Focus On Your Stress Coping Style

“When David lost his job with the printing company three years ago, things went from bad to worse, complains Kate, 33, a registered nurse and the mother of two children. “He’s working again now, but at a much lower salary. That was the fourth time in eleven years that David was out of work.

Though Kate claims she’s not blaming him - companywide layoffs gave pink slips to 1,000 workers - she can’t help wondering what’s wrong with her husband.

Because of David’s salary cut, the family was forced to move - again. That meant selling their home, pulling up roots, and resettling the family in a new town. “Saying goodbye to friends and the network of mothers I relied on for support was not easy,” Kate recalls. What’s more, in his old job, David traveled a great deal and the role of disciplinarian fell solely on her shoulders, Kate explains. “And that’s where it has stayed,” she snips.

“For years, I’ve felt like a single mom, going to school events and conferences by myself. David was so preoccupied with David that he was never there for the rest of us.”

As far as Kate is concerned, the stress has become so great that they no longer have a marriage.

“We are practically strangers. We pass in the hall without even speaking, never kiss each other goodbye in the morning or goodnight when we go to sleep,” she says. For the sake of the children, Kate wants to stay married - but she’s convinced her husband will never change.

David, 35, a salesman for a large printing company, wonders why Kate even wants him around anymore:

“There isn’t a day that goes by that my wife doesn’t remind me that I’m a failure in every way. I’m tired of hearing what a dope I am. I’ve heard that all my life.”

David’s downward spiral began, he believes, when he graduated from college. I graduated with good grades from a good college and with dreams of a job in broadcasting, he recalls. “I had a talent for it, but the country was in a recession and there were very few available spots.”

He did land a job that he loved, teaching high school journalism, but he lost that too, when the district had to scale back and teachers who were hired first were also the first to be let go. “So I took a sales job, and I’ve been pretty miserable ever since,” he notes. Of course, coming home to Kate doesn’t help. “She’s unapproachable. She races through the door like a tornado, screaming about one thing after another and never bothering to find out if something might be upsetting me,” he says.

When stress pile-up fractures a marriage

“Like most couples, Kate and David discovered that pressures from outside their marriage can affect their relationship far more severely than they ever anticipated,” says Paul Moschsetta, a marriage and family therapist in Huntington, N.Y. While it’s nice to think that partners will stand by each other in times of stress, that’s not so easy to do. What’s more, in cases like David and Kate, when one stress piles up on the other, it’s hard to get a breather. Instead of focusing their energy on one problem at a time, they are seeing only a mountain of problems and it looks hopeless.

Unhappy and frustrated, David and Kate are competing for who is more miserable. If stress pileup is causing cracks in your marriage, keep the following advice in mind:

Take some time to focus on the way you learned to handle stress as a child.

How did your parents handle problems? Did they ignore them and pretend they would go away on their own? Did they become anxious and filled with worry? Or did they confront difficulties head on and deal with issues as they came up?

Learn to use your coping styles to your advantage.

When your partner is under more stress than you are, be a sounding board and booster. Don’t claim to know what your spouse is thinking. Ask, probe, until you can encourage him/her to talk about his/her deepest feelings and concerns.

Force yourself to carve out time to recharge your emotional batteries.

David was not spending enough time on making David feel good, and because of this, his problems loomed larger in his mind than they really were.

Get help if stress is chronic. Talking to a professional counselor can help you see a solution that might have eluded you, as well as give you new coping skills.