What couples should do to reduce domestic stress, by counseling expert

Counseling expert and professor of Counseling Psychology at the Abia State University, Uturu, Prof. Chiemeka Ekennia, has said for harmony to prevail in the family, husbands have to invest in their wives by caring and loving them, especially within their first 12 years of marriage.

Ekennia stated these while delivering the 44th inaugural lecture of the university titled “Domestic stress and marital adjustment: Some lessons from psycho-counseling research.” He cited the death of a spouse and disharmony in the home as the pivot of domestic stress.

The lecturer defined stress as “pressure, tension or worry resulting from problems in meeting the challenges of life,” adding that stress is closely associated with anxiety, which is commonly experienced as general uneasiness, a sense of fore-boding and a feeling of tension.

According to him, it was observed that most causes of death in men that are not associated with diseases, may be psychosomatic, which is a function of domestic stress exacerbated by distressed marriages and family life.

Touching on sources of domestic stress, he said in marriage, people take marital vows on the presumption that they will live in harmony till the rest of their lives together but the breakdown in some of the marriages made him to undertake an extensive research into failed marriages.

The research, he stated, involved 1,088 men and women in the five south-east states and four Igbo speaking communities in Rivers and Delta states, to identify why marriages break down.

According to him, the findings of the studies done in 1998, 2008 and 2014, indicated among others, family power structure, psychological climate of the family, individual differences, differences in religious backgrounds, communication breakdown, socio-economic factors as possible reasons.

He, however, held that the number of daily hassles people experience is a precursor to physical illness and symptoms leading often to a breakdown in marriages. “Though each hassle may be relatively unimportant in itself, after a day filled with minor hassles, the effects add up to make people feel drained, grumpy and stressed out.”

On the way forward, he recommended that in view of the impact of domestic stress on the social psychological climate of the family and its concomitant negative effect on behaviour generally, the developed national policy on counseling should be implemented by the federal government.

Other recommendations are effecting community counseling across the country, married couples going for routine checks at counseling clinics/centres whether they are experiencing conflicts or not and sometimes even self-administering of marital adjustment scale to evaluate the state of their marriage.