“I’ll get sick and die,” the boy (or maybe the girl) decided. “I’ll die, and then they will all know how bad it will be for them without me.”
(From the secret thoughts of many boys and girls, as well as non-adult uncles and aunts)
Probably, every person at least once in his life had such a fantasy about his illness and death. This is when it seems that no one needs you anymore, everyone has forgotten about you and luck has turned away from you. And I want all the faces dear to you to turn to you with love and concern. In a word, such fantasies do not arise from a good life. Well, perhaps in the midst of a fun game or on your birthday, when you were given the very thing that you dreamed about the most, do such gloomy thoughts come? For me, for example, no. And none of my friends either.
Such complex thoughts do not occur to very young children, those who are not yet in school. They don’t know much about death. It seems to them that they have always lived, they do not want to understand that they once did not exist, and even more so that they will never be. Such kids do not think about the disease, as a rule, they do not consider themselves sick and are not going to interrupt their interesting activities due to some kind of sore throat. But how great it is when your mother also stays at home with you, does not go to her work and feels your forehead all day, reads fairy tales and offers something tasty. And then (if you are a girl), worried about your high temperature, the folder, having come home from work, rashly promises to give you gold earrings, the most beautiful ones. And then he brings them running from some secluded place. And if you are a cunning boy, then near your sad bed, mom and dad can reconcile forever, who have not yet managed to get a divorce, but have almost gathered. And when you are already recovering, they will buy you all sorts of goodies that you, healthy, could not even think about.
So think about whether it is worth staying healthy for a long time when no one remembers about you all day. Everyone is busy with their important things, for example, work, with which parents often come angry, wicked, and just know for yourself they find fault with your unwashed ears, then with broken knees, as if they themselves washed them and didn’t beat them in childhood. That is, if they notice your existence at all. And then one hid from everyone under the newspaper, “mother is such a lady” (from a replica of a little girl cited by K. I. Chukovsky in the book “From Two to Five”) went to the bathroom to wash, and you have no one to show your diary with fives.
No, when you’re sick, life definitely has its good sides. Any smart child can twist ropes from their parents. Or laces. Maybe that’s why, in teenage slang, parents are sometimes called that — shoelaces? I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing.
That is, the child is sick, of course, not on purpose. He does not utter terrible spells, does not perform magical passes, but the internal program of the benefit of the disease from time to time self-starts when it is not possible to achieve recognition among their relatives in another way.
The mechanism of this process is simple. What is beneficial for the body and personality in some way is realized automatically. Moreover, in children, and in almost all adults, it is not realized. In psychotherapy, this is called an annuity (that is, a benefit-giving) symptom.
One of my colleagues once described a clinical case with a young woman who fell ill with bronchial asthma. It happened in the following way. Her husband left her and went to another. Olga (as we will call her) was very attached to her husband and fell into despair. Then she caught a cold, and for the first time in her life she had an asthmatic attack, so severe that the frightened unfaithful husband returned to her. Since then, he had made such attempts from time to time, but he could not decide to leave his sick wife, whose attacks were getting worse. So they live side by side — she, swollen from hormones, and he — downcast and crushed.
If the husband had the courage (in another context it would be called meanness) not to return, not to establish a vicious and strong connection between the disease and the possibility of possessing an object of affection, they could succeed, like another family in a similar situation. He left her sick, with a high fever, with children in her arms. He left and did not return. She, having come to her senses and faced with the cruel need to live on, at first almost lost her mind, and then brightened up her mind. She even discovered abilities that she did not know about before — drawing, poetry. The husband then returned to her, to the one that is not afraid to leave, and therefore does not want to leave, with which it is interesting and reliable next to her. Which does not load you on the way, but helps you go.
So how do we treat husbands in this situation? I think it’s not so much the husbands, but the different positions that the women have taken. One of them took the path of involuntary and unconscious emotional blackmail, the other used the difficulty that arose as a chance to become herself, real. With her life, she realized the basic law of defectology: any defect, shortcoming, is an incentive for the development of the individual, compensation for the defect.
And, returning to the sick child, we will see that in fact, he may need an illness in order to want to become healthy, it should not bring him privileges and a better attitude than to a healthy person. And drugs should not be sweet, but nasty. Both in the sanatorium and in the hospital should not be better than at home. And mom needs to rejoice at a healthy child, and not make him dream of illness as a way to her heart.
And if a child has no other way to find out about the love of his parents, except for illness, this is his great misfortune, and adults need to think about it well. Are they capable of accepting with love a living, active, naughty child, or will he stuff his stress hormones into the cherished organ to please them and will be ready to once again play the role of a victim in the hope that the executioner will again repent and pity him?
In many families, a special cult of the disease is formed. A good person, he takes everything to heart, his heart (or head) hurts from everything. This is like a sign of a good, decent person. And the bad one, he is indifferent, everything is like peas against the wall, you can’t get him through anything. And nothing hurts him. Then around they say with condemnation:
«And your head doesn’t hurt at all!»
How can a healthy and happy child grow up in such a family, if this is somehow not accepted? If with understanding and sympathy they treat only those who are covered with well-deserved wounds and ulcers from a hard life, who patiently and worthily drags his heavy cross? Now osteochondrosis is very popular, which almost breaks its owners to paralysis, and more often owners. And the whole family runs around, finally appreciating the wonderful person next to them.
My specialty is psychotherapy. More than twenty years of medical and maternal experience, the experience of coping with my own numerous chronic diseases, led to the conclusion:
Most childhood illnesses (of course, not of a congenital nature) are functional, adaptive in nature, and a person gradually grows out of them, like out of short pants, if he has other, more constructive ways of relating to the world. For example, with the help of an illness, he does not need to attract the attention of his mother, his mother already learned to notice him healthy and rejoice in him like that. Or you don’t need to reconcile your parents with your illness. I worked as an adolescent doctor for five years, and I was struck by one fact — the discrepancy between the content of the outpatient cards that we received from children’s clinics and the objective health status of adolescents, which was regularly monitored for two to three years. The cards included gastritis, cholecystitis, all kinds of dyskinesia and dystonia, ulcers and neurodermatitis, umbilical hernia, and so on. Somehow, at a physical examination, one boy did not have an umbilical hernia described in the map. He said that his mother was offered an operation, but she still could not decide, and in the meantime he began to play sports (well, do not waste time, in fact). Gradually the hernia disappeared somewhere. Where did their gastritis and other ailments go, cheerful teenagers also did not know. So it turns out — outgrown.