HERT ILLNESS AND INTIMACY: FAMILY TEAMS

Most of us do not live our lives solo; we live in close-knit teams called families. The captains of the family team are the parents. What affects one part of the team has an overall effect on the whole team, and the rules and operations of the team—especially the rules and operations of the parents' marriage—have a great effect on each individual team member.
Family reactions and a patient's responses to cardiac rehabilitation are intimately related. There is no neutral position regarding the family's impact on the recovering heart patient; family reactions either help or hinder the patient's recovery. Just as important, but too often overlooked, is the fact that no heart patient's recovery process fails to change the family in which this recovery is taking place.
Because we are taught neither how to cope with the stresses of illness nor how to work together as family teammates, it is a rare family that does not make mistakes in reacting to illness. The effects of these mistakes can complicate the heart patient's recovery and can lead to some part of the family team breaking down. If you and your family are stuck in unhealthy reactions to illness, the accumulated tensions are probably causing symptoms someplace in your family. These symptoms might appear either in individual family members or in relationships between certain family members. In the case example of the Hinsons, both types of symptoms were evident: Maria and her son were showing physical signs of stress, and Maria's relationship with her husband was obviously losing sexual and emotional intimacy.
Of tremendous concern to me are those families who do not show any obvious signs of stress in reacting to illness but who settle into a subtle and dangerous shift in their ways of living as a family. These people appear to be doing a lot better than they actually are. At first, there may be no open conflict in the family or blatant symptoms shown by any individual member. Or the family may simply be failing to notice the signals of distress that are being sent out and that are obvious to observers outside the family. In either case, such families often settle into ways of interacting that undermine coping ability and health. For these families, illness behavior often becomes the focus of family life.
I once worked with the wife of a heart patient whose comments succinctly described this family dilemma. Without realizing it, she and her family had begun living a life that focused on illness rather than on wellness. She described herself and her family this way:
"After my husband's heart attack, we all got used to walking on eggshells in dealing with him. He was afraid he wouldn't recover, and we didn't really know exactly what to do to help him. We all changed our lives in umpteen ways out of fear of his 'weak heart.' We basically stopped doing anything but work, worry, and wait for the next heart attack.
"The strange thing is that none of us realized how much we had changed. Life got pretty miserable for us all, but we just kept on plowing through and never talked about how unhappy we all were. Our daughter's divorce shocked us all into looking at how we had been living our lives. We realized that this man was likely to survive his heart attack but kill us all in the process!"
To control the impact of illness on your family, it is important to understand how families operate as teams.
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