COPING WITH STRESS

Coping With Stress

Coping With Stress

Introduction

This study purely deals with my personal experience of grief and stress. In this study, I will describe the neighborhood environments we resided in, and my occupation prior to the major stressor event of death in my family. I am a pre-school director in a private preschool and my husband is self employed. We have a handsome, very outgoing and wonderful 16-year old son, and 5-year old daughter. I will also briefly describe each of us as to our attitudes toward life, our bond, and some of the characteristics we shared. In this study, using the Lipma-Blumen scheme, I will assess my family stressor of the death of my beloved sister, which really began to hit with psychological and emotional trauma in 2004, during the time I was pregnant with my second child.

Stress

Every family deals with stress. For many families, the stress is just an inevitable accompaniment to modern life, a background source of white noise that ebbs and flows with schedules, special events, and the nodal points of the family life cycle. Even losses are part of that normal cycle when they arrive as expected-at the end of life. But for many other couples and families, extraordinary stressors enter their lives. These stressors are unanticipated events that disrupt family life and can potentially damage individuals and their relationships.

Every couple and/or family therapist encounters clients struggling to cope with unexpected stressors. Therapists who work with traumatized couples and families have long observed how the impact of traumatic stressors filters through the relationships in intimate systems. The event may initially strike one individual or subsystem, but sooner or later the entire system is affected. Yet despite the observation that all systems are eventually affected, it is also true that each couple and family is different and every stressor is unique. The best we can do as therapists is to know as much as possible about (a) the common patterns of family structure and functioning and (b) the common elements that contribute to the unique impact of different types of stressor events.

It is difficult to conceive of a loss that is more painful and overwhelming than the death of a child. The death of one's child has been described as fundamentally different from any other loss (Kagan Klein, 1998), the worst loss that one can experience in adulthood (Rando, 1986; Sanders, 1980), and one of the losses most likely to lead to profoundly overwhelming and life-changing grief (Rosenblatt & Burns, 1986; Walsh & McGoldrick, 1991). Compared to other adulthood losses, the death of a child produces the most intense grief and the widest range of emotions (Sanders, 1980). With the death of one's child “a significant portion of the parent's life energy can effectively die with the child” (Rubin & Malkinson, 2001, p. 219). Deeply held beliefs are confronted with a child's death: Children should outlive their parents and serve as a bridge to the future. Parents should be able to guide, protect, and keep ...