ADULT CHILDREN OF HEART PATIENTS: WHAT PARENTS CAN DO TO HELP
To begin with, parents should learn to be aware of signs that they may be turning to their children for support in unhealthy ways. If you are having marital problems that you are not facing together, then the risk increases that your children will become unhealthily involved in the family drama. Any number of marital patterns or problems can increase the odds of triangulation occurring within the family:
- Excessive emotional dependency of the medical patient on the spouse.
- Indirect communication style within the marriage.
- The couple's narrow range of social contacts, paired with excessive emotional dependency on the children.
- Difficulty in resolving marital conflict.
- Sexual problems between the spouses.
- Generally poor intimacy between the spouses, perhaps due to difficulty in directly expressing warmth and affection.
- Spouses feeling misunderstood by or disinterested in each other.
While you are honestly examining the status of your marriage and family patterns, it helps to be sensitive to signs that any of your children are behaving in ways that create communication triangles. You may not intend for your children to become involved in your problems; these grown-up children with minds of their own may simply be barging into your private life uninvited. Regardless of why they are doing so, the important point is for you, as loving parents, to try to keep your children from assuming responsibility for your emotional life.
For example, invitations to one parent to gossip about the other, however lovingly phrased, usually signal that the child is responding to tensions that need to be addressed between husband and wife, not between parent and child. Or such conversations may be a concerned child's way of asking for reassurance that the two of you are taking care of your emotional business. Respond appreciatively to such invitations, but clearly refuse to participate in a negative drama involving one of your children and your spouse. This form of mature response is one of the greatest psychological gifts a parent can give a child of any age. Giving children unnecessarily private information about your marriage is harmful, both to your marriage and to your child. To do so is to weave one of the worst psychological webs that trap children and strangle their growth as individuals.
How should you respond, then, if a child expresses concern for your marriage? First, here is an example of a poor response: "Thank God you asked! I've been going out of my mind worrying about your daddy. He's just not the same since his heart attack, and he and I just aren't getting along. I don't know what to do! Maybe if you talked to him it would help. He does seem to brighten up when you and the kids come to visit. Maybe you should come over more often."
By responding this way, you would convey to your child the message, "You should feel responsible for solving this problem that exists between your parents." Such pressure will only increase your child's distress level.
A far more healthy and caring response to your child's expression of concern for your mate might be: "I appreciate you and your concern. Your dad is having some struggles right now that are sometimes hard to understand and to live with. But we are dealing with them. Being married teaches you how to get through hard times, and this is a hard time that we'll lick one way or another. We both love you and know you love us, and that's important to us. But this is something that he and I have to deal with."
The point is not to shut your concerned children out of your emotional life. The point is to reassure them that they are free to live their own lives, and that with love, support and caring, you will deal with your own marital struggles.
If you and your spouse realize that you are triangulating one of your children, then simply stop! Read this book together and speak to each other about your own struggles with intimacy or the fears that are keeping you from settling your marital issues. Then, with a sense of "we-ness," speak with your loving children, and free them from their sense of responsibility for your emotional well-being.
It may be particularly soothing to your child to learn that you have employed someone else, such as a professional marital therapist, to help you. This freeing of your child from triangulation can be done with laughter and should be done with open statement's of appreciation and love for each other. For example:
"We appreciate your coming over to talk with us. We want you to know about some new developments with us. We've been learning some things about how families work, and we realize that we had you caught in the middle of our tensions. This isn't a good place for you to be, and we're learning that this pattern in families just keeps marriages stuck in these issues.
Impossible as it may seem to imagine having such a conversation with your children, I assure you that such words would be music to the ears of any child caught in parents' relationship tensions. We harbor hopes and fantasies that our loved ones will be well and will care lovingly for each other. One of the many hard tasks of parenting is freeing children from their concern and their sense of responsibility for their parents' relationship.
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