Revue internationale de santé mentale et de psychiatrie

A Systemic Approach to Relational Health between Couples from an Asian Context

Karen Quek

This presentation will examine interviews of how Singapore couples with young children facilitate relationship equality or drifted back to traditional gender patterns. We approach this study from a social constructionist perspective in which relationship patterns are seen as ongoing processes, constructed and reconstructed through daily interactions. Although marital interaction is highly influenced by the options available in a given social context, partners have the room to create and modify previous gender patterns. The transition to parenthood is an important period for observing the outworking of gender equality since the addition of children requires the couple to make significant adaptations. However, the relationship between gender processes and shared parenting is complex and influenced by ideological, structural, and pragmatic concerns. As they transit to parenthood, they experience tensions in valuing of careers, sharing of parenthood and centrality of the dyad. Only 3 couples are able to successfully sustain all three. Most dual-career couples, who share parenting responsibilities, revolve their lives around children. Couples prioritizing the dyadic system as well, appear to maintain more equalizing of power. However findings suggests that husbands’ attentiveness to wives who scale-back or drop-out of work. Learning outcomes for this presentation will include the following: understanding changes in marital power with the addition of children; learning a theoretical lens to apply to couples shifting to egalitarian patterns; discovering strategies collectivist parents use to reshape relationship power and how contemporary couples sustain from hierarchical to egalitarian dominance patterns. Clinical implications will be discussed.

For many Married people, the high points and low points of every day life are associated with the end goal that stressors affecting one individual additionally sway the other individual. For instance, stress experienced by one individual may "overflow" to contrarily affect conjugal working. This examination utilized the two accomplices' day by day journal information to inspect same-day and cross-day joins among pressure and conjugal clash and tried a few factors that make couples helpless against overflow. Appraisal of 25 wide-extending wellsprings of every day stress included both paid and unpaid work, medical problems, money related concerns, and settling on troublesome choices.

Results demonstrated that the two married couples understanding of complete every day stress were related with more noteworthy same-day conjugal clash and that contention was more prominent on days the two mates experienced elevated levels of pressure. Proof of cross-day overflow was discovered distinctly in those couples with
high simultaneous conjugal hostility and in couples where spouses announced high group of-birthplace animosity. These outcomes feature both the normal, foreseen nature of same-day overflow and the conceivably dangerous parts of more delayed examples speaking to inability to recuperate from stressors that happened the earlier day. The conversation centers around how reactivity in one life space puts that person in danger of creating worry in another life area and how current conjugal hostility and group of-beginning animosity are related with trouble recuperating from unpleasant occasions.

Conclusion

This study is an extension of research testing links between stress and marital conflict in daily life; our results lend further evidence to the idea that everyday stressors can impact couple functioning. While daily links between stress and conflict may be common, extended stress spillover may be indicative of maladaptive relationship processes. Aggressive couples may fail to recover from stress and conflict experienced the day before, putting them at risk for greater stress and conflict the next day. Additionally, negative family-of-origin experiences may impact stress responding and set the stage for maladaptive relationship processes. In sum, this study points to how day-to-day stress can spark conflict between spouses and suggests that interrupting stress spillover might be an effective intervention for improving couple functioning.

Biography:

Karen Quek, PhD. is the program director for Marital & Family Therapy and Mental Health Counseling programs at Bethel University, San Diego, CA. Karen is a licensed mental health professional. She has extensive teaching, clinical, and supervisory experiences in the States and other parts of the world, including China, Singapore, and the Philippines. Her innovative research reflects her expertise and interests in multicultural clinical work, cross-cultural family dynamics, and gender equality, and has resulted in numerous publications and research presentations, including her 2017 co-authored book, Transition and Change in Collectivist Family Life: Strategies for Clinical Practice with Asian Americans.

32nd International Conference on Mental and Behavioral Health, April 22-23, 2020

Abstract Citation:

Karen Quek, A Systemic Approach to Relational Health between Couples from an Asian Context, Mental Health Congress 2020, 32nd International Conference on Mental and Behavioral Health, April 22-23, 2020