Councils Before Crisis

The stressor that stamped the ABC-X model on my heart arrived one ordinary Wednesday when I was fourteen: the phone rang, Dad’s voice cracked, and the words “Mom has a blood clot in her brain” sucked the oxygen from our kitchen. Under Hill’s theory, that diagnosis was an uncontrollable, terrifying A-event. My initial reaction was pure panic; every resource (B) I usually leaned on, Mom’s hugs, her knack for turning bad days into jokes, vanished with a single MRI report. Even the meaning (C) I’d assigned to our family (“We’re unbreakable”) felt fragile against neurosurgical jargon. Crisis (X) loomed, but what kept it from swallowing us were the very tools we studied this week: deliberate family councils, the Five Secrets of Effective Communication, and a shared faith expressed through prayer.

An hour after the hospital call, Dad gathered my older sister and me around the table. He opened with a shaky but steady prayer, asking God to guide the doctors and calm our fears. That prayer did more than soothe nerves; it signaled that all voices, even a terrified fourteen-year-old’s, were welcome in the council that followed. Elder M. Russell Ballard calls this process “Strength in Counsel,” where information, inspiration, and consensus form a three-legged stool. Dad provided information (what the neurosurgeon had said), invited inspiration (another quick prayer before decisions), and sought consensus on how we, kids included, could keep the household running. My youngest brother volunteered to load the dishwasher; I offered to help with school pickups. Those small tasks became our first reminder that resources aren’t just dollars and doctors, their chores shared and courage borrowed.

The next morning, extended family arrived with casseroles and opinions. Tension spiked when an aunt suggested experimental treatments. Dad’s instinct was to snap, but I watched him deploy David D. Burns’s Five Secrets almost word for word. First, he disarmed her: “You’re right, doing everything possible matters.” Then he paraphrased her worry (Thought Empathy) and acknowledged her fear (Feeling Empathy). A gentle Inquiry followed—“Can you send me the article you read?”, before Dad added his “I feel” statement: “I feel overwhelmed and want to follow the neurosurgeon’s plan first.” He closed with respect: “You’ve always cared fiercely for Mom, and I’m grateful.” The room exhaled; disagreement turned into cooperation as my aunt pivoted to organizing meals instead of medical advice. Gottman’s research from the Love Lab video flashed in my mind: that single exchange preserved the 5-to-1 ratio of positives to negatives that keeps families resilient.

While the doctors worked, our nightly routine became what I now see as a mini-council: Dad read hospital updates from his notebook, each of us voiced one worry and one blessing, and we ended on our knees. Prayer didn’t magically dissolve the clot, but it rebuilt our shared meaning each evening. Instead of “Mom might die,” the story became “God is tutoring us in faith and teamwork.” Forty-eight anxious hours later, the surgeon announced the clot had stabilized enough for medication alone. Relief roared through the family group chat, but something quieter remained: a trust forged by councils and compassionate dialogue. We kept the kitchen-table meetings for months, Prayer, councils, and the Five Secrets weren’t add-ons; they were the life raft that turned raw panic into coordinated action.

If another family asked how to face a medical bombshell, I’d distill it to this: Call a council before you call it a crisis. Bring everyone, teenagers included, around the table, pray or center yourselves, share facts honestly, and speak your feelings with Burns’s respectful toolkit. Do that, and even a brain clot can become less of a death knell and a more demanding teacher whose lessons you tackle together.