In This Together: Building Resilience When Caregiving for Your Partner

8. How to Avoid Regret in Your Caregiving Journey

• Marika • Season 1 • Episode 8

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In this podcast episode, I'm getting real about the rollercoaster of emotions that come with being a caregiver. I'm sharing my own journey as a caregiver and care partner while my husband battled cancer. I go into the differences between these roles and shine a light on the pesky feeling of regret that often hangs around caregivers like a shadow.

I talk about some of the common areas we have regrets.  Whether it's difficult relationships, things not said, or the painful realization of moments lost, I'm digging deep into the stuff that keeps us up at night. But don't worry. This episode is all about understanding where these feelings come from and how to deal with them. I'll show you how to make peace with past decisions and give yourself a break by realizing you did the best you could with what you had.

With a sprinkle of practical tips and a big dollop of emotional intelligence, I'm here to help you navigate the twists and turns of caregiving life. 

Top Things You'll Learn:
1. Understanding what regret is and how it affects our lives.
2. Identifying common areas where regret tends to show up.
3. Learning how to make peace with past regrets by acknowledging losses, accepting past decisions, and focusing on growth.
4. Discovering strategies to avoid future regrets, including making conscious choices, managing emotions, and standing by decisions with the option to make new ones as needed.

As a Resiliency Coach for people who are caregiving for their partner, I'm here to support YOU, the caregiver. Learn more about my work at www.coachmarika.com.

Announcer:

Welcome to In this Together, a podcast for partners turned caregivers, where you'll discover invaluable insights and actionable advice to navigate the ups and downs of caregiving with resilience and strength. Here's your guide, Marika Humphreys.

Marika Humphreys:

Hey, caregivers and care partners, I'm so glad to be back with you. What's the difference between a caregiver and a care partner? Let's talk about it for a minute. I use them pretty interchangeably, but I actually looked this up because I think it's worth just talking about. So what I found online this is not my definition, but I think it's fitting to the way I think about those terms. Online I found a definition that said a caregiver is someone who provides assistance, support and care to another individual, usually due to illness or disability, and that it's often a one-sided relationship where one person provides care and the other receives it, whereas a care partner there is more of a collaborative relationship and really equal partnership where both people work together to address the challenges posed by illness or disability. So I think that is really useful to think about. Again, I tend to use the terms interchangeably, but I know you may not think of yourself as a caregiver and a care partner may seem more appropriate, or vice versa, so that's why I use them interchangeably. Everything I talk about here applies to both, and I will say I really was both. During my husband's battle with cancer, I was primarily a care partner for the majority of that time he was able to make his own decisions and care for himself, but there were periods of time where he wasn't, and I was a caregiver, fully. So anyway, I just wanted to clear that up, and now we'll move on to today's topic, which is a little heavier.

Marika Humphreys:

We're going to talk about regret. I know, actually, that this is kind of a it's a little bit of a heavy topic, but I also feel like it's really important. It's a feeling that all of us are familiar with, and it's something I actually coach on quite a bit. I was recently talking to one of my clients about this feeling, and she was having to make decisions about how to spend her time, with the different things that were competing for her time, which were her career, which is very demanding, she had young children and her husband's health was really declining. So one of the things that she brought up was that she didn't want to have regrets about the decision she made about how to spend her time. So we talked about it for quite a bit and I want to talk about it here because I think it's something that we're all faced with, not only just in our life, but a lot as a caregiver or a care partner. So I'm going to talk about what regret is, the different ways it tends to show up in our lives, how to deal with regrets that we already have and how to avoid future regrets. Okay, because that is actually possible, all right.

Marika Humphreys:

So I'm going to start by defining regret and again, this is a definition I found from Wikipedia, but I like it and I think it fits the way I think about it and what we're going to talk about today. The definition goes regret is the emotion of wishing one had made a different decision in the past, because the consequences of the decision one did make were unfavorable, of the decision one did make were unfavorable. So there's a couple of things I want to highlight here that regret, first and foremost, is an emotion and, just like all the emotions, it's a feeling we have because of how we're thinking. Our emotions are always triggered by our thoughts, and regret is no different. So it's how we think about a past action or decision that is going to determine how we feel about it, and when you think you should have done something differently, that's when you're going to feel regret.

Marika Humphreys:

There's a couple areas actually there's many areas where we tend to have regrets in our life and there's so many, in fact, that I decided to just focus on the ones that I think come up the most for caregiving. But really, regret can show up in all areas of your life Because, again, it's a way we think about our past selves and our past decisions. As I talk about each of these areas, you might just reflect on if you have regrets in them Most of us do have some regrets about our life or in our life and whether you have some current regrets. My goal here today is just to give you a different and, I think, more useful way to think about your past decisions or actions or inactions, and also a way to evaluate current decisions and current actions going forward instead of regret. Right, regret isn't a super useful emotion. Of the areas where regret tends to come up that I think show up most for caregivers, relationships is one of them. No surprise there, right, we often regret things like not spending enough time with our loved ones. This was the area that my client was worried about and thinking about when she was thinking about her time. Client was worried about and thinking about when she was thinking about her time.

Marika Humphreys:

We regret neglecting friendships or certain family relationships. We often regret failing to express our love or appreciation for people who we care about, and that's often something that comes up when they're gone. A second area where regret shows up a lot is just around communication things not said or things said that we later wish we hadn't said. So around things not said. Right, we often regret not expressing our thoughts or feelings, or maybe even our needs, clearly, because often, with perspective and time, we realize the cost of not honestly expressing ourselves. We can regret failing to resolve conflicts or misunderstandings or letting them go on way way, way too long, letting them impact our relationships. Often in the midst of a conflict, being right feels more important than the relationship itself and then, with time and sometimes wisdom and a little distance, that's something that we think differently about. And this other one comes up a lot for caregivers is regretting that we avoided difficult conversations or avoided a confrontation or we didn't stand up for ourselves. I think this is a really important one to remember and think about because again, with perspective and time, we tend to look back and wish we had said the hard thing or wish we had shared our true feelings or stood up for herself.

Marika Humphreys:

Another area, really a third area for caregivers that often people regret is around their health and wellness or their partner's health and wellness. Caregivers often regret neglecting their physical or mental health later on in their journey or not prioritizing exercise or healthy habits. Both of those are really challenging to do while you're a caregiver because you're often placing your partner's needs above your own. But with hindsight and time and sometimes the consequences of neglecting your own health later, it can become something you regret. So we can make some short-sighted decisions in the moment around our health because it feels like our partner's needs are more important, and I know that's a challenging. These are not easy decisions, but I again just want to point them out that these are areas that we tend to have regrets in because of how we make decisions in the present and then ignoring signs of illness. That is one I often coach my clients on around their partner. That is one I often coach my clients on around their partner.

Marika Humphreys:

There's often regrets that they wish they had their partner go to the doctor sooner, or they wish they would have said something sooner, or regrets around kind of seeing signs of illness and not saying something or not taking action Something we reflect on and maybe we wish we had done differently, but there's often no guarantee that that would have changed anything. We think it would, which is why we regret it, but that's not necessarily true. And then financial Financial issues are often something an area where we tend to have regrets Overspending, not handling our finances well, not saving properly or not seeking financial advice. Those are often things that we can regret, and I would just say, in general, a lot of regret revolves around past decisions we make or actions we took or didn't take. That's kind of a general category of regret right. So often, acting impulsively without considering consequences, we tend to regret those things later Not standing up for ourselves or speaking our piece, making decisions out of fear or societal expectations other than our own values. Those are big areas where we tend to have regrets. So I want to point them out, that this is something we all do, and I also want to point out that regret is something we feel after the fact, right After we know how something turned out. Later on in our life, when we have more knowledge or wisdom, that's when we look back and regret our past decisions. Regret is kind of unique in that it's an emotion we feel usually much later than the action that we took or the decision we made. We feel it when we look back from a later point again in our lives, usually when we have more wisdom, more experience, more knowledge, when we know how something turned out and we judge ourselves, we judge our past self after we know how it turned out.

Marika Humphreys:

One of the regrets I carried for a long time in my life was that after college I didn't take the Foreign Service exam. Now I was a international affairs student at a university in Washington DC, so many of my classmates went on to do things in government and politics and that was just kind of the atmosphere I was in and it was something I was interested in. I always thought it would be super cool to work for the State Department and travel all over the world. The prerequisite to doing that was you had to take what's called the Foreign Service Exam, and I remember the saying at the time was that you needed to read like the Washington Post newspaper every day for a year in order to prepare for it. You just needed to be really sort of up on current knowledge and I was not. But it was an interest of mine and, long story short, I never even took the exam and I think anybody could take it. I mean, basically, you had to be a college graduate and you could sign up and take it, but I never even took it, never even signed up, and I regretted that for a long time.

Marika Humphreys:

I regretted it because later, with perspective and maturity, I realized that that decision was based on fear, fear of failure, fear that I wouldn't pass it. So what's the point of even trying? And again, my wiser, older self recognized that well, you're of course going to fail if you don't even try. And so for a long time I carried that regret, but I realize now that something I learned from that it was a consequence of letting fear dictate my actions or, in this case, an inaction, and how that turned out. So this is a really unfair thing that we do to ourselves when we judge ourselves so harshly for our past decisions. It seems unfair to be so critical when we have the benefit of hindsight, the benefit of age and wisdom and experience and knowledge right. When we regret our past decisions, we are judging ourselves from a future place.

Marika Humphreys:

I will give another example of this, one that actually happened recently with a client, and it's not like in my case. I was looking back to a decision I made out of college, you know at the age of 20 or 21. One of my clients her husband, was in the hospital recovering from a procedure clients Her husband was in the hospital recovering from a procedure and it was going fine as far as she knew. And she got a call from him and he said something is wrong Actually, it was a text, I think and he said something was wrong. So she reached out, she contacted the doctor. The doctor said hey, yeah, we're dealing with it, we're going to run some tests. But she got the impression that it was nothing concerning and they were handling it. So she had a hair appointment that was already scheduled and so she went to her hair appointment. Afterward she later found out that it was kind of a serious thing. It was way more serious than she realized and so she felt terribly guilty and regretted the fact that she went ahead and went to her hair appointment instead of going to the hospital, even though it all turned out fine. Okay, her husband was fine, it all turned out, but she felt like she was such a bad wife and made this very selfish decision and she regretted it. So we had to really explore that and that was just a case of regretting an action that she had very recently taken, right Basically the next day.

Marika Humphreys:

We can so easily judge ourselves from this future place. It's very easy to do, but when we talked about it I pointed out that even if she had gone to the hospital, it might not have changed anything. So I think that's important to just recognize whether it turned out fine or it didn't turn out fine. She was making a decision with what she understood at the time and instead of regretting it, we then talked about what can she learn from that, so that going forward maybe she asks some more questions or does something a little bit differently.

Marika Humphreys:

But when we judge ourselves after we know how something turns out, it's just so unfair. Often we think that if we had made a different decision things would have turned out differently, but there's no way that we can ever know if that's true. I really want you to hear that, because I think a lot of us do this. We think, oh, if only I had done X, y, z, then everything would have been fine. But we don't know that. It's an easy way to think. But it's really unfair again to ourselves. We don't know that it's an easy way to think, but it's really unfair again to ourselves. We don't know, sometimes you can make all the quote unquote right decisions, right choices, and things still don't turn out like you'd like them to. So I think that's just something to always be mindful for. Okay, because there is no right decision out there. Right, there's just a decision and then there's going to be some consequences.

Marika Humphreys:

So that brings up, really, the next thing I want to talk about, which is what about the regrets that you have in your life now, like how can you make peace with them? I want you to think about what some of those regrets are that you have. I'm sure they're coming to mind, right, we all have them. Why is it worth even making peace with the regrets that you have, or thinking about them differently, being able to let them go? What's wrong with just having regrets Like yeah, there's things I should have done differently or decisions I should have made, or I was really dumb when I was a young person?

Marika Humphreys:

I do think it is worth doing, because when we have lots of judgments about our past self like I wasn't smart enough, I wasn't brave enough, I wasn't educated enough it impacts how we view ourself right. It impacts our view of ourself and how we think and how we make decisions and when we are super critical, especially in hindsight, it establishes this relationship with ourself that we're going to judge ourselves harshly and if we do that, it's going to be really hard to trust ourself in the present and with decisions we make going forward, because we've set up the rules so that if we something doesn't turn out, we're going to judge ourselves harshly and think badly about ourselves right. So we've kind of created a situation where we really can't win very easily and therefore you're going to be more leery and more unwilling to make decisions because you're gonna fear your own judgment. So learning to make peace with the past decisions, past regrets, is a way of establishing a different relationship with yourself and when you have a relationship of trust with yourself, it is easier to make new decisions going forward. It is important to do. It changes how you think about yourself and it changes your relationship with yourself.

Marika Humphreys:

Part of making peace with your past regrets and finding acceptance is, I think sometimes it's just grieving what you've lost. That's a critical step that we like to skip over. A lot of our regrets often stem from losses right, lost opportunities, lost relationships, lost experiences, and sometimes we just need to let ourselves fully grieve those losses, be sad about those disappointments, and just letting yourself fully feel the sadness or the disappointment of the missed opportunity, the frustration over a poor decision. That is really helpful to do and sometimes necessary before you can move on. One example of how you do that right how do you fully allow yourself to feel that regret? It's just to acknowledge it.

Marika Humphreys:

One of the things that I regretted was that I never acknowledged the loss of mobility that my late husband experienced after his really first surgery that he had on this arm where they found a tumor. So he went through chemo and then the chemo didn't work and so they ended up removing the tumor from his bone, which required removing the bone. Long story short, he was able to keep his arm, but he lost a lot of mobility because they had to remove some muscle and so he could still use his arm, but he couldn't reach above his head, he couldn't really reach forward and this was his right arm and he cooked and he played sports and he couldn't do some of those things with his right arm the way that he could before.

Announcer:

He still had an arm which was wonderful.

Marika Humphreys:

But I never really appreciated how difficult that was for him at the time and acknowledged his loss. At the time I remember feeling sort of frustrated that he wasn't more grateful for what he did have, and because he was kind of angry about his loss of mobility and often frustrated by it, and I would just get impatient with him and want him to be grateful. You should be grateful for what you have and not focus on what you don't have. And later, after he passed away, I realized you know I never acknowledged that that was probably really hard, and so what I did was I went through a process of actually doing that, actually acknowledging and saying sorry to him in a letter. This is after he's passed away, but I still acknowledge the regret I had and essentially made amends for it. I found closure for that part, for my role in our relationship in that way. So acknowledging what you've lost or missed can be as simple as just saying it to yourself, writing it down and just letting those feelings be valid, that you feel them, that you wish it had turned out differently, or you wish you had been smarter, or you wish you had said something or not said something. That is the part of grieving the loss right, grieving the consequence of our decision that we regret. Often that's a first step. Then we can move forward and it's often easier to find acceptance for our past self. That often involves recognizing that, hey, we made the best decisions we could with the information and understanding we had in that moment.

Marika Humphreys:

There's a great quote I heard years ago. I have no idea who it's from. It goes like this People are always doing the best they can, even when they clearly aren't. People are always doing the best they can, even when they clearly aren't". People are always doing the best they can, even when they clearly aren't. Let that sink in for a minute. I love that because it's such a reminder that our best quote unquote looks different to different people and at different stages in our life. My 20-year-old best is very different than my 50-year-old best.

Marika Humphreys:

So acknowledging that we're always doing our best with what we know at the time is how we find acceptance of our past self, even if what we did then doesn't align with our current perspective or our current knowledge. Instead of dwelling on what we could have done differently, we can instead focus on having some compassion and understanding for ourselves and reflecting on the pressures we were under at the time, or our emotional state at the time, or what knowledge and resources we had at that time. Those are often things we like to just gloss over and we forget about. But that means it's harder to find acceptance for yourself when you don't remember where you were and what place you were coming from, and the fact that how something turns out is always influenced by a number of things that are beyond our control. And then I think the last piece to finding acceptance with past regrets is thinking about what you learned from that experience. If you can think about what you learned from it and how you grew from it, you can instead focus on the lesson as opposed to the mistake that was made. And unfortunately, we usually learn the most from the things that don't turn out so well or the things that we wish we had done differently.

Marika Humphreys:

I really think it is worthwhile to think through and be willing to let go of your past regrets. This helps to change your relationship with yourself in the present. Okay, and then the last thing I want to talk about here is how to avoid regrets going forward, because that is absolutely possible. How you avoid regrets going forward. I think there's three parts to this. The first is by making conscious and deliberate choices in the present. So that involves being thoughtful, requires being mindful and intentional and making sure that our choices align with our values. Okay, another way to think about that is to really understand your reasoning behind your choices or your actions, and like your reasoning. Sometimes it's easier not to do something. But if you realize you're not doing something because it's hard or you don't want to have a confrontation, you may not like that reason. So you just want to get clear, like what are my reasons and do I like them? A little hack that I like to teach people for making decisions is to think about it from a future perspective. Think about that decision from six months from now or a year in the future. How will you feel about it if you do this and how will you feel about it if you do this Right? Because often the future you will see things a little more clearly than the present. You who may be under that pressure or may be fearing a confrontation or whatever you're struggling with.

Marika Humphreys:

A second part of avoiding regrets going forward is being really aware of the emotions that are impacting your choices, recognizing them, allowing them instead of letting them influence you without your knowledge, right? Because that's often what happens. I didn't know that fear of failure was really dictating my actions when I didn't take the exam. I know that now, with hindsight, right, and wisdom and knowledge and growth and experience and all of those things. So in the present, you want to just have a lot of awareness of what emotions you're feeling. If you have a big decision to make or you're thinking about certain choices, what feelings come up. You can still make decisions even if you're feeling fear or obligation, if you have awareness of them and then know how to allow those emotions without impacting your decision, right? I remember when my husband was first diagnosed with cancer, we felt a lot of fear. We didn't know what our options were and every decision we made felt very much influenced by fear. And it was something that we learned later when we got in a coaching program that we reflected back on and realized, oh my gosh, so many of those decisions were just based in fear. It's totally understandable, but now I know how to recognize that feeling, when I'm feeling it and just how to allow it and then not let it impact my decision making unconsciously, because that's often what will happen is, your emotions will unconsciously impact your decisions, so you wanna have awareness around them.

Marika Humphreys:

And then, lastly, you want to practice standing by your decisions. My coach always called this having your own back, which is a great way to think about it, right? You wanna have your own back, which is a great way to think about it, right, you want to have your own back. Standing by your decisions means taking responsibility and ownership for them, regardless of how they turn out, and that might seem scary, but it's actually very empowering. But that requires that you won't judge yourself harshly if something doesn't turn out. So that is why it's really important to have the good relationship with yourself.

Marika Humphreys:

There is always uncertainty in life around all the decisions and choices that we make, and so when we can recognize that all decisions, no matter how well made and how well thought through, won't necessarily lead to the desired result, it can be easier not to judge ourselves so harshly and be so critical of ourself. Right, because even the best decisions won't necessarily turn out the way we'd like. I like to remind myself, too, that I can always make a new decision in response to new information, changing circumstances, right, we always have the ability to make a new decision, and that can be really helpful to standing by our decisions right. We make a decision, we move forward, we commit to it and then we have the option if we get new information or we start to see that it takes a turn in a direction, then we can make a new decision or shift course, thinking about it in terms of making a new decision, versus looking backwards and thinking, oh, I shouldn't have done that. That's an unuseful way of thinking. Instead, oh, this is not turning out the way I'd like. Let me make a new decision, let me change course, let me shift gears.

Marika Humphreys:

Okay, it's a much more powerful and empowering way to think about it and to take actions in your life. Okay, I know that that was a lot and you may want to listen to this episode again, but this is really what coaching is all about Helping you have more awareness and be more deliberate in your life. That is what I love. It so much is what has brought me personally and it's what I help my clients do now, but I hope to help you do that just through these podcasts alone. So just by thinking about these things, you will be more deliberate and conscious about them. Okay, so there's a lot of benefit just in the podcast alone. That will bring awareness and more thoughtfulness to some of these areas of your life.

Marika Humphreys:

When we have awareness and make deliberate choices, when we do this most of the time, it's also easier to give ourselves more grace for the times that we're not able to, because there will be times where we are influenced by our emotions, where we are not super thoughtful or deliberate as we'd like to be, and that's okay. Okay, cause we're not going to be perfect in this process. Just remember regrets are choices that we make, judgments about our past self, and you don't have to do that. You can decide to forgive yourself and avoid regrets, moving forward by being thoughtful and deliberate and aware of the emotions that are impacting you. All right, my friends, I am going to leave you with that this week.

Marika Humphreys:

If you are finding this podcast helpful, please leave me a review. I would be so grateful. And if you are listening on Apple Podcasts, the way to do that is you have to go to the show, so you can click on the three dots in the upper right corner of your podcast app and click on go to show and then scroll down until you see the option to leave a review, so I feel like it's kind of hidden in there. That's why I wanted to explain how to find it on Apple Podcasts, but I would love it. Leave me a review, please. That helps other people find the podcast, and I will see you next week.

Announcer:

Thanks for listening to this episode of In this Together. If you would like to learn more about Marika's work, go to www. coachmarika. com.