We're goin' crazy!

This week it was all about crises and how families deal with them. Crisis is defined as something that makes it so a family can no longer function as it did before the event. We learned a cool little formula:

Actual event--observable part, the stressor
Both resources and responses--attitudes, $, insurance skills, flexibility, cohesion, lean vs. blame, church
Cognitions--how they perceive the event
------------
total eXperience--the crisis

It was cool to learn about how it isn't the event that determines whether the family will survive or not, but rather how the family deals with it. Certain things make it easier for a family to deal with crisis like the things under the resources and responses. The way we think about a crisis really affects how we experience it and how the family will be able to function after the crisis. Our thoughts sure do have a lot of power!

Some tips we got were:

• "It's the structure, not the stressor"  We often focus on the actual event and not how we deal with it, but really it's the structure of our family and what we choose to do that affects how we'll be afterward.
• "Making decisive acts, being mindful of other's situations, and not following natural tendencies tends to lead to improvement through crisis." Families can either go through crisis and be worse off, the same, or better off afterward. I think most of us want to be better off, so if we think about how we're acting and choose to be agents who act rather than objects that are acted upon, our families will be better off following a crisis. 
• "If it doesn't get resolved, it won't change." Too often we think if we just kind of ignore things and let them "blow over" they'll go away, but this often leads to extended periods of hard feelings that are unresolved.
• "Observe and describe reality" ex: I'm really sad and it's hard to deal with VS. I'm really sad , it isn't fair that someone did this to me. 

We're all bound to face a crisis at some point in our family lives, but we can choose to make the best of it and come out better than we were before!

"We often think the event creates the feeling but in reality our thoughts of the event create our feelings which lead to our actions...we decide how we respond to events."