists of “can I….”. Then there is the language of equal partners which is set up as a request and respect, which looks like “it would mean a lot to me if you would….”. If we own our words and make clear our expectations of the partner, there will be less stress and contention in the couple(the foundations of the family) then in the family.
Lastly, something that we can relate our stresses to is this equation; A+B+C=x which is defined as; stressor/actual event+ Resources and our responses+ our cognition= X. The X is the product of how well we handle the stressful events. The better resources and contemplating ability we have, the better we will be able to handle the stressful events in our families.
I hope you enjoyed this blog, let me know if you have any questions or comments.
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