One of my fears about this life is how common divorce seems in today’s society. I have always feared of having that happen and worrying on what would need to happen for everything to work out so that divorce wasn’t an option. This week proved to have a lot of great parts to it though. We talked about the 6 processes of divorce, predictors of divorce and protectors from divorce. Also about some very interesting facts that we learned is that divorce is super expensive. People also within the first two years wish that they had not gotten the divorce but had worked things out. 70% of people think that way and usually about 70% of men also remarry in that time so that makes it next to impossible for them at this point to get remarried. They  also did a study that showed people who took this study and where having a really hard time by 5 years later had shown that they were happy in their marriage. With this new information I decided that maybe I can not only protect my marriage but influence others to protect theirs and try to make a difference. We need to remember that covenant marriages are just that covenants set in stone and written by another one, we are not only compromising for a contract it is a covenant marriage. I can’t wait to share this with other people who also might be scared or thinking about divorce.

               Parenting seen in the eyes of today it seems like a very scary thing! Little kids running around spending enough time with them and yet also being able to support a stable life for them … all is crazy. We actually talked about how if you related families to and onion in layers the world really has been taking off different layers leading to the center which is family. We also got to talk about how having a very active role in our kids life is what would make a difference. We watched some videos that talked and broke down so many different situations we really can see that active parents have a very important role. Of course you don’t want to go too far either way. Finding a balance with each child and making sure to do your best to listen and talk with them. We also talked about some of the purposes of parenting. Though a lot of them where religious a lot seemed like common sense. But it was neat to see how much we can have an effect on the way our kids perceive things. Talk to them like an adult and let them be a part of the rules and consequences decisions especially dealing with them. That way they are accountable frothier actions and you are simply dealing out the consequences decided on.

               Finances and economic family situation have always been things that have made me timid about starting a family. Making sure that you can provide and support your family. Will your wife work and if so will the benefits outnumber the consequences? It was interesting in class we talked about what happens when eve a mother gets home just a few hours later. The kids now without supervision are more likely to get in more trouble. There even was a study done that showed that during those times the highest rates of nonviolent crimes happen all the time. So even though you are making up some extra money you also are sacrificing some very valuable time and developmental period with your children. Your family doesn’t even really have to be all that rich again going back to the beginning of the semester we saw that though yes it might have a little effect if we can provide the basics and work hard then we have the things our families need then we should be able to get all the things done. Time spent with our children is expendable. It makes me think of a Mormon message ad that ends isn’t it about time… even though economics of a family is important I truly believe that if we provide the basics then everything else will play a part.

One thing I have been an avid supporter of is communication. I totally believe that most of the world without meaning to do it miscommunicates and/or not a full understanding of what is going on. Even on my mission there were a lot of different things that would come up that I would be discussing, even amongst other missionaries, where I knew it was a miscommunication. I believe that if we could clarify and work on our abilities to ask for clarification instead of assuming we knew what someone was talking about I really do wonder and believe if the world would not be a better place. Even looking at the simple out line of communication First we start with thoughts and feelings, We decide the best way to encode that message, then use a media to express that encoded message (interesting side note is that only 14% words, tone 35%, and 51% nonverbal things like facial expressions body language and eye contact, after that the other person has to decode that message and this is taken back in as thoughts and feelings and then our cycle starts immediately over with the encoding. The hard part about this is that this happens many times even within a sentence. One thing that Brother Williams said that I believe to really think about was “We should communicate so clearly not only that we can be understood but so we cannot be misunderstood.”

and still more to come

After reading about what happened in our last discussion in class what would seem like the next best things that we could talk about? IF you thought it would be about dealing with stress, especially on the family level you would be right. One of the neat parts about this week was we talked about and really broke down what you might have thought and where those different thought came from. It’s important during times like this that we do take a minute to stop and recognize where the different thoughts came from. Doing this will allow us to asses where we really are at and what we might need to be doing! It’s interesting because during this conversation Bro. Williams taught us, and it makes perfect sense, that the brain is hard wired to protect life. What a beautiful thing to realize that it is our body’s conscious choice to stay alive and protect that. Likewise you have to realize how far a person must go in order to think about making a decision in the opposite. We continued to talk about the different ways to cope . . . and either we draw together or pull apart. Obviously from most successful to least was things draw together, or use alcohol and drugs. At least this is what we were able to discuss with or time in class. It really makes me stop and think about all the different things that I start to stress over and really it sounds crazy but it already has helped even with little things.

So I fell a little behind one this and decided to catch you all up on a week to week basis of what we have been learning about.

               We all have moments in our lives in which different crisis and things happen to each of us for our learning and growth. Some of the different things we learned about really stuck out to me. One of the things was to start off we talked about how the meaning of crisis in Chinese means danger and opportunity. This was a very true statement as discussed the different things that happens when and why you go through different crisis. There are things like trauma, urgent, family at risk, instability and much, much more. We took the approach of what happens to the family unit? Either it grows together or it grows apart and in some cases it could even do a little of both. That’s when we discussed a pretty important law, created by Ruben Hill, that helps recognizes and work on during a crisis. Its ABC-X , Actual event, Both resources and response, Cognitions ( before, during, and after)  to equal your eXperience. These are the things that affect us and our families during different crisis and if we can take each of them for the better way out. Last neat thing that I realized and thought was pretty neat was that when something stimulates and emotion, without anything else to feed off of it, it only last 2 minutes. Now it can feed off thought, something someone else does, or something else along those lines but by its self it can only last 2 minutes.

This week we have continued to talk about different family and marriage relations… imagine that :) it was really interesting though as we talked about different kinds of appropriate relations in marriage. Some that I have never really thought about but that after thinking about them make sense. One of them was how our friends play a role in our lives and how friends of the opposite sex really should be kept in a sort of check. Not that they are bad to have but in a marriage you need to be able to rely on that significant other for your problems not just a friend, especially one of the opposite sex. It was also really neat as Brother Williams started off our week by asking us to write on a question board with some of those questions we don’t get to ask all the time. It was neat to see as he really tailored his lesson to teach us different aspects of our sexuality in marriage. Now this week you really had to be in the class because of how well it was set up but let’s briefly say it was a very amazing and enlightening class this week!