In This Together: Building Resilience When Caregiving for Your Partner

10. How to Deal With a Difficult Sick Partner

• Marika • Season 1 • Episode 10

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Ever felt like you're wandering through a maze, trying to figure out how to handle your partner's behavioral challenges while still showing them love and care? You're not alone. Come join me as we dive into the messy, real world of caregiving. I'll open up about my own experiences dealing with my late husband's struggles with anger and how I tried to cope with it.

We'll explore how losing autonomy and independence can really weigh on our loved ones, and how the way we interpret their actions shapes our reactions. Setting emotional boundaries from a place of love isn't just a skill—it's a crucial tactic for caregivers.

I'll share some stories from my own life and those of my clients, offering practical advice on how to keep your cool and see things from a different perspective. By understanding, being patient, and recognizing that our partners' actions often stem from their own struggles, we can break free from that endless cycle of thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Top Things You Will Learn:

  1. Recognizing and understanding the patterns of difficult behavior in your partner.
  2. Developing empathy by considering the underlying emotions driving your partner's behavior.
  3. Setting healthy boundaries to protect yourself emotionally.
  4. Reframing your thoughts to maintain empathy and compassion towards your partner.
  5. Learning to respond calmly and compassionately to difficult behavior, even in challenging situations.

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, welcome back. And today I'm talking about a challenge that I know a lot of you face as caregivers, and that is how to cope when your partner is difficult. I wrote a blog article about this several years ago and it's been one of my most downloaded articles, so I know this is something that a lot of you face, and I first want to say having a partner whose behavior is really difficult is very challenging. I think there are a lot of hard things that we do in caregiving, but dealing with a partner who's consistently difficult is one of the hardest, and that's especially true if you have been caregiving for a while or they have just been a difficult person for a while. It wears on you. I think being around anyone who's negative or angry or demanding it can just be really draining. So I want you first to just acknowledge yourself that this is hard, and today I'm going to give you some ways to think about their behavior, hopefully differently, and also give you some coping strategies. So let's dive right in.

Marika Humphreys:

As you know, I always like to start with clarifying what exactly we're talking about, so I've called this difficult behavior, but difficult can be a really subjective term, so I want to give you some examples of what I mean and what I tend to think about or mean. When I think of someone who is being difficult, it is when they are behaving in a negative way frequently, so maybe they are more angry or lose their temper easily. Maybe they have just become just generally grumpy and demanding. Or another way that happens for people is they become controlling, either with you or with others or with maybe everybody in their life. They may be more irritable or moody a lot of the time. Those are just some examples of what I think of when I think of difficult behavior, but I'm sure there's probably more in different situations.

Marika Humphreys:

I think one of the most important factors of what makes behavior especially difficult is that it's not just occasional. It's how they are frequently. So it's something that comes up a lot. In my own situation with my late husband, it was his anger that was very difficult. He would lose his temper more frequently with cancer and as he battled cancer and really as his cancer progressed than he did basically the entire time before in our marriage. I've reflected on this a lot and I don't remember him really being angry at all in our marriage, but with cancer that was something that started to come out a lot. It wasn't how he was all the time by any means, but when he did get angry he would get really angry and it really affected me.

Marika Humphreys:

It was challenging to deal with. When I coach clients on this, the first thing I like to do is imagine what their partner may be feeling on the inside. I think in the midst of someone's difficult behavior, we're often busy just reacting to it. So when you're calm and have a little distance, it's a good time to think about what your partner might be feeling and try to imagine what they're going through. Disease, losing physical or mental autonomy, such as from a stroke or dementia, has a huge impact on someone emotionally and physically, and unless you've experienced that personally, I think it can be really hard to appreciate how to appreciate how challenging that must be. As human beings, one of the things that we value most is our autonomy and independence. So with disease or dementia or a stroke or even aging, we lose our autonomy and we lose our independence, and that is a very hard thing to come to terms with. I can't imagine having to ask for someone's help to get up and go to the bathroom. Maybe some of you have experienced that in your life, through maybe like an injury or an illness. I can't imagine how difficult it must be to not remember things clearly or not be able to trust your own mind, not being able to do the sports or activities that you used to do. I can just only imagine how hard that must be. So I want you to just reflect on what your own partner's individual situation is and what they might be experiencing as a result of what they've lost, what independence they've lost, what autonomy they've lost. And I want you to think about that, because the way that they're behaving that difficult behavior right is how they are trying to cope with their situation, and often when people feel a lack of control in themselves, the response is to try to control anything in their life, and a lot of times that turns into being demanding or being controlling, or being angry with other people, angry with other people. So the behavior is really just a side effect, really, of the struggle that's going on underneath, and I think it's really helpful to remember that, because that's hard to do in the moment. For me, when my husband would get angry, the last thing I thought about in that moment was why he was angry. It was more just trying to respond and react to his anger. So it's only later that I reflected on how challenging so much of his losses his physical losses must have been for him, and that was just the way he was showing it.

Marika Humphreys:

The next thing I want you to think about is what meaning are you giving to their behavior? So, as we go through life, we are always seeing things in the world and in our lives and giving meaning to it. So, for example, we see someone cry and we assume that they are sad. Or someone else is raising their voice and we conclude that they must be angry. We're always just interpreting and drawing conclusions about the things and the people in our lives and around us, and that's just how we make sense of the world. So how you're interpreting your partner's behavior is important to understand, and I'm going to tell you why. But I want you to think about that right now. What meaning are you giving their behavior?

Marika Humphreys:

And I find that there are usually three categories of interpretation that most of my clients fall into when they think about their partner's difficult behavior. The first is that they make their partner's behavior mean something about them personally. So they think it's my fault or I'm doing it wrong, or I need to fix it for them, or I keep upsetting them, or something about them personally. So their partner yells at them and they conclude that they did something wrong, and when we think like that, we just end up feeling terrible and we end up questioning ourself. We end up experiencing a lot of self-doubt. I had a client that I worked with on this for quite a while, because she always felt like it was somehow her failing was the cause of her partner's behavior.

Marika Humphreys:

Another way that we tend to interpret our partner's difficult behavior is that it means something about them, and I'll give you an example of that. You might think that their behavior means that they're getting worse, or that it's unhealthy for them, or they're just a mean person. In my situation when my husband would get really angry, I made it mean something about him. I always felt like all his anger was unhealthy for him and that he was going to make himself worse by not figuring out how to better handle his anger. So I worried that his anger was making him worse and that in turn caused me to feel anxious and on edge. But it was simply because of the meaning I was giving his behavior. I had no idea. Who am I to know what the result of his being angry is? It could not mean anything remotely like that, but that is how I interpreted it anything remotely like that, but that is how I interpreted it, okay.

Marika Humphreys:

And then the third way that we tend to interpret or draw conclusions about our partner's difficult behavior is that it means something about our life or our marriage or something bigger. So, for example, you might think, oh my gosh, every time they are irritable with you or controlling you think I don't want to be around this anymore. I can't live like this, I can't take this. We take this one example and we kind of make it mean something bigger about our whole life or our whole relationship. But what I want to point out here is that all of those interpretations are simply that they're just interpretations, they're just conclusions that we've drawn, and often we don't even question them. But here's the thing we can be completely wrong about our opinions, and often we are, especially when it comes to other people. We think we understand what their behavior means, but we're not inside their head, right? So our interpretations have more to do with how we think and less to do with them, and these are just our thought patterns, right? So all of these thoughts, these interpretations, usually make us feel worse about ourselves or about them or about our life in general. So that's why it's just important to know what conclusion, what meaning, you're giving your partner's behavior.

Marika Humphreys:

So what I'm essentially talking about here is the think-feel-act cycle. I will do a podcast episode on this, but you can also Google it as well. Lots of coaches talk about this, but really what the think-feel-act cycle means is that something happens in the world or somebody says something. We have something, a thing in our, an event in our life. We think, a thought about it. That thought causes us to feel something, and then that feeling drives our action. So how we think determines how we feel, and how we feel determines how we act, and that cycle is happening all the time. The part that's important here is when you start to become aware of how you're thinking. You can shift your patterns of thought or you can question them, and that's what I want to really encourage you to do with. What I'm talking about today is just become aware of what you're thinking and then just question it a little bit.

Marika Humphreys:

Whatever you are thinking is going to determine how you feel when their behavior comes up. So figure out what meaning you're giving it. Now, I know some of you may be thinking right now well, what if I'm right, though? What if I'm interpreting their behavior correctly? Because I know I'm right about this? It is natural for us to think we're right, because we only have our own perspective. It's a great question to ask yourself. What if you are right? What if your opinion about their behavior is correct? Then what? What does that mean? Well, the best way to answer that question is ask yourself how do you feel about it? Because when we go back to the think, feel, act cycle, our feelings will drive our actions, and if our feelings are anxious or on edge, or guilty or something negative, that is not the best place to take action from. So even if you are correct maybe I was correct that my husband's anger was not good for him when I thought that it caused me to feel anxious and on edge and my reactions as a result were to try and prevent him from getting angry. So that was a very unuseful and just ineffective process. I couldn't change how he felt. You can still take action from a calm place, though. So, even if you are correct, if how you think about it causes you to feel something negative, then it's just not a useful way or a useful place to take action from. I hope that makes sense. It can be a little complicated, but you can always take action from love or from a calm place, and that's really what we're talking about here is giving you some strategies of how to respond in the midst of their difficult behavior, and so that's what I'm gonna get to next.

Marika Humphreys:

The next thing I like to recommend to my clients and something I wish that I had done a little more of is creating a boundary for yourself when your partner is being difficult. So I want to first explain here what a boundary is and what it is not, because I think there's a lot of misunderstanding around this concept. A boundary is something that you do to protect yourself emotionally or physically. It is not a way to get someone else to do something, so it's not a way to manipulate or control someone else. It's an action that you take to protect yourself, and it should always be done out of love out of love for you, out of love for them. So, for example, if your partner's angry and yelling, a boundary for you may be to leave the room. Super simple, right? If they're being demanding or controlling, you could say something like I can't talk to you like this, I need to take a break and we can talk later. That's a boundary. You stop engaging and you excuse yourself. A boundary is not saying something like if you don't calm down, I'm leaving you. That's an attempt to control someone, it's a threat. And if you've done that, first of all, I just want to say no judgment.

Marika Humphreys:

We all have responded out of frustration. It's natural to feel defensive. If we're feeling attacked, we get defensive, and making threats is kind of a response to feeling attacked often. So if you've done that, even if you've done that a whole bunch of times, it's okay. You are human and we do these things.

Marika Humphreys:

That is not always the best way to respond, and so when you're calm and when you have some distance from a challenging situation, that's a really good time to figure out what your boundary is. So for me, looking back on my own situation, a simple boundary would have been just for me to leave the room, because when he was angry I couldn't calm him down and sometimes he just needed to like get it out, and for me to be in the room and be around. It was upsetting for me. So a simple boundary to protect myself emotionally would be to just leave the room and wait till he calmed down on his own. So that is always a great option. If you can do that, that's always a great option. But you can also have a boundary where you just say I can't be with you right now. I need a break. Remember, it's always got to be about you and it needs to be from a place of love. But it is really helpful to think about this beforehand and make a decision of what you're going to do beforehand, because in the moment, especially if you're triggered and your nervous system's all fired up and on edge or feeling attacked or whatever, it's really hard to respond calmly if you haven't thought it through in advance.

Marika Humphreys:

And then the last step here is to figure out what else you can believe about their behavior that isn't upsetting for you. If you can recognize that their behavior, their challenging behavior that you are seeing on the outside, is just a reflection of the suffering they are experiencing underneath, it's a lot easier to practice and have some empathy for them. And the thing is we can't change how they behave. I know many of you have tried. I know I did. It is very tempting to want to try to change someone else's behavior. It seems so simple, but if we could, the world would be a very different place. In reality, we have very little control over how others behave, but we can change our reaction to their behavior. That is huge. So if you know what your reaction is right now to their difficult behavior, you can change that. That is within your control and the key to that is changing how you think about their behavior. Again, this is the think, feel, act cycle. Right, how you think is going to change how you feel and thus how you act.

Marika Humphreys:

So what you want- to do here is just to find a more neutral way to think about their difficult behavior, because, again, we're using the word difficult, which means it's challenging. Perhaps it's behavior that's been draining you for a while, or it's just really hard to be around. We tend to have negative thoughts about that, and I want to encourage you to find a more neutral way to think about it, and I'm going to give you some examples, ones that I use and I still use to this day, anytime someone is acting in a way that I just find challenging. Here are some of the thoughts that I've used, but I want to encourage you to find your own, and the key is you have to believe that this is also true. You have to truly believe and see this kind of new way of thinking about their behavior is really valid, like, oh, I could see that that's true as well. So here's some examples. This is how they are coping With my husband's anger. I now realize, yeah, that is how he was coping. I mean, I believe that's actually also true. That's a good thought to have when someone is just behaving in a way. This is how they're coping. Or another thought is they must be really struggling right now. Here's another one. I know that they're doing their best. Okay, that's a great one to use with your kids, because I think we all, honestly, are all trying to do our best, even when our best isn't great, but we're trying. Or another one and this is also kind of one of my favorites is this is just where they are right now. So, whether they're grumpy or irritable, or controlling or demanding, so whether they're grumpy or irritable, or controlling or demanding, this is just where they are right now. Rewind this to listen to those examples again. All of those I find really useful. It's just kind of a reminder that this is how they are coping and it kind of keeps me from not losing control of my own emotions.

Marika Humphreys:

One of my clients really struggled with her husband's behavior. He tended to get very confrontational and sort of blaming and he would lose his temper really easily with his cancer and at first she always thought it was her fault in some way. She always thought she triggered him or something. But over time, as we talked about it and as she observed his behavior more and she started to see her own thought patterns about his behavior, she started to see it differently and she noticed that he was more prone to anger when he would get run down and tired. And so eventually she got to the point that when he would lose his temper she would think, oh, he must be really tired, because she knew that was kind of an effect of just being run down and that was from often the treatments, just all the stuff that his body was going through with cancer. So it would wear him down and then his temper flared, but she couldn't even see that before because she was so busy blaming herself for it.

Marika Humphreys:

When you start to think differently, it will actually change how you see your partner, and this just helped her so much. Seeing his behavior was not at all about her but was actually what he was going through on the inside. And then, because she wasn't as triggered by his behavior, she could respond in a more calm and compassionate way, which again helped him ultimately, and her as well. So there is a huge benefit to going through this process, especially when you're not in the midst of it. That is what I do as a coach, so it's really helpful to have someone guide you through this process. But you can absolutely do this on your own and I hope that this podcast has given you some steps and some ways to think about that.

Marika Humphreys:

All right, my friends, I hope this has been helpful. Again, I'm asking if you will leave me a review for this podcast. That would be fantastic and I would be very grateful for it, and I'd love to hear any questions you have for me, any specific challenges you have about being a caregiver or being a care partner. Send them to me and I will make a list and cover those on a future episode. All right, I will see you next week.

Announcer:

Thanks for listening to this episode of In this Together together. If you would like to learn more about,