There are many full-time carers who live with an elder, partner or other family member and care for them 24/7, often with no day or time off unless they feel deserving of such. If left unmanaged, exhaustion is often the consequence.
Those who take on or inherit family caring responsibilities often find themselves in a cycle of care that is multi-layered and complex. How do carers navigate these intense caring relationships together with the financial challenges they face?
Part 1 – The ideals and beliefs
Self-care is the foundation to remaining steady in caring roles, exhaustion free and with continued health. https://acarersjournal.com/101-of-self-care-2/
Less spoken about are the hidden and inner drivers that influence how we are and what we do as we care for another.
Energetically, what exhausts us are ideals and beliefs about being a good daughter, son, mother father, friend, spouse, sister, grandparent, carer.
These ideals and beliefs are inner messages on continual replay and when listened to rule our lives. Most are rooted in religion, culture and family and many have definite gender bias with expectations and beliefs that women should: be perfect, good, nice; please others, don’t rock the boat, don’t ask for help, sacrifice their life for others. Others are based on expectations that things will remain the same; exhaustion often comes from the tension we encounter when they don’t.
Regardless of the complexity and nature of the caring responsibility and relationship, what matters most is how we respond to them. There are only two positions, we either respond or react.
The essence of exhaustion free care is being responsive
What does this mean?
Being responsive is when we find purpose and accept the caring responsibility in full. This includes the responsibility of caring for our own wellbeing as carers. Neither are mutually exclusive, it’s all one package.
Reactivity fuelled by ideals and beliefs generates resistance, resentment, obligation, duty, good, pleasing others, guilt and sympathy. These reactions steamroll our wellbeing as carers, creating tension and exhaustion by making everything effortful. These aspects are often glossed over as being a normal part of what caring is.
Do we respond or react to our caring responsibilities?
A woman in her eighty’s cares for her husband with advanced dementia, she is capable, organised, loving and diligent. But resents the fact her life was cut short when her husband became ill. Prior to his illness, she was an active volunteer, her life was full, she travelled, met people, was recognised and appreciated. Now she feels constrained by being at home alone 24/7 caring for her husband. She is dutiful and loving but beneath this resentment seethes because since becoming his fulltime carer by default, she cannot do what she wants
This is an example of an ideal or belief that elevates and gives more value to being involved in the community and working as a volunteer above caring for her husband at home.
Conventional ‘norms’ say that certain aspects/roles of life have more value than others where in truth every role is of value, including caring roles. With purpose, we accept the magic and rhythm of life cycles: one cycle completes and another opens equally as valuable as the one before it, but only if received as such. D’s role caring for her husband has every potential to be as or more enriching as her previous volunteering role. Holding on to ideals and beliefs can convince us otherwise and it is this that creates tension and dissatisfaction. Contrary to widely accepted belief it is not the work itself but it’s how we respond to the work that’s the problem.
Every caring relationship offers the possibility of true enrichment.