“It’s Not Stress That Kills Us…”

“It’s not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.” –Hans Selye

Stress. Everyone has experienced stress at some point in their life. And if you say you haven’t you’re in denial, which is a bad coping method for stress. 

The other night I was watching a movie called Penelopewith my roommates. It is one of my favorite movies, but I don’t know if you are all familiar with the plot of the movie but it very much goes with our topic of “responding to stress during a family crisis” this week.

The plot of the movie in essence is that a very rich, very posh family, the Wilhern’s, are cursed for many generations that any daughter born in the family tree would be cursed with a pig nose and that the curse could only be broken by “one of their own kind” (meaning a rich blue blood) accepting her as she is…nose and all. The Wilhern’s went many generations without having any girls, that is until Penelope was born. And true to the curse she was born with a pig nose. The parents were distraught, especially the materialistic mother. The parents hid the girl away, ashamed of their daughter’s appearance. They neglect her and isolate her from the world never letting her experience life or interact with people. When the girl, Penelope comes of age the mother hires a match maker to find and blue blood boy to marry her and hopefully break the curse. Dozens of snobby boys come and go as they see Penelope’s appearance. One boy goes as far as to try and inform the press of her “hideous” features. But a man named Max meet her and didn’t flee. In fact, he and Penelope hit it off and he saw her true inner beauty but when the mother begged him to marry her he refused thus breaking Penelope’s heart. Her mother tries to remind her that “you are not your nose” but upset she then run’s away to the outside world that she has never experienced. She goes on a self-discovery but then her parents find her and bring her back home and force her to marry a young man who has agreed to break the cruse. In the end, Penelope calls off the wedding and runs to her room locking the door behind her. The mother calls after her demanding that she returns to the wedding so that the curse can be broken. Penelope yells back saying that she loves who she is. At that moment the curse is broken. Looking back, they realized that the curse did not mean that a blue blood had to marry her it just meant that her type of people had to accept her, so once Penelope admitted that she loved herself for who she was the curse could break. The parents feel guilty for not spending time getting to know there daughter and loving her instead of locking her away because they were ashamed of her. They realize had they do that when she was young they could have broken the curse a lot earlier.

Now sorry for the spoilers but hopefully you see the family crisis in this summary. I was doing some reading this week and found a formula for defining the crisis. It’s called the ABCX model created by Reuben Hill.

A: is the event causing stress

B: is the resources you use to cope 

C: is how the family perceives the problem

All of this brings you to

X: the family crisis 

So let’s take Penelope’s story. A) was the daughter being born with a pig nose. B) was the family hiding their daughter away, living in denial, and trying to find someone to break the curse and C) was the family seeing this as the worst possible thing in the world. Thus making X) a massive catastrophic crisis.

The parents were using some pretty ineffective coping methods such as denial, pretending that the problem didn’t exist, or scapegoating the problem, by blaming the great-great-great grandparents who were cursed in the first place. 

Had the parents used more effective method of handling stress the problem could have been much less catastrophic, by taking responsibility for the problem and acknowledging the family’s worth by treating their daughter like a normal human. The solution could have come a lot easier. Stress is what you make it. Use the ABCX model and effective coping strategies when crisis strikes and they won’t seem so hard. Life is what you make it, so make it good.

“Chapter 13.” Marriage and Family: the Quest for Intimacy, by Robert H. Lauer and Jeanette C. Lauer, 8th ed., McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2011, pp. 283–308.

Palansky, Mark, director. Penelope. Universal Pictures, 2008.