How Do You Cope in Stressful Experiences?

It is inevitable to have stress in a marriage. We are all natural human beings. We take things to personal, we assume our spouse meant one thing when they meant the other or have the death of a child or loved one. Along with stress comes many feelings and we create our own way of coping with the stress whether it is negative or positive.

The negative ways we let our feelings show is we communicate less to our spouse and tend to shut down. When we do this most the time we turn inward and don’t speak about our feelings. This leads to feeling shame and doubt. We may start to blame ourselves or those around us for causing the stress.

The positive way we should interact and cop with this stress though is to turn towards each other for support. You are both going through the same struggle and helping each other out seeing each other’s sides or the experience can help greatly.  We need to also utilize our resources. This can either be other family members, church groups or having people come and babysit so your spouse and you can get away for a couple hours. We need to express our emotions and realize that this situation won’t last a life time. It will get better.

The most important thing to realize is that coping with a situation doesn’t mean that all of a sudden everything is going to be alright. Coping through a situation is making the necessary little changes so that in the future the whole picture and experience will all fit together better. Coping isn’t just trying to get by.