Family Crisis

What is stress? Whenever someone comes up to you and tells you "I am so stressed" What are they referring to? Most of the time we tend to confuse being stressed with feeling distressed. Stress is outside or internal pressure that makes us move and achieve things. When we feel distressed our defenses go down, we start snapping at people, and if you are like me, we tend to cry ourselves to sleep. There are several different parts of the brain, but when we talk about stress and distress I want to focus on only three parts. The frontal lobe is the part of the brain that takes care of our logical reasoning. Within the frontal lobe is the hypothalamus. The function of this part of the brain is to regulate body temperature, hormonal activity, thirst, hunger, and other homeostatic functions that we don't think about. The third part of the brain I want to focus on is the brain stem, the most basic part of our brain. The brain stem in charge of keeping us alive. It controls the heartbeat, blood pressure, breathing, swallowing, blinking, consciousness, and whether one is awake or sleepy.

When we perceive danger, for example, if a bear jumps out of the bushes and attacks you, suddenly the functions in your frontal lobe are not as important. The brain focuses on keeping you alive and the brain stem and hypothalamus jump to action and you either fight, fly, or freeze. The key word is the perception of danger. Thankfully we do not live in the woods and do not have to worry too often of bear attacks. And if you do, then you have my condolences. However, the everyday stressors we have today can trigger the bear attack mode our brain has. The problem is when a family perceives a danger when there really is none, and we react to that perception.

I do recognize that there are certain situations where families can succumb to the pressures, such as a disability, illness, death of a loved one, or economic problems, or some may suffer discrimination. Even then there are many truths that are often twisted into lies, and this can lead to family fights and deterioration. The solution is taking a step back from these problems

to think things through and not get caught up in them.