ADULT CHILDREN OF HEART PATIENTS: SUMMARY
Healthy family reactions—to illness or to simple day-to-day life— require that parents remain the architects of the family. As long as you are able to do so, it is important for you to care for each other appropriately. Your loving connection as mates provides an umbrella of security and psychological structure beneath which your children can grow and thrive. Do not fold that umbrella just because heart illness has entered your life.
Regardless of the ages of your children or of your parents, highly stressful times carry with them the risk that someone will become caught in triangulation patterns. To do so is damaging to your marriage and your health.
If you are a cardiac couple living in the "sandwich" generation— feeling responsibilities to your own spouse and children but also feeling responsible to care for aging parents—be especially careful to stay out of multigenerational emotional triangles. Speak openly and lovingly to your parents about your dilemma and about your need to balance your energies both in your family of origin and in your family by marriage. Accept that you cannot be the perfect son or daughter, even if your parents have difficulty believing it. Be loving. Be available. But be clear that your primary energies must be directed to living your own life.
If you are a cardiac couple with grown children, try to maintain a balance between respecting your children's needs for independence and being open with them about your needs. It is all right to ask for support, help, guidance, or companionship from your children. I hope you have already taught them that it is safe to speak their minds in dealing with you. If they are available and willing to give what you ask, then so be it. But if your children indicate through their words, their actions, or their own symptoms that they are caught in a conflict of loyalties, then give them your blessing to focus their energies on coping with their own problems. You remain the parents and they the children, through all the days of your life together. Free them to live by loving each other.
Finally, let me emphasize that no family fulfills all the glowing descriptions of healthy functioning, and no family is all bad. The descriptions of positive and negative family characteristics in the preceding several chapters are presented in the hope that you may be able to identify yourself and make changes in your life if you need to. Viewing yourselves from the foregoing perspectives can be quite helpful in stimulating growth within your family. I recommend that you use and reuse these chapters as blueprints to guide you during times of discussion in your marriage and in your family relations. Remember that normal, healthy families are those who continue to grow and change together; a steady state of perfection is never attained or maintained in family teams.
If your family is struggling in its efforts to adjust to heart illness, it is likely that either a cause or an effect of this struggling is lessened marital intimacy. The remainder of this book is devoted to what I consider one of the most important aspects of cardiac rehabilitation: marital intimacy.
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