Stress Management

Identifying Stressors
Many of us may feel “stressed out” in our daily lives without knowing why. As many
people are on medication due to anxiety and depression, it is obvious that many of us
are under a great deal of stress. While medications to alleviate the symptoms of stress
can help, they are merely a mask. The real problem is the stressful situation that we
are enduring, either in our minds or in reality.
Janet was a secretary for a large law firm. She had a boss who would criticize her
every move on a daily basis. Janet was in no position to leave her job as she was the
sole supporter of her two young children. Her husband had died two years prior and
this was the first job Janet had since his death. She worked hard, but no matter what
she did, she could never please her boss. However, she had to work so she kept her
mouth shut and never said anything. Janet’s boss had been through three secretaries
in the past six months before he hired Janet.
Although her boss was very critical, Janet liked the people with whom she worked very
much and considered herself lucky to be able to earn enough money to keep her
children in the lifestyle to which they had all been accustomed when her husband was
alive. She considered herself happy. She felt that she was finally able to get on with
her life after the unexpected death of her husband.
She could not understand, therefore, why she felt anxious all of the time. Especially on
Sunday evenings. One Sunday night she ended up in the emergency room of the
hospital with heart palpitations. She thought she was having a heart attack so she got
her mother to look after her kids and went to the hospital. After a series of tests, it was
determined that Janet suffered from a “panic attack.” The ER doctor gave her a
prescription for tranquilizers and advised her to see a psychiatrist.
A psychiatrist! Janet wasn’t “crazy.” And everyone knows that only “crazy” people have
anything wrong with them mentally. So she took the tranquilizers and ignored the
advice of the physician. She continued to experience “panic attacks” on a more
frequent basis until one Monday morning, she couldn’t get out of bed. Her children got
very upset and called their grandmother who found Janet in a catatonic state. She took
her daughter to the hospital where she was admitted to the psych ward for a few days.
Janet had what used to be called a “nervous breakdown.”
Was Janet “crazy?” No, she was just suffering from severe anxiety and depression
caused by several stressors. One of them was her boss who was just a bully. The
other was the fact that her husband had died and left her as the sole provider for her
two children.
Fortunately, Janet’s mother took her to the hospital as Janet had been thinking more
and more about joining her late husband. Even more fortunate for Janet was the fact
that the doctor at the hospital was able to help Janet identify her stressors.
While Janet could not do anything about the death of her husband, she could do
something about the second stress factor, which was her boss. She looked for a new
job with a boss who was a bit more human and finally found herself not only with a
better boss, but more money. She was still able to keep in contact with the friends she
made at her old job, who regaled her with stories about how her bully boss kept going
through secretaries.
Identifying stressors is not so easy for most people as it was in Janet’s case. While
some of us can point to different stress factors that have occurred recently in our lives,
others have absolutely no idea why we are stressed. In some cases, the original
stressor can be something that happened in our childhood.
In the film “The Three Faces of Eve,” a woman is depicted as having a “split personality
disorder.” The film follows this very usual psychological disorder until they get to the
root of the problem which was the fact that she was made to kiss the face of her dead
grandmother as she lay in her coffin. This was not done as a form of abuse, but was a
cultural belief. Her mother, who made her kiss the dead woman’s face, did not do this
to abuse her child, but believed that by kissing the face of the dead, it would cause you
not to miss them and for them not to haunt you.
Unfortunately, the trauma that this girl endured caused her so much stress that she
actually felt it necessary to retreat into her own mind and develop other “personalities”
who usually emerged whenever she was under any sort of stress. The personalities
took over the her life and Eve had no recollection of what the personalities were..