Light and Truth

 In the event of stress, how do you and your family respond? Do you all respond the same way? How have different responses to stress events impacted your family? For me, I think immediately of one of my aunts. She already is someone who has a negative and dramatic outlook on life, so when her mother passed away over 10 years ago, it was extremely hard for her. And honestly, it totally should be; she’s justified in taking it hard. However, I feel like she has held onto the pain for way too long, and it has affected her immediate and extended family life. She has taken her pain out on God, but I also feel like it has been an excuse to extremely distance herself from her husband’s side of the family that she never really liked in the first place anyways. The way my aunt’s siblings took their mother’s deaths was much different from her response. They, of course, were in pain and needed to mourn, but they were able to move on much quicker, and it didn’t impact their family’s lives even as remotely as negatively. So what’s the difference? 

There is an ABCX equation that helps us to begin to understand why there are those differences. “A” stands for the actual event that happened. “B” stands for both resources and responses to the event, which I will talk more about. “C” stands for cognition, or the way that an individual thinks about the situation, actual event and resources/responses included. “X” stands for the whole experience. So let’s go back to resources and responses. When an individual goes through a stress event, here is a good list, but I acknowledge that it’s an incomplete list of resources that influence an individual’s stress event. This list includes: money, food, clothing, friends, family, previous experience or practice with the event, greater community, religious community, religious faith, and memories. I recognize that I can’t necessarily go into these as in-depth as I would like, so I hope you’ll refer back to this list and give each one a considerable amount of thought, and weigh the pros and cons of each. 

For the first three resources listed (money, food, and clothing), I think it’s easy to see that with plenty of those, it would make the stress event a lot more focused, and therefore, easier to handle. Now, I could be wrong, but that’s the way I see it. If someone is having a hard time grieving the loss of their loved one, for example, that process would be even harder if you were distracted, or even more stressed, with a lack of money. On top of that, your child is growing out of their clothes, and no longer have appropriate attire to attend the funeral. So, on top of all of the financial strain, there’s also a time slot you need to allow yourself to make sure your children are dressed the way they need to be. And to make matters even more stressful, you now need to provide food for, not just your family now, but also everybody that will be attending the viewing/memorial/service. 

So far, we have mentioned “A”, the actual event, and “B”, both resources and responses, and now I am excited to talk about “C”, cognition, or the way we think about life. Personally, I am a religious person, and that greatly influences the way that I view stress events, and to follow suit here, specifically death. I’m thoroughly convinced that faith in anything brings some sort of degree of peace no matter what. But I’m even more convinced, to the point that I call it knowledge, that if you seek truth and light, your soul can never be overtaken by anything thrown its way. Sure, major events can still be extremely hard, but with the knowledge of correct principles and beliefs, that you are absolutely undoubting on, it can produce the miracles, the hope, and the healing that you are needing in your life with power. 

Overall, with all of these parts of the equation being discussed, we can begin to see the experience that ourselves and others are having, and why. Obviously, there is no perfect explanation, but it makes a lot more sense to me why my aunt, who struggles with faith, and pushes friends and family away, would still be acting and feeling the way she does now. I hope more than anything that this overview on stress events has some sort of impact in your life from now on. Thank you for indulging me.