Stress of Life

We face stress every day of our lives, we vent our stresses to our close friends and family members and while we try to avoid it, we accept it as a normal part of our lives. But what really is stress?

Stress, at its roots, is primarily a physiological system. Our brain is made up of a series of different parts with the parts that are generally more advanced and evolved on the outside, and the generally simpler and less evolved on the inside. Two of the innermost parts are the limbic system and the brain stem. The limbic system is the part of our body the controls our natural bodily reflexes, while the brain stem controls our unconscious, metabolic functions like heart rate and breathing.

When our body encounters an event we perceive as stressful, our limbic system kicks in and starts to take control of the brain stem. Our heart rate increases, we breath more quickly, our sleep cycle is ignored, and the other parts of our brain focused on problem solving and creativity are devoted exclusively to the problem before us.

So, why does this happen?

Our brain knows that in order for us to have the highest chance of survival, we need to devote all our energy to the immediate problems. This would be very useful to ancient hunter-gatherer civilizations as people living in that time probably faced frequent attacks from predators and those with a strong stress response system would have been more likely to survive and pass on their traits to their children.  The problem we face in today’s society, however, is when our stress responses become prolonged and start cause detrimental effects to the rest of our body.

As we become more irritated, and more angry, due to our having a difficult time sleeping and our hormones being out of sync, we naturally start to take out our frustrations on those around us who are closest to us, which is almost always our family. Once our personal stress starts affecting the family, it transforms into a family stressor. Family stressors come in many forms, most commonly consisting of marital issues, death of a family member or someone close to the family, economic uncertainty, or harmful behavior from children or adults.

That being said, there have been proven ways to overcome stress. I think back to a time when my family was going through a stressful period. While my dad has had a consistent job and we have always had the money for our needs and then some, we aren’t particularly well off and live in a relatively small 4-bedroom house. Another family from our church congregation had recently gone through a traumatic experience as the father tried to kill himself in front of his family. We offered their family a place to stay in our house, but it involved trying to fit their family 7 in with our family of 7 which lasted for about six months.

While their family was great, they came from a very different background compared to ours, and it was just a difficult situation in general when you try to fit 14 people from different families into 4 bedrooms. I remember hearing my parents argue about something for the first time in a very long time, and I remembered feeling down and stressed out because our personal space had been obstructed.

However, as we learned in our class, stressful situations can lead to a stronger family. Our parents frequently let us know how important we were to them, and how important our sacrifice was, which helped us see the situation in a better light. A few weeks after I overheard my parents arguing, we had a family scripture study in which they testified to us kids about how much Christ has sacrificed for us, and how important it was that we helped everyone we could. Looking back, some of my most favorite memories were from the time we were helping that family. Ultimately my parents were able to turn a stressful situation into a period of family growth.

Intimacy in Marriage

Intimacy in marriage is probably one of the most awkward and taboo subjects to discuss, and I am lucky enough to have to write an entire blog on it!
Sarcasm aside, as we have talked about this touchy subject this past week, I have thought a lot about why it is so taboo. For one thing, we live in a culture that puts a lot of emphasis on sexual and intimate relations being private, and although I feel like this is changing a bit, it is still a deep-rooted societal norm that is shared across many of the major world cultures. Another reason this topic is so awkward to talk about it because it is very personal, and it really isn’t our place to give people specific advice on their personal marital intimacy. With those points being said, I would like to talk a bit about some of the general themes and ideas that marital intimacy affects us on a personal and cultural level.
As might be expected to someone who has a basic knowledge of the biological makeup of people, men and women are affected by martial intimacy in very different ways. There are three big hormones that are released during intimate moments, these are dopamine, serotonin, and in women oxytocin.
Dopamine is something most of us are familiar with as ‘getting a high’. It helps us feel excited and good while performing a verity of acts and is part of evolutionary development in most animals to reward us by performing acts that benefit us. Sexual reproducing is very important, and uses dopamine extensively, causing us to crave it.
Serotonin is another important hormone, which has more to do with giving us a feeling of wellbeing and contentedness. It is sometimes used to help treat extreme depression and is important in making us not only feel excited about intimate relations but also feel like they are important for our wellbeing.
Both males and females produce these two hormones during intimate or sexual acts. The hormone oxytocin, however, is only produced by females. Oxytocin is important in helping us build connection and trust with those who have shared intimate moments.
So along with these difference in hormones, males are also aroused a lot quicker and with less control, while females are aroused over a longer period of time, and their arousal is stronger based on their feelings of safety and trust. Because of this, sexual moments for one marriage partner can mean something a lot different than for the other partner.
This can present problems because a man might be able to feel as though they have a satisfying intimate relationship, while his wife may not be fully satisfied because. It also becomes a problem with the culture of casual sex that seems to be prevalent today, because while a man might be able to have sex with just anyone and not really think much about it, a woman would build up at least a small amount of trust and connection with people she is having sexual relations with. Long term, this can lead to attachment issues, causing them to put less emphasis on those trust feelings and causing them to suppress natural mental processes of connection when none exists.
I don’t pretend to be an expert in this subject, but I think as we come to better understand this taboo topic, we will be better able to understand our feelings and our partner's feelings in relationships. These reactions have developed over the long course of our evolutionary history, guided by God’s hand, and we have them for a reason. It is our duty to discover this reason and use it.

What is love?

What is love?
The question to define love is asked so often that it has almost become a cliché in today's culture. The biggest problem is that it can have so many definitions and there are many situations where we apply the word or concept of love. It is also one of our most powerful emotions and inspires acts of great courage or great stupidity. I have personally always been fascinated by the concept, and always enjoy learning more about it.
Ancient philosophers in Greece first came up with four types of love. Storge is the love of a parent to their child and is seen as nurturing and protective. Philia is the love of friendship or connection and was valued most highly in Greek society. Eros is the romantic and erotic love that we most commonly associate with people who are ‘in love’. Agape is not love for a specific person, but rather a more general love often translated into the English word charity. This theme of four loves seems to be prevalent throughout history and even though it fails to describe some forms of love, such as the love a child has for a parent or, the love a person has for objects or activities, it can be very useful in learning how to express our love.
So, all of these ideas and thoughts on love are interesting to think about, but how do they actually apply to our lives?
A good way to apply this is the Relationship Attachment Model or RAM. Displayed below, it shows how to keep a relationship safe and healthy.

The idea is that our relationships proceed from left to right. We first come to know someone, and if that goes well, we start to trust them, and then actually rely on them. The more we rely on someone the more we feel committed to them, and as an innate desire, we display that commitment through touch and intimacy.
When we look at where our love is coming from, it can often help us in all relationships, especially romantic ones. If our love is too focused on eros we will naturally start to push the relationship very quickly towards the touch, and if starts to surpass the other values, it could cause dangerous situations and spell later problems for the relationship because trust and commitment were never fully developed. It is good to follow the natural progression of relationships, keeping in mind that we shouldn’t rely on someone before we trust them, or trust someone before we know.
It seems that we should have all forms of love in our life. Having a love for all people is very important, but we shouldn’t necessarily trust everyone. In close relationships with friends, family members, and romantic partners, it is important to have that connective or ‘friendship’ love so we can build up trust, and to help our romantic relationships to grow even furthers we should have a passionate eros-like love to help build to commitment and touch.

Why do we need Mom and Dad?

I played basketball throughout high school and I played on a verity of different teams with different strengths and weaknesses. I also played a verity of roles on those teams. On some teams I was one of the go-to scorers, on others I played the role of a supporting big man, and my junior year I played the role of a bench sitter. I ended up enjoying fulfilling all of those roles, even though some might be looked at as less prestigious than others.

Even though I didn’t think I was going to like it, I found the role of bench sitter to be one of the roles I fulfilled the best. I was always pushing the starters in practice, helping them to work harder, and when those times came during games that I was put in, I was able to give every bit of energy I could to help the team.

I think this important lesson can be related to the roles of a mother and father in a family structure. The society of western countries has really tried to demean the importance of these roles, similar to how a bench player might be demeaned for his role on the team, yet, they are still vital, and it takes a certain degree of skill to fulfill the role. In a successful team, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and this is no different in a family team.

During class this week we talked about the specific roles of a father and mother, and I wanted to go over them a bit.

Traditionally, a father has been seen as a provider and protector. He works hard to support his family and helps shelter and protect them from the evils of the world. A male is biologically predisposed to be stronger physically which helps with both working and protecting, and males, in general, are able to focus greater on a single task which helps them to put aside other worries and get the help their family needs. Males are also more aggressive and competitive, which helped them historically in finding food and keeping their family alive and helps in modern life as they strive for competitive job positions.

A mother, on the other hand, has been traditionally noted as a nurturer. She is focused on helping and teaching the children and the family on pretty much everything. We often talk about how powerful a mother’s love is, and it is with this love that she is able to give so much care to her children. Females tend to have greater communication skills which helps them to keep the family together and understanding of one another. Females also tend to see things by their relationships to other things or a group. This can further help them in understanding the possible problems individuals are facing in a family setting.

These clear roles are very important yet are being degraded in much of modern society.

Of course, life doesn’t always work out ideally, and that is for the best. On many occasions, we will be called on to take on roles that our skills don’t seem to match up with perfectly. While we were talking about these roles, and the strengths men and women have associated with them, I thought of my own parents. My mom played college basketball and is very aggressive and focused. My dad studied family relations in college and is very focused on relationships and communication. While these attributes are often associated with the opposite roles, I feel it has really helped them to fulfill their roles better, and I am thankful for that. No matter our skills or challenges we can fulfill the roles put before if we persevere.

The What and Why of Family Culture

There is nothing more influential in our lives than our family culture. In an earlier post I talked about how important our family culture can be for not just our own lives, but for all of society. This past week I was able to learn a lot about how social class, ethnicity, life experiences, and many other factors play a huge role in how a family culture is developed, and as I have come to understand this it has helped me better understand those living in family cultures that are very different from mine.

As part of our family relations class, we spent about an hour on a demonstration of what a typical family culture would be for a family of illegal immigrants from Mexico. We did this by creating a hypothetical situation that would be typical for those families, and then several members of the class role-played different family members as they made the perilous journey from Mexico to the United States. I had the unique opportunity to play as the teenaged son of the family. As I was trying to think of what a kid like that might be going through and put myself in his shoes, I had a really eye-opening experience, and I feel like I understand the difficulty and challenges a young man like that might face much better.

One of the biggest challenges with family culture, is that it can have a strong domino effect throughout the generations for the primary reason that the only culture we know to pass on is usually the culture that we are familiar with, the culture we were raised in. Those families that struggle with the difficulties of extreme poverty are likely to perpetuate the same culture across many generations because many of the challenges of the social-economic class, such as a lack of a stable household and little time for the parents to be home will have a huge effect on the children raised in those situations.

I was also surprised to learn that those in very wealthy households can also face generational struggles with family structure. While many of those coming from a poor socioeconomic status struggle to keep a stable household due to outside influences, those with a higher socioeconomic status also struggle with a stable household often because they build many of their family structures and roles around nannies and maids.

So, what is the solution to these problems? If many of these external factors have such a huge impact on our family culture, how can we end up rising above it and change our families for the better?

I don’t pretend to have a solid answer for this, but what comes to my mind is the importance of being informed. We live in a time where some of the greatest innovations known to humankind are available for everyone to learn about and take advantage of. There is a lot of information and research about the family out there, and as we spend more time learning about how families operate, and how we influence each other we will have the knowledge to start to transcend those ethnic and socioeconomic gaps. There is no perfect family culture out there, but there is also no family culture that is not worth examining and learning from. We should make every effort to talk to those around us in different family cultures, and together, we can all make our families and communities more beneficial to all.

Theories of Family

If there are very few things more complicated than a family. While we some people may offer sincere advice about how they think a family should be run or what worked for them, even experts in the field understand that we can’t boil down how family members influence and interact with one another to a couple sentences of advice. That being said, many have studied the family in depth and have come up with fundamental explanations for why families at the way that they do, and I am going to talk about four of those which are most prominent.

While each of these theories can hardly explain the complexities of all family interactions, they are very helpful in understanding some of the basic reasons a given family is the way that it is. The first few theories I want to mention just briefly because I wanted to talk more in-depth about the last one.

Exchange Theory, in essence, assumes that all of our relationships with others are based on how it benefits us, and we are only satisfied in relationships if we feel like we are getting at least as much out of it as we are putting into it.

Symbolic Interaction just means that actions are symbolic of emotions, and the same actions can mean very different things if the situations differ. For some families a hug might be a simple greeting, while in others it could happen less often and represent a deeper affection.

Systems Theory is a bit more complicated, but basically explains the behavior of the family as a network of family roles and implicit or explicit rules. I talked a bit about how important the family culture is last week, I didn’t really know I was talking a lot about the systems theory, as that is really what this theory is all about.

I was a fairly well-behaved child growing up, but that didn’t stop me from having occasional power struggles with my parents as I pushed the boundaries of what I could get away with. Conflict Theory states that interactions between family members are primarily driven by subconscious desires for ‘power’ and the subsequent conflicts that arise from clashes in these desires. I mention power in quotation marks because we can interoperate power in a bunch of different ways, and in the context of conflict theory, it just means a person’s ability to get what they want.

Kids do this a lot by trying to manipulate parents into giving them what they want, usually attention. It is also easy to see in couples with deteriorating relationships as they focus on who seems to have the upper hand in the relationship. Unfortunately, it happens when parents feel like they must always have the last word or have the one-up when punishing a child.

While this theory seems to be very focused on the negative, it is actually very useful in trying to solve conflict. When we expect people to naturally strive for power, we understand that they aren’t evil and aren’t really out to get us. In family situations, if we can look for the reason why someone is acting hostile towards us, we can get past the petty reasons for arguing, and address the deeper issue.

For example, if a middle school aged child disrespects his parents, instead of retaliating by punishing him for acting that way, they could look at the why. Maybe he is being bullied in school and needs to take out his frustration about his lack of control over his life, or maybe he is feeling lonely and is subconsciously trying to get his parents to notice him more. In either of those cases, simply punishing the child would have caused more harm than good and wouldn’t have solved the problem in the short term or long term.

For a long time I have always hated conflict, but I really enjoyed learning about how it is such a central part in all of our lives, and when we really understand it, it doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

Family Trends

Learning about the trends in the family was a very interesting experience because I, like many others, often discuss data without ever really understanding the implications of it. While family trends can have a big impact on society as a whole, they can also have a big impact on our lives in a more personal. I would like to go over some of the trends we learned about in our class this week and share my thoughts on their impacts from a population-wide perspective and from a personal perspective.

The rate of births from unmarried mothers in 2007 was 39.7 percent. This statistic worries me greatly because of the huge impact this can have on society. While it is understandable that some mothers would give birth when they are not married and there are many cases of great single mothers, statistics show that children who grow up in single-parent homes are at a significant disadvantage when compared to children born into a stable family, as reported by familystructuresstudies.com. With the increased likelihood of children of single-parent families being at risk in many different ways such as crime, unsafe sexuality, and a higher chance of struggling in relationships, I think it is important that we look for ways to help reverse this trend while also looking to lend support to single parents we know personally.

The amount of people who cohabitate has grown immensely the past few decades. Because of this marriage and thus divorce, has gone down. In relation to the above paragraph, I think some of the reason more children are being born to unwed mothers are because there are less married mothers to begin with. Also, because we have less married families, the birth rate in America is at an all-time low, which is also very important and could lead to a whole different discussion.

There are many other trends we discussed in our class, but I think it is clear that these trends are mostly against the forming of stable families. It is important to understand how important families really are on a large scale, but what is even more important is for us to understand how our individual families are important.

It is understood that there are no perfect families, and I personally know many who have been hurt by their families in destructive ways, but many families can hugely benefit their members. I have noticed that every family has an individual culture and these cultures have a huge effect on all family members, parents and children alike. Most people learn how a family works through their experiences growing up in one, and when they start a family of their own, will likely pattern it after the culture they grew up in because they probably don’t know of anything different.

I was raised in a stable family, with a stable culture. While it was far from perfect, I always knew my parents and siblings had my back, and I had theirs. This has influenced me a ton, and I really hope to pass this culture on to my future family. Even the little things, like my family's focus on sports, or how open we are to learning new things, I notice an almost subconscious desire to emulate. That is why it is so important for us to examine these family trends and understand how they will affect our families. Kids who grow up in an unstable, dangerous environment will likely pattern their future family after that, even if they might suspect it is wrong, it will be the only thing they know.

I hope that we can all take a second to understand our influence on our personal family or the families around us and try to make a positive impact on those family’s cultures to protect them from these dangerous family trends.