Critical Thinking

Critical-Thinking Project for Chapter 3 Danyelle

Owens

Question

Explain the last stressful situation you experienced. Use specific information from the textbook to describe the coping mechanisms you used to deal with your stress, evaluate how successful these methods were in helping you too cope with this situation, and explain at least two other mechanisms that may have helped you to improve your ability to cope with this situation.

Answer

Not even a year ago I was faced with the most stressful and devastating part in my life so far. I lost my grandmother two weeks before my high school graduation after living with her all throughout high school, Mainly because my mother and I didn’t really get along that well. My life was put of hold to me and I didn’t want to do anything so people in my family just started making decisions for me and I ended up in Maryland living with my other grandparents. Moving away from all my friends and close family was very hard definitely right after losing one of the closes people to me. I really struggled with getting over her death and moving on with my life. The cognitive relational theory defines stress as a particular relationship between the person and the environment that is appraised by the person as a taxing or exceeding his or her resources and endangering his or her well being (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984. P 19).

First I immediately used emotion focused coping by trying to deny what has happened and make it seem like it was just a dream. At the same time I burst into tears. During that time I was right in the middle of taking my final exams in high school. I wanted to avoid going to school because of all the different emotions I was feeling. I just wanted to stay away from people and just be around my family. I ended up going to school just to take my exams even though my teachers gave me the option of taking them later. I just wanted to get it over with, and I left school right after I was done testing. One study...