My Child Is Seriously Ill. I'm Scared. Part 2

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The news of the child's serious diagnosis plunges parents into shock. Denial, fear, despair, anger, aggression are necessary and correct emotions at the first stage. This is followed by depression and here parents either "get stuck" forever or turn to a specialist for help and are looking for how to give their child real emotional support and resources.

What are the extremes?

1. Parents suppress and ignore their fear and anger. They become cold and insensitive, although it seems to them that they have become strong and purposeful, the child is correspondingly capricious and uncontrollable. A difficult child-parental conflict unfolds, in which all forces are spent not on healing, but on the struggle and suppression of the child's will. “How much I said so much and you’ll lie there”, “Are you stupid, don’t understand that you can’t get out of bed?”. Of course, the child is not stupid, he perfectly understands that his actions are hurting himself. But she will do this until the parents admit their fear and anger at the illness that happened to the child. With his provocations, the child "forces" the parents to live their anger in such a surrogate way and at the cost of his precious and limited time. Children, our most important rescuers.
2. Parents deny the disease and diagnosis. They go to different doctors and hospitals for months. They miss out on thousands of opportunities. They lose time in their child's life, but they still don't give up. Parents become nervous, irritable, and inadequate. They can go through 10 doctors, get 10 different diagnoses, and do 10 different operations. In such a situation, the child becomes weak-willed, apathetic or manipulative and domineering. Realizing that getting sick is beneficial, because it allows you to command and control an unstable parent, he will never turn to healing, even at the cost of his life.
3. Parents fall into depression and grief. Getting out of depression on your own is very difficult. Parents spent many months suppressing anger and fear, now becoming exhausted and exhausted, they transmit apathy and melancholy to the child. Often parents cry at the bedside of their child and lament "you just get better." The child will never disappoint his mother, who mourns him day and night.

We live in the 21st century, there are many good books, specialists and accessible Internet around us. Being in chronic stress or depression without external help is difficult to cope with these conditions. Even a runny nose can lead to serious complications. You can go to personal psychotherapy, a coach, family constellations and start changing your state, discover a resource and strength in yourself, and as a result, the child's situation will begin to change as well. After all, children are in the psycho-emotional field of their parents. In general, you can do a lot, but most of the parents give up the simple thing - from the recognition of the fact of what happened. “You understand,” the mother of a 10-year-old boy shouted, “no one had this in the family, never!” And in 3 years the child underwent 10 operations and 4 radiation therapies, for a short time there was relief and again a rollback, again an operation, relief and rollback.

In every clan system there is a first one, through which something manifests itself, a dynasty (heart, diabetics, asthmatics, etc.) can begin to take shape, which keeps the clan loyalty at the cost of its life. It is impossible to cope with this alone. But if parents do not know how or do not want to take help from the outside world, then how can they teach a child to accept this very help from parents and doctors?