Crisis in the family

This week we talked about the crisis in the family and the affects it has on individuals and as the family as a whole. One thing we talked about that I really enjoyed was viewing crisis through the symbolic interaction theory. This theory states that each person can interpret and view the same event and come up with completely different meanings. I had an interesting experience as I went out and talked to other people about crises that happened in their families and how they defined them. One of my friends said that in high school her dad was changing jobs so he worked all like 18 hours a day. She said that it was kind of nice because he wasn't around to bug her but to her mom it was really difficult. I thought this example was illustrative of how the same event can mean completely different things to people in the same family living under the same roof. I like how we discussed the normative stressors that are events that are going to happen to most families over the period of life. These are things such as the birth of new children, marriage of children, and the death of a parent. It was nice to see the different coping patterns and to see which ones don't produce growth over the long term. Reframing, which is where you change your perspective of something that has happened in the past, is something that has really helped me in my life. When we have negative experiences we tend to focus on the negative outcomes but as I've gone back and looked at the negative experiences I've been able to reframe them in my mind as learning experiences which I think has really helped me with coping.