Stress!

 

Welcome back blog reader!

This week was super interesting but in a special kind of way. I am probably getting repetitive because I am pretty sure that every week I say “this week was super interesting” but any who… lol. This past week we discussed the importance of stress… well I guess I should say the benefits of stress. Yep, you read that correctly, benefits!

Stress is often associated with events that are harmful to us in any way. For example, as of today I am feeling pretty stressed since I have fallen behind on some schoolwork for literally all of my classes. This is making me stressed and irritable. If we were to crack down on this issue you would see that the stressor is schoolwork. Now, thanks to the stress that the stressor is causing I am making myself get my homework done. Which in turn is making the “stress” a good emotion; it is making me get my homework done. I believe this to be true for most scenarios where stress is present. In this instance we will be talking about family stressors. Our professor shared us an amazing story about something that happened to him and his family when he was a young child. Unfortunately, when he was younger one of siblings passed away and this caused a huge amount of stress on the parents and on the family as a whole. From what I had observed this situation could have affected the family in two separate ways. The first way was that both parents could have shut down from all the pain and sorrow and would cause to become distant from their spouse and their other kids. On the other hand, the loss of the young child could bring the entire family together and make come closer and depend on another to surpass this tragic situation. To reinstate my points; the stress of the loss could have caused the family to separate, or it could have brought the family closer together. In the case of my professor this situation brought his family closer together. He shared that after the loss of his sibling the family grew together, and his parents were happier with one another as well his siblings. Before his brother had passed all siblings used to fight with another frequently but after the event the siblings began to be nicer with another and grew up with greater harmony. This was a beautiful and marvelous story but what if another family does not react the same way?

This is going to be a sad story about how stress can negatively impact a family. This story took place when I was 7 years old. One of my dad’s cousin had a boyfriend who was not the greatest person because he was caught up in drugs and alcohol. Due to the fact that he was trapped in those vices he did not have a lot of money. Eventually the girlfriend got pregnant, and this caused a huge rift between them since they did not have the means to raise a family. The boyfriend was so stressed and on top of that he did not want to have the baby. So, one night he was doing drugs and drinking, and he was so out of his mind that the stress caused him to do something horrible. He did not know how to deal with the pregnant girlfriend and decided to take the life of the girlfriend at the same time killing the baby. This story is sad and tragic but if we dissect the story you can see what lead him to killing his girlfriend. The combination of drugs and huge amounts of stress made him commit the horrible.

Stress can be a positive or negative thing. It is really up the family or individual to decide how he chooses to deal with the stress.