If the job of being a caregiver only involved giving help to your aging
parent such as doing the dishes and helping fill out the Medicare paperwork,
your life would be considerably easier.
And if that were the case, even if there was a lot to do, the problem of
caregiver burn out would not be such an issue.
But the real drain on you and even on the senior citizen you are taking
care of comes in the emotional toll that the care giving relationship brings
with it. Because the “assumed understanding”
of the care giving relationship is based on the extended giving of a very large
favor, guilt becomes a common element in every aspect of the time you spend
with your aging parent.
It’s very easy for the senior citizen to feel guilty for asking you for
the work you do to take care of him.
It’s a strange situation because in most cases, they never asked. You may have stepped in because you saw your
parent’s life beginning to unravel and you knew that someone had to help get
his retired life organized. And yet, the
senior citizen feels a lot of guilt because you are giving him huge amounts of
time and that is time away form your family and maybe your work to do things
for him unpaid and very often without thanks.
It doesn’t help that the time of transition from independence to
assisted care is one of huge loss of self esteem for your aging parent. There are a lot of tremendous changes that
happen in rapid order for y our parent and they happen in areas of life that
have remained unchanged for decades. If
inside of a year your mom or dad go through a loss of their home to go live in
an assisted living facility, loss of mobility because they cannot drive and
loss of independence because everything is being done for them, that causes a
lot of negative emotions. Guilt makes
its appearance because they feel irrationally that if they had not grown old,
this would never have happened.
But guilt also is an issue for you, the caregiver. There always seems to be something more you
could be doing for your parents. It
doesn’t help that the senior citizen you work so hard to care for also inflicts
guilt on you by whining, “I wish you never had to go home” or by complaining
about their lives and getting angry.
So what can be done about all of this guilt? Guilt doesn’t make the relationship better
and it doesn’t improve the quality of life for the caregiver or from the senior
being cared for. So whatever we can do
to shut it down would be a positive step for both parties.
Probably the most proactive thing you can do about guilt is confront it
directly. Sit down with your aging mom
or dad and get those guilt feelings out in the open. It’s not their fault they got old. Your parent should not feel guilty about being
cared for by you. After all they cared
for you for decades when you were just a child and young adult.
Bu taking the teeth out of guilt, you have a real chance of getting
that out of your relationship. By
learning not to put guilt on each other, you become a team in care giving, not
combatants. And these are positive steps
toward a healthy senior citizen and caregiver relationship.
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