20100923 130100

HEALING HEART ILLNESS: CHOOSING INTIMACY IN COPING WITH ILLNESS

Throughout this book, I emphasized my belief that you are Born to Choose when it comes to dealing with your individual stress reactions. I believe even more passionately that you have choices as a couple in determining your reactions to heart illness within your relationship. I believe that you only have two basic choices, however: your reactions to this illness will either (1) help or (2) hinder your marital intimacy.
Different phases of the cardiac rehabilitation process create different varieties of relationship crises. Relationship crisis tends to pull you backward, to make you regress to a less mature and less healthy way of functioning. Be aware of these pulls and persist in your cooperative efforts to help your relationship along this path of growth.
As you travel together, do not kid yourselves or each other about the realistic destination of this journey as a couple. Marriage does not involve undying security, or endless happiness, or never-ending intimacy. Healthy marriages settle into Good Enough Territory. Your mission as a couple is to be reasonably certain that you are not going backward in this journey. Your quest should be to discover how far you can go together as husband and wife.
I have found that the following brief marital exercise is tremendously helpful to couples who are attempting to stay on course in their marital journey. This exercise helps you consciously choose to create and embrace intimacy as a soothing balm to your fears or as an icing to the delicious cake that is your life together, in sickness and in health.

*132\170\9*