Family Crisis and Coping

 Marriage and family is hard. Yep, it’s not the Disney fairytale that people dream about. Not all families are perfect, and everyone goes through struggles and crises. It’s how we deal with them as a family that makes the difference between growing together or falling apart. 

In the beginning of the week, we went over some of the problems that can arise in families and the impacts it has on the individuals. One of the most common struggles that families deal with is addiction. It could be an addiction to alcohol, drugs, pornography, video games, etc. Alcohol and drugs are the most talked about though because it’s more out in the open and it’s been around the longest. Alcohol addiction often stems from an individual going through some sort of hardship and is looking for a way to cope. It could be that they lost their job, one of their family members are sick, or they are under a lot of financial stress and need something to relax themselves. Another cause of alcoholism is that the person’s parents also struggled with alcohol and it became a habit in their family. Whatever the cause is, alcoholism effects everyone in the family, not just the individual. Some of the effects is that a child or spouse could be abused verbally, physically, emotionally, or sexually. Victims of abuse often feel powerless to do anything or feel like it’s their fault that this is happening to them, even though it’s not. This is true for those who experience sexual abuse from their spouse or family member.  

Another addiction that I want to talk about is video game addiction. Video games is the new past time for everyone these days and every day they come out with new ones. Now I don’t believe that people who play video games are bad and they have an addiction to them, but witnessing  the extreme effects videogames can do to a family has put them in a different light for me. I have a good friend whose husband loves to play video games. Every day he comes home from work and goes straight to his office and plays his videogames for the entire day. It’s really sad because he has children and they never see him. Hearing my friend’s experiences about how hard it is to raise her family without the help or support of her husband has made me realize how crucial it is to monitor ourselves so that we can prevent us and our family from developing habits that will damage them and their families. That also means telling a individual when they have a problem. It’s not easy, but the only way to fix something is to first bring it out into the open. 

Today, my professor talked about the different ways families and individuals cope with crises. One of the important points we discussed was that how someone interpreted the crises played a big role on how they dealt with it and how they were able to bounce back. For example, during WW2 a lot of families were split apart because their husbands or fathers had to go fight in the war, and many didn’t come back. This put a huge strain on many families because now the mothers had to be the breadwinners of the family and still take care of everything. This was especially hard because during this time getting an education wasn’t the norm and a lot of people, especially women, had a hard time getting a job because they didn’t have the education for it. So then, these families went through a kind of depression because they believed that they couldn’t get out of their situation. On the other hand, there were those who took their crisis and turned it into an opportunity to grow and learn. The Chinese characters for crisis translate to “danger opportunity”. And it’s true, the way we look at a crisis will determine how we will react and cope with it.