Preparing For the Storms of Life: Preparing Families to Effectively Handle the Stresses That Come

Lesson 1: Don’t Mess with Stress Lesson goals: Understand what stress is and how our body responds to it. Learn the definition of coping. Understand the family stress model. Before you begin this course. Please take a minute and complete this short pre course survey. Click on the link here https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/BCD3QWX Introduction: Have you ever felt as though you can’t keep up with the daily demands of being a wife and mother/husband and father? Do you feel like you have too much on your plate? This is stress and stress is a common occurrence in this busy, fast paced world that we live in. There is always so much to do in too little time. I know how stressful being a parent can be from firsthand experience. By the age of 25, I had a 4 year old, a 2 year old and a newborn baby. Six weeks after I had the C-section for my third child, I went under the knife yet again for an ACL knee reconstruction surgery. Sleep deprivation overcame me, I could not...

Lesson 2: The Tools You Need to Succeed Lesson Goals Learn about the ABCX model and how to apply it to your life. Learn what Cognitive Behavioral therapy is and how to apply it to your life. Introduction Now that we have talked about the basics of stress and coping we wanted to go into some greater study of a few tools that help to explain stress and what can be done to help you. This lesson isn’t to be confused with the lesson involving coping methods, which will follow directly after this one, but think of it as additional help. ABC-X Model As Boateng shares with us, the ABC-X Model was created by Reuben Hill around the time of the Great Depression (2017). As Hill studied families during this time he put together this model, which has been expanded by McCubbin to form the Double ABC-X Model, shown below. A first look at this chart may seem overwhelming, even stressful, but we promise that it isn’t as scary as it looks. As you can see, this chart i...