Managing Stress – Part II

Once you decide to deal with your stress, you have to decide how to deal with it.  A major part of relationships is the sharing of stresses.  Either one will support and encourage the other, or one will cause the other person stress.  Yet in any case, when two people love each other, ones stress should automatically be the others concern.  So how a couple plans an attack of a source of stress is important. 

Dave Chappelle

There are three ways to deal with stress.  The first of which is Appraisal-focused strategies. This method is the changing of ones perception of the problem. To reduce the priority, or find the humor in the matter.  African Americans tend to use this method culturally.  In studying couples counseling sessions, you will tend to find more laughter and humor between African American couples prior to the raw emotions are evoked. 

The consistent and historical stress of the African American experience has manifested a culture that laughs at their common situations, as seen on many  African American comedy stages.  Even the use of the N word is an appraisal-focused coping methodology. 

This predominance within the African American culture has historically saved their sanity, yet in modern times it has created an expectance in the norm to the point that many find little to no problem with the ever increasing dysfunction of certain immoral social interactions.   Being poor and ignorant is a source of stress, yet in some circles, being ignorant is encouraged, because if you are smart, “you are trying to be white, or better than us”.  

The second method is Problem-focused coping.  This is the attempt to resolve the source of the stress. In this method information is gathered and problems are meant to be managed.  This tends to be the way the average man approaches issues, which typically is not the way women [initially] cope.  

Women generally utilize emotion-focused coping.  This is the main reason why women may find more serenity in the mere discussion of an existing source of stress, as my recent article “Women feel resolve by simply talking about it“ points out.  The main objective is not to attack the issue, it is to fix the ill feeling that the issue caused.  This is why men need to hug a women during a crisis, to give her support for the emotion she is feeling.  If we can comfort her emotion, to her, we have resolved much of the problem.  Yet as we comfort and console, we men are thinking about the source.  Yet if a man that is supposed to be her comforter chooses not to do so because he may be the source of the stress, or just occupied with problem-focusing, he is not effectively multitasking. He needs to be in tune with her emotional needs.

It is to the advantage of any relationship to understand how your partner deals with stress.  With this information we can realize that men and women complement each other in that way, and we can adjust how we interact in a stressful situation without creating more stress for one another. Part III will deal with the affect stress has on relationships.