Glenden BrownUnhelpful Habits
I’ve blogged before about the experience of growing up at the healthy sibling of a sick child. Over the years I’ve known other people who had the same experience.
A former aquaintance of mine talked about her experience of being sent to live with relatives when her sibling was seriously ill and how her family badly mishandled the experience. No one in the family bothered to offer her the simplest explanations about whas was happening; this woman was terrified she had been sent away for being bad, for doing something wrong, for somehow making her brother sick. Though it was many decades ago, she still remembers the experience as keenly painful - a time of personal rejection that was never really healed. As an adult, she continued an array of behaviors developped during that part of her childhood that were distinctly unhelpful - including a tendency to overreact to any positive attention, and a strong streak of stubborn independence that left people at arm’s length from her. Having learned to care for her own needs at an early age, this woman did not know how to get her needs met by other people in healthy ways - she literally either completely turned herself over to other people or stubbornly refused any help at all.
I was recently talking with a friend and we explored the idea of self-sufficiency. Healthy siblings of sick children learn to take care of themselves early; their parents are distracted by the pressing burdens of having a sick child and are rarely able to meet the needs of their healthy children. So, in the face of this crisis, these children learn to take care of themselves - physically and emotionally. The habit of caring for one’s self becomes so deeply engrained that as adults these persons continue in those behaviors, at times in ways that are distinctly unhelpful to themselves.
As my friend put it, “Everyone knows I can take care of myself so even when I ask for help, they don’t believe I really need it.” The dark side of this epxerience manifests itself in a learned unwillingness to ask for help - especially when you need it. People who are very good at taking care of themselves often find themselves taking care of those around them - being the person who thinks of the details, who attends to the needs of those around them, who is aware of those around them in surprising ways.
Over at Beliefnet, there’s an interesting article about the topic. What I found most interesting was the comment:
I worked with multiply handicapped kids for about a year and a half. In that time I learned that the siblings of the kids I worked with were not only some of the strongest people I have ever met, they could come the closest to defining what “normal” meant. The other thing they had a firm grasp of was what “loving” meant even more than their parents. They went through all the developmental struggles not only fo themselves, but for their “delayed” sibling. Even the most rebelious and spiteful (I never knew one to be truly hateful) could not turn away from their sibling, though their expectations of their parents were not usually well met. Most often they were the ones who offered ther greatest and most beneficial support to their “delayed” siblings (this means they did not bend to every wish or accept any brow-beating or manipulation)
Parents are often unable to set boundaries with their ill child. Once that child recovers it continues; for children with chronic conditions (i.e. down syndrome), boundary setting is even more difficult. Parents never fully recover from seeing their child as “sick and/or dying.” Emotionally, it leaves deep scars. A coworker has a child who got an infection that almost over night turned systemic and nearly killed her child; it’s been years now but her voice still carries deep, unexpressed pain and fear when she tells the story. In a great article at USAToday:
Reading through the entries of the book, published by the Richard D. Frisbee III Foundation, one thing becomes clear: As families try to cope with the illness, the healthy children feel as if they have become an afterthought to their parents . . .
Children with a sick sibling come to realize that the illness forces their parents to prioritize their lives around helping the ailing child, says Gerald Koocher, a pediatric psychologist and dean of the School for Health Studies at Simmons College in Boston.
“Obviously, families do their best under awful circumstances, but especially if the healthy kid is doing OK, they’re not the squeaky wheel,” he says. Though it is natural for healthy children to harbor resentment for the sick sibling who receives more attention, they rarely voice their emotions to their parents, Koocher says.
“How can you say to your parents without feeling selfish, ‘I need something more for you when you’re taking care of my sibling who can’t do the things I can do or is chronically ill.’ ” [snip]
Mallory Stratton, 15, who wrote about dealing with her brother’s autism, said she used to be angry that her parents were more accommodating to her brother.
“They always used to tell me, ‘The world doesn’t revolve around you,’ yet at the same time, our world was revolving around my brother, and I saw that as very unfair,” says the teenager from Orange, Conn.
Ill persons experiences profound and pressing needs - needs that those around them often strive to meet. If the patient is a child, the parents adopt a ferocious focus on them and their needs, which leaves siblings at loose ends. For the healthy child, the lack of parental attention is a double edged sword - they learn life skills they will need in later life. At the same time, the sense of being an afterthought can make them emotionally needy or unavailable in later life.
For years after my brother’s birth my sister and I received marginal parental attention. When my brother finally got healthy enough that my parents were able to refocus their attention, I certainly regarded them as johny-come-latelies. As my parents tried to assert parental authority they had largely not asserted in previous years, I regarded their efforts as interfering with my autonomy and resisted. In that counterintuitve way that human brains work, my parents tried harder to enforce authority I regarded as illegitimate and I resisted even more; at the same time, they turned more attention to my brother who was receptive to their parental authority (which only reinforced my attitudes).
Nothing in life is an unalloyed good - even the best things require work and adaptation on our parts. While a tendency toward self-sufficiency might seem good, it can result in unanticipated problems - for instance an unwillingness to ask for help. And learning that others needs are pressing and to consider them first can lead to an unwillingness to fight for your own needs - sometimes even to deny your needs.
On a final note, a while back I found an article that advocated “involving your healthy child” in caring for the sick sibling. I can’t imagine anything I think is less helpful. The healthy sibling’s world is already being circumscribed by the unhealthy child. The more pressing need, it seems to me, is for parents to carve out some time for the healthy siblings to get one on one time, some affirmation from their parents and some special attention of their own. Healthy children have emotional and developmental needs; meeting those needs may not be possible, but at least acknowledging them will give the healthy children a tremendous boost and go a long way to maintaining a healthy family dynamic.
