Two Sides of the Same Coin

It may seem like a mystery how two people can go through the same stressful event and yet come out from it completely different! This mystery is actually not the mysterious at all though. One way this phenomena was explained was by what's called as the ABCX model. A stands for Actual event. B stands for Both resources and responses and C stands for Cognitions which equal X, which stands for total eXperience.

You can understand this better through an example. Lets say two couples suffer through the death of a child. The actual event would be the death of a child. Now lets look at both  recourses and responses. Lets say one couple is new to the area, they don't know anyone and they respond by closing them selves off to the community and each other. Lets say the other couple though has a strong role in the community, The respond by reach out for support and during the funeral the whole community comes to support and bring food and flowers to the mourning couple. Then there is cognition. Lets say the first couple view this as the worst thing that could ever happen, they are mad at God for allowing such a thing to occur, maybe they are mad at each other for not trying harder to keep the baby alive. Maybe the other couple use it as an opportunity to come closer to their other children, maybe they look forward with hope of seeing their child in the next life. They may possibly view it as sad and yet use it to have meaning full discussions with each other that unifies them. As you can probably imagine both of these couples probably ended up having a very different total experiences.

Challenges will always be hard but hard doesn't  need to mean bad in fact much of how life goes depends on our attitude and how we face these seemingly impossible heartaches. I love the Chinese symbol for the word crisis. It is made by combining the symbol of Danger and opportunity. Every challenge in our life can either be a danger to everything we know or it can be an opportunity to grow and become better. With in our families it is inevitable that we will come face to face with a crisis and it can either tear our families apart or bring us together.  Much of this choice is ours, how we choose our cognition and responses and how we use our resources will effect the outcome of our challenges.