PITFALLS OF FAMILY LIFE: THE FAMILY SCRAMBLE
As is evident by now, I strongly believe that few events in life create as much of a scramble in family functioning as heart illness. Families coping with illness get pushed to the point of losing the organization that holds them together. This family scramble is heightened if the wrong" family member gets sick or if the illness hits a marriage that is already caught in a painful struggle over intimacy.
The Wrong Person Got Sick!
No family wants any of its members to get sick, but we have less difficulty coping with illness if it strikes a member who is already defined as being the "sickly one" or the "weak one" or the "problem" in the family.
For example, a family may have grown accustomed to dealing with the health problems caused by the husband's alcoholism. If he now has a heart attack, the specific problems change, but the processes of living with a husband who has a health problem simply continue. The family may already be used to coping with the husband's illness when the heart attack happens, and the shock of this illness may therefore be less than if he had never been sick before.
On the other hand, this family would have more difficulty coping if the wife were to get sick. Then the family member who had been the primary caretaker of the family (because of her husband's alcoholism) would be temporarily unavailable to hold the family together in the face of escalating stress. Family adjustment to this illness would be understandably more difficult.
Such family scrambles in adjustment occur not only in reaction to the family caretaker's illness. Any time the impact of illness requires family members to make major shifts in their modes of relating to one mother, the family is at risk of developing adjustment problems. Families who are shocked by illness struggle to remain organized in familiar ways. In their efforts to help one another maintain comfortable and familiar roles within the family, some families make the unhealthy choice of either denying that the illness exists or having someone in the family "one-downing" the heart patient by becoming even more symptomatic than the patient.
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