Using Our Minds to Fight Our Battles

I never fully understood family stressors or crises until I turned 18. And it wasn’t that I suddenly understood when I got older haha! The night before my eighteenth birthday, my father had a heart attack. He ended up being in open heart surgery on my birthday. Even though all went as well as physically possible, it was scary. It seemed like in one second, something could rip apart our family we had taken a lifetime to build. Everyone goes through family stressors and crises. But, I think ultimately how we decide to think about them makes all the difference in their outcome!

There is a common explanation of stressor events that is called the Double ABCX Model. In this, it shows the components that always make up how a stressor event affects a family. A would equal the Actual Event. We can just take the example of my father’s heart attack. A would be the actual heart attack. B is Both the resources and how we as a family responded to the event. So, B for us, would be praying for him and taking him to the hospital. C is the family’s Cognition towards that event. How we think of and define it. So, instead of saying that this terrible thing was going to ruin us, or our family would never be the same, we said that everything would still be okay and that we would fight through it as a family, no matter the outcome! The X comes into play because it means the Total eXperience. How a family feels about their event and what they actually do about it creates the total result. It’s not what happened to you, but rather how you deal with it!

You might be thinking that is all good and dandy in a serious event such as mine, but I honestly believe it can help in any situation, large or small. For example, I have battled with anxiety since high school. Sometimes it gets so bad that I can’t eat for days without feeling like I will throw up every meal. Other times, I can’t stay asleep, or even fall asleep at all, for weeks at a time. I never had had anything like this happen to me until high school, and I honestly didn’t know what was going on. I thought something was wrong with me, that I was dying or dead, haha.. But over the years, I have learned how to manage my anxiety mostly by using my thoughts.

I think it is so cool that God gave us the ability to govern our thoughts and be our own master. I realized that when my anxiety gets bad, I can deal with it. I handle my anxiety the same way I handled my father’s heart attack. It’s all about how we think of something that dictates how we react to it. Everyone has felt anxiety at some point in their life- before a big test, when deciding to get married, or even while driving on slick roads. So everyone knows the feeling- your heart jumps into your throat, your palms get sweaty, and you feel a little nauseous.

But, many times I feel this way during a time that shouldn’t be anxiety-provoking, such as sitting on my couch watching TV. Now, I have learned to stop what I’m doing and analyze what’s going on. Anxiety comes because our brains register something as dangerous. A lot of the time, I realize I have a test or something in a few days and that’s one of my huge triggers. My brain is right to be nervous about that, but it doesn’t need to be anxious. I have learned to do a few things that have really helped in situations such as this. I talk to myself. I ask myself what I am nervous about. I point out things that make me nervous, and make a list of them. After doing that, I can say that the actual outcome, even if the worst case scenario happens, will be fine. I break things down into positive, authentic statements about what is going on, and my body relaxes. So instead of thinking, “I’m going to fail this test!” I think “Well, I have studied everything I can and I am sufficiently prepared.”

It’s incredible to me that something as simple as that makes me relax. My heart rate slows, and it doesn’t feel like someone is sitting on my chest anymore. It’s ALL about how we perceive things, folks. When we reassure ourselves that everything truly will be okay, it really will be. Our brains are the most precious gift. We should use them as such!