Expired In Sickness and in Health: Helping Couples Navigate Illness and Disability

Serious illness and disability can severely strain couple relationships. Distilling practice principles from his recent book, Dr. Rolland’s Family Systems-Illness model, provides a guiding framework for therapists to help couples navigate the changing landscape in the experience of illness over time. His resilience-oriented practice approach integrates the psychosocial demands of various types and phases of illness with family and individual life cycle challenges, multigenerational legacies, and beliefs/meaning-making. Guidelines are offered to help couples view the illness experience as a “shared challenge,” and seize opportunities for relational healing and growth.

Participants will gain skills to help couples maintain intimacy with caregiving demands and threatened loss, overcome gender-role constraints, promote resilient “illness narratives,” re-vision life dreams and goals when necessary, and counteract relational imbalances that can emerge over time. Discussion includes timely, cost-effective applications in different clinical settings, including use of preventive family consultations, psychosocial checkups, brief and intensive interventions, and psychoeducational couples groups.

Learning Objectives:

• To use a comprehensive resilience-based Family Systems-Illness model for assessment and clinical intervention with couples coping with chronic conditions
• To help partners mobilize, view the illness experience as a “shared challenge,” and seize opportunities for relational healing and growth
• To help couples maintain intimacy with caregiving demands and threatened loss, overcome gender-role constraints, and counteract relationship imbalances that can emerge with an illness
• To use intensive and brief, timely cost-effective couple interventions with chronic conditions

Presenter:

John Rolland, MD, MPH is Professor of Psychiatry at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and Co-Founder and Executive Co-Director of Chicago Center for Family Health. Widely recognized for his conceptual model and clinical work with couples and families facing serious health conditions, his recent book is Helping Couples and Families Navigate Illness and Disability: An Integrated Approach. Other professional books include his landmark volume, Families, Illness, & Disability: An Integrative Treatment Model; and (co-author) Individuals, Families and the New Era of Genetics. Past president of the American Family Therapy Academy (AFTA) and recipient of numerous awards, Dr. Rolland is a highly regarded international speaker and consultant on family-oriented approaches to major health conditions.

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