Family Support is Important for Stress Problems
By Cozee Cackel
Family support is important when it comes to giving care and warmth to the person you wish to help. Keep in mind that sometimes family members enable the person with the problem to stay stuck in their situation, despite the family’s good intentions. It’s easy to baby someone we love. It’s just as easy not to give “tough love” when it it’s someone close in the family. But that’s what they need, not giving in to them just because you love them. This doesn’t mean that a family member won’t benefit by knowing there is love and support around them.
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Keep in mind that certain issues and problems lend themselves to manipulation by the person under stress.
“Enabling” is a term discussed a lot in alcoholics anonymous. It’s because family members often make a lifestyle of enabling another person in unhealthy patterns unknowingly. Though it feels to be genuine concern, the enabler has their own psychological issues for having someone rely and depend on them for assistance.
Just as carrying a child around because you don’t want them to fall while they are learning how to walk is not helpful, so are certain types of help with someone who has psychological issues. Your “help” could do more harm than good. For instance, a mother who does her teenager’s homework because it’s “too hard for them is not helping them. That will interfere with their learning and could help give an inferiority complex to the child when they know their classmates can do their own homework. That type of help weakens your child and also makes them dependent on someone else to do their job.
Healthy support shows someone you care. By listening to them you help them to share what they are going through. It’s important though, to be able to question and even gently challenge someone if they are involved in blame or fault findings. That way they can look at themselves to see how they may be contributing to their own stress. A big part of undoing stress is learning the ways we perceive that we are able to change.
A good support person will be sympathetic but not agree with the excuses that someone makes. When someone is stressed, if you affirm their point of view when it is distorted or when it exaggerates a situation out of proportion, you aren’t helping that person reduce their stress. In a case like that you instead keep them in a pattern of thinking that is not productive. Because we wish to be liked by others, we often can find it difficult to challenge a family member or a friend’s point of view.
About the Author
Cozee is working on a plan to beat this recession. It’s a three step plan. Here is the first step which is starting an easy to operate, but potentially very profitable Internet business.
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