PITFALLS OF FAMILY LIFE: DANCING HARDER THAN EVER

The longer I practice clinical psychology, the more amazed I am to observe that families, like individuals, tend to know what they are doing that contributes to their problems, but they continue to do it harder and harder the more frustrated and frightened they become. Many families coping with heart illness react this way. Now that they are threatened by overwhelming illness-related stress, they exaggerate family roles that were not working very well in the first place. Two such family patterns are (1) amplifying typical family roles and (2) exaggerating existing differences in perceptions.
When the family stress and fear levels escalate, exaggerated interplay among these roles can occur. In reacting to the stresses of heart illness, many couples get stuck in a dance in which one finds fault with everything and the other spends all his or her energy trying to soothe die first person's feelings. The heart patient may take on the first role, reacting to issues having to do with the illness by telling his or her partner, "My cholesterol levels are still too high! If you'd learn to cook healthier meals, maybe I'd live longer." The partner is often all too familiar with his or her own role and readily settles into feeling anxious and guilty about the spouse's rehabilitation struggles. The partner's steps in this dance involve remaining quiet about his or her own needs and trying to avoid further blame by pleasing the other person. Remembering that reactions within families fuel counter reactions, you should not be surprised to find that such a couple soon gets stuck in a circular dance: the more one person complains, the more the other placates, and so on.
As tensions mount in the marriage, the whole family team may heat up in emotional reactions. Other family members may react to the tension of this dance by exaggerating their own typical family positions. For example, a child might try to divert attention from this scary process by misbehaving. This distracting behavior might fuel an over-rational response by the family member who always keeps cool. In an effort to counterbalance the child's failure to attend to the main issues at hand, this family member may become progressively more rational and logical in reacting to the emotional situation. Such people often appear cold to others, but in fact they are typically concerned and lonely behind the walls of all of that logic.
The more emotional tension mounts in the family, the more these pre-illness family roles escalate by fueling one another. Thus, many families settle into patterns of reacting to illness that simply make matters worse.
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