Divorce and Abortion in Family Crisis: Analysis Through Double Abc-x Model

Introduction

I was born in the city of Kerman, the capital of Kerman province, in Iran. Both of my parents were also born in Iran, and thus our ethnicity is Iranian. In order to explain the crisis that my family went through, and how we adapted to it, I will describe Iranian culture, the importance of family and religion, as well as tell the story of the crisis in detail. This will be the first half of my paper; the second half will be my analysis of it using the Double ABC-X Model.

Iranian culture and Religion

Iran is a country which formerly was known as Great Persia. I was born in a family that practices Zoroastrianism, one of the oldest monotheistic religions that was formed around 4,000 years ago. Zoroastrianism was the religion of multiple dynasties until the Muslim conquest of Persia and the eventual decline of the Zoroastrian religion. From that point in history, Iranians were forced to change their religion to Islam, and if there was any resistance, the consequences were severe and included death. As of right now, there are roughly around 100,000 people who practice Zoroastrianism globally, and the majority of them live in Iran and India.

Prosecution and discrimination against religious minorities, including Zoroastrians, is not something new in Iran, and has been going on since the Arab invasion of Persia. My ancestors lived through this discrimination for almost 1,300 years. This led my parents and grandparents to have a prejudice against Muslims, for they felt as though they were to blame for our suffering. I personally always considered myself both lucky and unlucky. I feel lucky because I knew that I came from a very resilient family bloodline that never gave up on their faith, and for that, Zoroastrians are very proud people. I feel unlucky because I personally experienced how hard it is to be part of a religious minority in a newly formed country, after the Islamic revolution of 1979, where in the eyes of the majority, my family was considered inferior. However, I did not form a prejudice against Muslims, and even dated a Muslim girl for a few years, much to my parents disapproval.

Iranians, including my parents, are very proud of their rich ethnic origins and culture, which goes back thousands of years. The majority of Iranians are also proud of their practice of Islam, as the country’s official religion. The only family rituals I can vividly remember, that came from our ethnic origin, was the celebration of Persian New Year. It was during this one time a year event that my family all got together, set up a traditional table, and carried out the traditional practices associated with this special day, such as cooking special dishes, lighting candles, and so on.

Both Iranian culture and Islam heavily influence relations between men and woman in the family, and therefore the majority of Iranian families have a patriarchy social construct. My family was amongst this majority. Family is considered the most important aspect of Iranian culture. The typical Iranian household includes grandparents; therefore, kinship and family are closely linked together, and the welfare of the unit, rather than individual goals, is the priority. As for Zoroastrian families, since there are only a few living in each city, almost all of them know each other. Therefore, arranged marriages between relatives used to be very common until two decades ago.

My family

My parents had an arranged marriage, just like their parents and grandparents. My father is 13 years older than my mother, and they are cousins. Marriage between cousins was very common in Iran, regardless of religion, because of the trust and closeness of kinship and families. When I was born in 1986, my father was 42 years old, my mother was 30, and I had two older sisters: Anahita, who was nine and Aida who was seven. The crisis that I have chosen to analyze revolves around Aida’s divorce and abortion, as well as her later diagnosis of bipolar disorder. However, before getting to that, a short background about my family will shed some light as to why we were able to deal with this crisis and become a better and closer family as of today.

My father was born into a poor family. He is the firstborn of four sons, and lost one of his brothers at a young age due to illness and the inability of his father to afford the necessary treatment. Multiple times my father told us about how my grandfather was an alcoholic with a bad temper, and how he used to beat my father and uncles with pomegranate tree branches as a way of teaching them proper manners. Although my father only drinks in social events, and evaded alcohol as much as he could, his method of bringing up my sisters and I always included physical punishment, shouting, and short bursts of rage followed by long hours of being cold, to make us feel bad about what we did. In my earliest memories, I always remember my father as an angry man who I was scared of and tried my best to avoid. The same was true for my sisters, especially Aida.

My mother, on the other hand, was born into a middle-class family, and her parents were kind and caring. As soon as my mother finished high school, she had the choice of getting married to either my father or my father’s younger brother. My father was the better looking brother, so she chose him. My mother was 17 years old at the time of her marriage. My parents had to move to the city of Kerman from Tehran, the capital of Iran, because of my father’s career. The distance between Kerman and Tehran is about 700 miles, and traveling at that time, in an underdeveloped country, was hard. Due to this my mother could only see her family maybe once or twice a year. Soon after my mother turned 21, she got pregnant with Anahita, my oldest sister, and two years after that, she got pregnant with Aida. My mother was left with no one to help her to raise my sisters, as she was now living in a new city with no friends or close family nearby.

My father worked for the government as an inspector and my mother was a housewife until they decided to buy a house. Since my father’s income was insufficient to afford a house, my mother decided to continue her education and enrolled in a university. It was 1979, the year that Aida was born, that the Islamic Revolution happened and everything changed dramatically. Almost a year later, in 1980, Iraq invaded Iran and the war started. The war brought eight years of hardship, scarcity of essential resources, especially food, and the death of almost a million soldiers and civilians on both sides. The government had to let go of half of its employees in order to afford the war, and therefore my father lost his job 4 years into the war. My mother’s education remained unfinished due to the closure of universities. My family was forced to move back to Tehran to live with my mother’s parents due to a lack of financial resources. Both of my sisters remember the night raids and missile attacks quite vividly. Aida was five at the time and got the worst of it, seeing our neighbor’s building blown up by a bomb. I was born two years before the war ended, which was the worst possible time. My family decided to move back to Kerman for my birth, and my grandparents moved there with us until the war was over.

Shortly after the war was over, my father got his old job back and my mother finished her bachelor's degree and started working immediately. I was five years old at this point. From this point, we had a normal life as a family, with hardships that were considered common at the time, such as biweekly family fights and arguments. Everything was normal through my eyes until Aida’s divorce and abortion happened. This was a huge crisis that my family and I experienced. Explaining my family’s economic and religious background to this extent was vital to understanding why father could not keep up with the competent male role that expected of men in Iranian culture and therefore he always saw himself as a failure and felt defective, late I realize the accumulation of these feelings made him to always feel angry.

Growing up in a patriarchal society with an angry father was always hard, but it seemed to be the norm. I cannot imagine things being different, and as a family, I thought we were doing fine. Experiencing the occasional family fights were normative events, in which it was typically all of us against my father. My father had strict rules about everything and there was no emotional connection or communication with him. Everything had to be his way, and his way only. Since there was no emotional connection, closeness, or the sharing of even a single joyful activity between my father and the rest of us, my sisters and I grew a lot of dependance, closeness, and loyalty for our mother. According to Olson's Circumplex Model theory, in my family, the levels of family cohesion were completely disengaged between my father and the rest of us, but between my sisters, mother, and I, we had a cohesive system.

As for the amount of flexibility in my family, my father was a complete authoritarian with strict discipline; he set the rules and there was no negotiation or change allowed. For example, he prohibited both of my sisters to ever use the phone, go out with friends, talk to boys or have boyfriends, wear revealing clothes, or play any sports. Their roles were to study as best as they could so they could finish college and then learn how to be a good housewife. My mother, on the other hand, was much more flexible and persuaded my father to let my sisters learn painting, calligraphy, and music.

When it came to communication skills in my family, my father had very poor listening skills with almost no feedback, almost always spoke for us, and never shared any of his feelings or emotions with us unless it was anger. I must admit that although he used to get angry a lot, he rarely ever disrespected my mother in front of us or others. He always showed her respect in front of others. Pre-crisis, I would classify my family as rigidly connected that was barely balanced (Olson, 91). The connection part was all thanks to my mother.

It did not surprise me that both of my sisters got married as soon as they got the chance. Anahita was lucky because her fiance turned out to be an amazing person who exhibits high levels of communication and respect, and he really loves my sister. They faced a lot of problems too, as soon as they started living together, including the loss of jobs and financial struggles, but they overcame their problems since they always had good communication with each other. However, for Aida the story was entirely different. Aida got married when she was 22 years old, straight out of finishing university. She met her now ex-husband, Farzin, at my cousin’s wedding. Farzin was tall, handsome, and appealed to my sister. Farzin was living in Tehran, had a stable job, and came from a good and respected family we knew. However, we were not relatives with his family. At that time, I was 15 years old, and I remember the way Aida could not stop smiling all night after that wedding. I thought to myself that this is it for Aida, she is going to get married and I will get to have two rooms in the house to myself. Two months after that wedding, Farzin travelled all the way from Tehran to Kerman, with his cousin, to ask my father for permission to date Aida with the intention of getting married. This concept is unfamiliar in western culture, but in Iran, at that time, it was not possible to just date a girl without the intention of marriage. My father accepted, and two months later Farzin came to Kerman with almost all of his family for their engagement party. Interestingly, Farzin’s father had to stay in Tehran to work, and later I found out that there were many similarities between Fazin’s father and mine, such as their hatred for travelling.

One year after their engagement, Aida and Farzin got married and Aida moved to Tehran to live with Farzin. Since my grandparents are old and live in a two story house, they rented the second story to Aida and Farzin at a very low rate as their way of helping them. However, living directly above my grandparents caused a lot of relationship problems for Aida down the road, since my grandmother meddled in their marriage a lot.

Shortly after Aida moved to Tehran, she started her Master’s degree in English Literature. Therefore she was studying most of the time instead of being a housewife, which was expected of her by her husband's family. Farzin was working long hours from 7:00AM to 8:00PM, and as I later came to understand, they never had much of communication with each other, nor any common hobbies or interests. Farzin was into soccer, cars, and sports while my sister loved Shakespeare, Lord Byron and William Blake. Since having premarital sex is unaccepted and severely looked down upon in Iran’s culture, Aida and Farzin were each other’s first. Years later I found out that their sexual relationship was not very good at all, to a point that Aida called it non-existent. Their lack of communication, common interests, and intimacy caused their marriage to go downhill very fast, but it did not end in divorce as soon as it should have in my opinion.

The reason Aida and Farzin did not get divorced as soon as they realized they were not good for each other was because divorce is very looked down upon, not only in Iranian culture, but also within the Zoroastrian culture and community. Since there are very few Zoroastrians left in Iran, a divorced woman will have a really tough time finding another husband that is from the Zoroastrian religion. If she marries someone with another religion, not only would she be outcast, but her entire family would be looked down upon as well. This makes divorce taboo in the Zoroastrian community of Iran. Divorce is a huge stressor for a family that values what other people think of them more than the well-being of their own family members. This was the case for Farzin as much as it was true for Aida.

For all of these reasons combined, Aida and Farzin continued to live together as a married couple while their relationship was cold for almost two years. The rest of my family was clueless about this fact since Aida and Farzin both kept it very well hidden and pretended that everything was fine. Aida developed a severe case of depression while dealing with this situation alone, without any support from my family. I vividly remember that it seemed like nothing in this world could make her happy again. She stayed in bed for 18 hours a day and had no motivation to do anything at all. This got my mother so worried that she lived with her for almost two months and helped her to find a job as a university professor to teach English Literature. From this point onwards, my mother always knew that Aida did not love Farzin anymore or want to be married to him anymore. However, my mother advised Aida to give him a second chance and not to get divorced since she would be alone for the rest of her life in Iran if she did.

All of a sudden, after a month of teaching, Aida was happy again and supercharged with energy and motivation. We all assumed the worst was over, but in fact, her reason for happiness was that she fell in love with another English literature professor, Reza, who was a married man with a 3 year old daughter. Since this man was married and not Zoroastrian, it made everything so much more complicated for Aida. From that point on, all of these pressures caused Aida to be depressed half of the time, and happy the other half. Many years later, I came to know that during this time in her life, Aida got pregnant from Farzin, but she decided she did not want the baby. She therefore got an abortion and did not tell anyone in my family about it till a long time after.

It took Aida quite a few years to decide what she wanted to do with her life. She finally told Reza that she loved him, to which he told her that he also loved her, and was willing to divorce his wife and get married to Aida. Therefore, Aida finally told Farzin that she wanted a divorce. Aida and Farzin agreed to divorce and continue living together until everything was ready and settled for Aida to move in with Reza. Four months into still living with Farzin, Reza told Aida that he cannot divorce his wife and leave his daughter, and therefore, he cannot be with Aida anymore. Aida had a nervous breakdown, and since she had no one to help her emotionally, her situation got so bad that Farzin had to take her to the hospital. Eventually, my mother found out what happened, and shortly afterwards, Anahita and I got the news too. This news was the crisis that shook my family.

My mother spent the next few months in Tehran with Aida, while my father was so mad at her that he refused to visit because of what she had done. Anahita was going back and forth between Kerman and Tehran, trying to help Aida as much as possible. Meanwhile, I was angry, confused, sad, and heartbroken. Farzin’s brother and I were very good friends, and in that moment of awareness that I would lose this friend, I also realized that nothing in my family or my life was ok. Although I have always loved Aida, my 22 year old brain could not make any sense of the things she did or why she did them.

Analysis of family crisis

According to the Libman-Blumen model, this crisis was an internal stressor for my family, since the source was divorce happening in my immediate family (Price, Price, & Bush, 2017). It was also pervasive, since not only it affected my family, but also directly affected the relationship between my family, relatives, and grandparents lives as well. The stressor was a gradual onset for my mother, since she knew how bad Aida’s relationship was with her husband, and that it was getting worse. Thus, she foresaw the divorce. However, for the rest of my family, it was a precipitate onset, since none of us really knew what was going on in Aida’s life so the divorce hit us hard (Price, Price, & Bush, 2017).

The degree of severity of this crisis was intense for my family, but it also came to be a transitory stressor because it was stressful to deal with the problem of Aida’s living situations long after the divorce itself. Although my mother predicted that Aida would divorce Farzin and she somewhat readied herself emotionally, to the rest of my family it was random crisis coming out of nowhere. Since the divorce was direct result of my sister’s action and Farzin’s, it is categorized as an artificially generated stressor . The stressor was perceived as solvable, at first, by my family, since they thought they could fix the problem by taking Aida to therapy. This then shed light on a much bigger problem, which came to be unsolvable, which was her diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Since there is no cure for bipolar disorder, my mother dedicated 99 percent of her attention and emotional support to Aida for many years after the divorce. This left me and Anahita with very little emotional support. In the case of substantive content, this crisis was primarily a combination of social, religious, health and sexual domains (Price, Price, & Bush, 2017).

According the Double ABC-X Model, the aA factors represent the stressor event and the pileup stressors (Price, Price, & Bush, 2017). In the case of our family crisis, the A factor was the phone call we received that informed us Aida was in the hospital and that she had divorced Farzin. I believe the “a” factors, which includes pileup stressors were the diagnosis of my sister with bipolar disorder, and the fact that after she got well to a point that she could live by herself again, there were periods of time when we had no idea what she was doing, where she was, or how she was doing. Due to this, the coping process turned out to be a long one, even so that after ten years there are still situations that creates stress for my family when it comes to Aida’s current relationships.

As of right now, when I look back at everything that happened and how we dealt with all the stressors that existed after the divorce, I find myself and my family very fortunate to possess many resources that helped us to cope with this crisis. According to Double ABC-X Model, the bB factors represent the existing and new resources (Price, Price, & Bush, 2017). In determining the B factors for my case starting with individual family members, in general, we adapted ourselves to the new situation instead of blaming Aida for divorcing her husband, getting an abortion, or for being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. We also learned that we have to support and help her as much as we can. Our sense of cohesion as a family grew better and better with each passing year.

My mother was the greatest resource that my sisters and I had. Not even for a second did she stop loving Aida or ever blame her for anything that happened. My father realized how serious the situation was and tried his best not to show any anger or aggression toward Aida, which was very surprising to me. Although he never accepted Aida’s behaviour, and from time to time, if there was any discussion in the family, he reminded her of her mistakes, in general he learned to control his anger and outbursts of rage completely. Anahita was the best support I had and my relationship with her grew stronger after learning about Aida’s divorce. Since my mother gave most of her time, energy, and emotional support to support Aida, Anahita had my back and even motivated me to attend many classes with her on subjects of spirituality, reiki healing, confidence building and so on during all these years. I believe that no one in my family has changed more positively or grew stronger from this experience as Anahita did. As of right now, my father tries his best to accept Aida for the person she is, he does not argue with her anymore, and tells her that no matter what, he will always love her. Although a bit late, this shows how much my father changed in terms of flexibility and communication. Therefore, my family has turned out to be more connected and flexible than it was previously, due to this crisis.

In terms of having a family system as a resource, we were both lucky and unlucky. We were lucky in a sense that our cousins always remained Aida’s friends and tried to support her as much as possible. However, my uncles and aunts pretended like nothing serious had happened, but at the same time, they tried their best to keep Aida away from their children, as they saw her as a bad influence. As for community support, the only resource that we were fortunate to have were friends and colleagues, especially for Aida. One of the most important reasons that Aida was able to handle this crisis was because of her relationships with her friends and colleagues in university. As for formal support from community institutions, there is still not any kind of community institutions that can help Iranian women to deal with divorce or mental disorders. However, the only kind of formal support that greatly helped my family and I was counseling. Everyone in my family, except my father, went to counseling at some point after the crisis. My mother saw a therapist once every week, for years, to learn how to cope with this event. There she also learned the best ways to communicate with Aida, so that she could help my sister in the best possible way. Anahita and I did the same thing to be able to reconnect with Aida.

The “double C” factor in the Double ABC-X model represents the perception of the initial stressor event and the stress or crisis. In our family crisis, the C factor, or the initial perception of this crisis that happened right at the moment of receiving the news, which I remember vividly, was my father’s reaction. My mother just told us in a phone call that Aida got a divorce and she was not feeling well and she was in hospital but it is not anything serious. My father was so shocked that he lost his control and almost fell on the ground. I thought at first he must have had a stroke. He went into his room and did not come out for the rest of that night, did not eat dinner, or sleep at all that night. As for me, I cannot clearly remember my feelings at that exact moment, but I do remember wondering to myself that night about what is going to happen now.

One of the important factors that I think always made a big difference in how my mother and father approached challenges in their lives was their belief system and value orientation. As Price explained, my mother has a mastery orientation and always believes that she can fix all the problems she faces. On the other hand, my father has more of a fatalistic orientation, and thus accepts that everything will stay the way it is and he cannot do much to make a situation better.

Throughout this paper, in regards to the stressor event, I mainly utilized the word crisis rather than than the word stress This is due to the fact that, according to Price, this event had all the components of being perceived as a crisis by my family: the disturbance was overwhelming, the pressure was severe, and our family could not function adequately. There were also a lot of changes in our family boundaries and customary roles, and my family was not functioning at optimal psychological level.

In the end, the factors that made the coping process easier for my family included all the components of Cognitive coping strategies (Price, Price, & Bush, 2017). Currently, all of my families subjective perceptions of divorce and abortion have changed dramaticly to a point that it is concidered taboo anymore. As a family we achieved this by taking many direct actions like counseling with a therapist and learning about mental illness and its effects on human mind and body which resulted in us reframing the crisis, the process which Price calls intrapsychic This perception helped us greatly to control our emotion every time the subject of divorce was brought up around Aida in family gatherings. As of today, all of my family, including myself is maintaining a satisfactory communication with Aida, we also encourage her in all of her endeavours and our bonds of coherence and unity is getting stronger with each passing day.

After reading the “Race and Ethnicity” chapter in Sociology, a Down-to-Earth Approach I compared the difference of whether the crisis had occured in Switzerland rather than Iran. I realized that if I was born in Switzerland, I would have lived in a country that adopted the policy of multiculturalism, also known as pluralism, in which racial ethnic variation is encouraged (Henslin, 338). This was the opposite of what was true in Iran. Since the Swiss population is made of up French, Italian, German and Roman people, no matter which ethnic or religious group I was born into, I would have never been considered a minority. This would be because these ethnic groups have kept their own language and lived peacefully together while participating freely in the country’s social institution, from education to politics (Henslin, 338). If this case was true, then I my sister’s divorce or abortion would more likely not have been considered a huge crisis, but rather perceived as a normtive stressor event.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this paper used the crisis event of my sister’s divorce and abortion, and throughly analyzed it using the Double ABC-X Model. In analyzing this family crisis, I came to realize how this event made us grow as a family. I also realized how we learned many coping mechanisms to deal with stressful events in our lives and therefore the xX factor in this case for my family’s crisis is bonadaptation. I believe the silver lining is that having gone through this crisis made us stronger, more united and resilient, and overall, a better family.

Works Cited

• Henslin, J. M. (2014). Sociology a down-to-earth approach. Boston: Pearson.
• Olson, D., DeFrain, J., & Skogrand, L. (2008). The Family Circumplex Model. Marriages and families: Intimacy, diversity and strengths (pp. 83-98). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
• Price, C. A., Bush, K. R., & Price, S. J. (2017). Families & change coping with stressful events and transitions (pp. 1-23). . Los Angeles, CA: Sage.