The Sharegiver’s Dilemma: Balancing Love and Limits | 002

Welcome back. Today's episode number two about sharegiving is going to focus on putting your mind in charge of what your heart wants to do. See, I view caregiving as a labor of love, and that our success in this labor depends on how well we manage ourselves in that relationship, we come to it because we care about someone, and that's why care is in the original definition caregiving. But what we often find is that we could be overwhelmed by the labor itself.

So what I'm going to talk about today first are client stories about the question, can I say no and keep my family relationships? I could tell you a single story, but the funny thing is that I found that this will often apply to many stories of caregiving. So one example, then might be I had a young woman who was a college student come to me one time and say, I don't know what to do. I just don't seem to have enough time, so I'm going to limit how many classes I take this semester, even though that is going to lengthen the time it takes me to get my degree. So I said, Well, what exactly do you need to say no to and what's going on here? So we talked about the story, and the situation was that there was only one family car, and her mom was using public transportation to get to work, and she was allowed to use the car, provided that she took care of her siblings in the morning and made sure to get them up and dressed and ready for work, because mom had to leave so early. And then in the afternoon, she had to make sure to pick each one of them up and deliver them to wherever else they needed to go and pick them up again after that activity was over, or stay home with them if there was no activity plan for the day. So it really limited the number of hours she had available to take classes, study and do her homework and complete all those tasks. And while she was talking, she mentioned some other relatives, and I wondered, just wondered aloud, was it possible for one of the elder relatives who was living in their house to watch the children in the afternoon so she could go to the library for an hour after she brought them home from their school or activities. And she thought about it, she said, Well, I don't like to bother them. And I said, well, so you're telling me you're going to put off getting your degree and maybe not get it at all because you don't like to bother people. Is that what you really want to say about yourself, and how do you think that's going to be so what would happen if you said a kind of yes to that arrangement, meaning you could have the car for certain hours, but a no to being The only chauffeur in the house, or the only babysitter in the house. So she thought about it, and while she imagined that it might hurt some of her relationships with some of the people in the story, she thought maybe her grandma would like to take care of the little ones. And she checked it out with her mother and found out that that would be okay. So that was true.

The problem isn't that we're mean people that we want to say no to everyone. The problem for caregivers is that we start thinking we can't ask someone else for help, and that snowballs into a we never ask anyone else for help, and pretty soon we're overwhelmed, and the statistics on caregiver burden, some of which I talked about last time, really have to do with being so stressed out that you can't cope anymore, and you're working well beyond your capacity to make other people happy while doing nothing about your own health care, your own mental health, your own physical health, you don't get any exercise and your financial health, sometimes it may be costing you. So that wonderful student of mine who did get her degree eventually was no different from the grandmothers that I'm counseling now who are taking care of sibling elder siblings like themselves or taking care of grandchildren, because their children need to be able to go to work. Everyone has to work on a way to say yes. That preserves everybody's health, mental, physical, emotional and otherwise. So I came up with a framework after experiencing this myself and being reluctant or afraid to ask other people for help that when you take on a caregiving assignment, when you agree to do it, and really you must agree to do it, it's not something you should just absorb like a sponge. When you take it on, you should start with an awareness of what the situation actually is. First of all, start with yourself. What are you doing about your well being now? What are some areas that you need to do a little bit more with? Are you seeing your friends? Do you have personal interests like hobbies or sports that help you to feel good about yourself and maybe work on your well being at the same time? Are your finances in good shape? Are you able to pay for everything you need to do, and if you had to, could you chip in to help the person you're going to be a caregiver for? Or is that not possible? What's your situation? Are you aware of it? And then it's important to look at the other person's situation. What kind of help does this person need? I mean, I compiled a list of tasks one time for the 17 to 20 systems that people have to navigate immediately upon taking a caregiving assignment. And the list is huge if you just tried to get through the other person's tasks in the day, there's probably not much time left for yourself. So being aware of what you can do, what the other person needs, and where you're going to need help is really a first step in creating a successful caregiving assignment. So that's this first stage of the framework that I would help you to impose. The second step is called acceptance. And that mean doesn't mean saying, Oh, well, I can't do anything about this, so I have to take it. What I do mean, though, is looking at what's really there.

So that's where you need to start, with acceptance, with awareness of what you're going to get yourself into and see if you truly understand the other person's situation. Or are there some potentially hidden pitfalls of taking on this task? Will anybody help you? Was what another thing that you should consider and are you accepting that no one will help you if you do because it's crucial that you begin with accepting the situation the way it is. Otherwise magical thinking will turn you into a very resentful person when it doesn't work out. So be aware and accept what is there, not the thing that you hope will be there, then you can safely take responsibility for what you can manage. And if you feel that some of the situation is going to be out of your control and not something that you can take on, you need to say so upfront. And there may be things that come up later on, which you don't want to or can't take responsibility for, but at least at the front edge, be aware and accept what is before you agree to take responsibility for another person. It's their life. And at the same time, are you being responsible to yourself? Are you thinking about your life and how to preserve that? Only then can you get to the fourth stage of this framework, which is grace, moving in the world comfortably with the task that you've taken on and the agreements you've made. A lot of people skip to step four grace because they're enamored of themselves and the person that they want to be caregivers for, be a caregiver for. And unfortunately, by skipping those first steps, you're not going to live in grace for very long, because you're going to be angry about the things you didn't foresee, some of which maybe you couldn't foresee, but things that you could have planned for, or could have said, I need help in this area, and looked around for who the resources were going to be, or what the resources were going to be before you ever said yes. So that's starting from the end, and you really have to travel the whole journey to do it well and to come out with self preservation in the end. So what caregivers long for the most is three or three things, respect, recognition and respite, and often it's very hard to get those things from people around you and even from the person that you're giving care to. How do I know this? Well, one of the things I needed to stop doing after I hit my third session of caregiving for another person I love very much, was to stop being a doormat for everyone else. If there are other relatives or other people who have an interest in your person, they should be sharing the load and helping out too. It's not possible for one person to completely take on the needs of another without sacrificing something about herself. Now I often think to myself, Mother Teresa didn't work alone. She developed sects of people all over the world, groups that. Actually did the caregiving, and what she was doing was managing that. So that's the paradigm I want to be looking at, not Mother Teresa as a saint, but Mother Teresa as a terrific manager. I think it's important for to get these things by taking care of your own mental, emotional, physical and financial well being, mental health is important because it's the stress that creates caregiver burden, and that's what makes people sick and unable to care anymore.

Emotional well being is important to you, because if you feel downtrodden or like a doormat, you're going to lose your competence or your feeling of confidence about the job you're doing, and that often leads to mistakes when you're not sure, when you can't judge physical well being is also critical, because if you don't do exercise, you don't eat right, you don't take care of your nutrition and other health concerns, you're going to find yourself with new lifestyle, conditions that you have to manage, possibly a chronic disease will manifest that might have been put off or never, never experienced for a number of years. So this accelerates your own deterioration. So your physical health is paramount, and last that financial well being. Are you kicking in more than you can afford if you've already started? I know my husband and I shelled out $10,000 to care for my dad immediately, because my parents finances were in such terrible shape, and we were not prepared to make an investment like that. And we knew from experience, if there was that there might be more things that needed to be paid for, maybe even more important things. So what's the financial impact to you, and who is going to pay for it if you're not recognition, respect and respite? Those are three things that often get sacrificed when you try to do it alone. And I was very lucky that a doctor who was taking care of one of my loved ones said to me, you can't do this by yourself. Get other people involved. So he at least respected the load I was going to carry, and recognized that it was more than a one person job. He couldn't provide the respite or the rest the RNR that I was going to need, but he was reminding me that that's very much what I was going to need, and I should take care of myself to make sure that that happened. What's wrong with current approaches to caregiving? When I listen to other people speak about it, who mean very well by by us, I find that they're trying to find ways to help you do more and work more. My approach encourages you to share more and delegate more to live more. In other words, if you do more, you're probably going to learn yourself out at some point, and that's the thing I very much want me to avoid. I know this because I lived in burnout, and it is not a pretty place to climb up out of. So I didn't get here by writing a textbook or even writing a blog. That all that came late has come later. I have lived a lot of trial and error and spent a lot of money. I became sick, I resented myself and other people. I had regrets, and I had to give up. Sometimes I wanted to be liked instead of wanting respect, and that's a critical error that I made. And I know other caregivers make this too. They want to still be loved by their family, even though they're doing the lion's share of the work and other people aren't showing love to them. So when the call comes to you, it is a fork in the road, and you can handle it as a prisoner, become Superwoman. You can handle it as a tourist and not learn too much and be bumped along on the road. Maybe your accommodations aren't so good, and you have to just live, live with it and lump it, and you're not going to use that to our company again. Or you can be an explorer who creates and manages new strategies for caregiving, inventive ones that apply to your situation. You can build a team and lead it as an explorer.

So it's time to get started, and I want to ask you an important question, do you think your well being is negotiable? What I mean by that is, Do other people have control of your well being, or do you, and if you think you do, but you can't do it alone. I'm here to help coach you through you can connect with me through my website, www dot Deborah greenhunt.com, and there's a link for my contact form in the show notes today. And. I'd love it if we can renegotiate your caregiving agreement to empower you. Thank you for listening. I love being with here with you today, and I want help.