Can relationships kill your body?

I visited an old friend last night–no, he’s not old, but I’ve known him since he was in diapers and he’s now 36. He’s the son of one of my sisters when I was an exchange student to Belgium the summer of my junior year, so I know his entire extended family.

An innocent question about how his dad was revealed a family tree of unimaginable misery. His mother has cancer and faces a prospect of continuing chemo–“they’re not going to stop it” until when? Until it kills her? Or she cries uncle? Or what? Ironically it’s the same progression of cancer as killed my mother, or rather, as motivated her to select chemo which then killed her. My friend is sure that they’ve so improved chemo by now.

Interestingly, they say that tumors start 7 years before diagnosis, and those correlating cancer with emotional and psychological factors suggest looking at that period of time to see what happened in the person’s life.

For my friend’s mother, the trauma was the marriage of her daughter at long last (she was mid thirties) to a man who turned out to be a sadistic, psychopathic con man. The daughter’s now divorced after the most tumultuous divorce imaginable. And to make it worse, she only got 50% custody of their two very young children which means she deals with her ex several times a week. He does not hesitate to use their children against her. For example, she was looking forward to their son’s little graduation ceremony from kindergarten. He knew this, had custody on the day in question, and faked doctor’s notes to keep the children out of school, just to spite her. Wow!

An inescapably sad story, for someone to be stuck with such an abusive ex-spouse, and for children to be subjected to it. Lots of trauma and drama and upset over this– charges and countercharges! So my friend has made herself sick. It’s a sad story, but is it worth killing yourself over?

And by the way, his mom and dad had been harping and snaping and being nasty to each other for years (I haven’t seen them since 1998 so I was shocked, having known them when they were more content).

And in the three years since I’ve been updated on family news: one uncle has died young of a heart attack, his wife (my friend’s aunt) is permanently disabled with a permanent tube in her throat to breathe through since she passed out on a bus and they discovered she had a hereditary muscle wasting disease that was causing heart failure. Same hereditary muscle disease has already killed her 27 year old daughter.

My friend’s father has this to a slight degree. His sister, the ex-wife of the psychopath, has it to a much greater degree though you wouldn’t know it to look at her. And by the way, my friend (who is happily married and the father of a 10 month old angel) has just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Another cousin is unhappily married, into a rich family with a mother in law who throws things at her and has arranged to make sure the large house she lives in will never be in her name, only her husband’s and her child’s.

Wow! Does everyone live this way? Is this level of stress and resulting physical degeneration considered normal?

Isn’t there a better way?

I would like to show people it’s possible to be happy together, using tools that are really not all that difficult if you’re motivated! So many people need these tools! What would take for them to show up in my classes so they don’t have to die of their dramas?

Check out the classes under ecourses on this site. You can still get in on three live calls in the current series, and a new series starts in September.