In This Together: Building Resilience When Caregiving for Your Partner

12. Navigating the Silent Grief of Caregiving

• Marika • Season 1 • Episode 12

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Ever stopped to think about the weight of those "little losses" caregivers carry? You know, those quiet sorrows that can cast a shadow over our days? Well, today, let's talk about grief—not the kind we feel when we lose someone, but the other losses we encounter on our caregiving journey.

In this episode, I share my story of experiencing intense grief when we found out my husband's cancer had spread. I'll also share some common examples of other losses caregivers may experience. And I'll give some practical ways to spot and tackle those losses head-on.

It's so important to give ourselves the time and space to deal with grief, but often we don't. Or we try to rush to this place of acceptance. Or we try to ignore the emotions we're feeling and just stay focused on the positive. But recognizing our losses is key to navigating caregiving with more strength and kindness toward ourselves.

Resources Mentioned:
The Grief Recovery Handbook, by John W. James and Russell Friedman

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.

Marika Humphreys:

Hey, caregivers and care partners out there, how are you? It is good to be back with you and I know we have taken on some heavy topics lately. Last episode I went deep into the hidden cost of suppressing or avoiding your emotions, and today's topic is related to that and also a little on the heavy side, because we're gonna talk about grief today, and not the grief that you experience when you lose someone. Today I'm actually going to talk about all the little losses that we experience as caregivers that you may not even recognize. Last week, my really main point was that emotions are something that we have to pay attention to when they come up in our lives. We can't just ignore them or push them away, because when we do that for one, they just pile up anyway, and there's lots of hidden costs associated with sort of trying to ignore our emotions. So today I'm going to focus in on grief as one of the emotions that caregivers experience quite frequently, I think, during their journey. So let's get into it. While most of us commonly link grief to the loss of someone, it actually comes up a lot in various forms throughout our caregiving journey, and a lot of that grief we don't even acknowledge or recognize or even bring to the forefront, and I have found that it's just so important to recognize our feelings of loss, especially if we don't want to stay stuck in them. We all know what loss is and we've all experienced it Loss of a pet, loss of a home relationship, we've all experienced loss, but few of us really know how to cope with that feeling. A lot of what I learned around loss, and grief in particular, really came from my first deep dive, I would say, into grief, after my husband passed away and I signed up for a class that I didn't even really know what it was going to be, but it was called a grief recovery group and in that group, which was fantastic and offered in my area for free, in the group we did some work based on a book called the Grief Recovery Handbook by John James and Russell Friedman Fantastic book and so I'm actually going to reference some of their work today.

Marika Humphreys:

They define grief and you know I always like to define things to get clear on what we're talking about. They define it as the conflicting feelings caused by the end of or change in a familiar pattern of behavior. So that's a little bit of a different definition and I like it for a couple of reasons. One it points out that we often have conflicting feelings about our losses. Sometimes we feel relief, sometimes we feel anger, sometimes hopelessness, sometimes sadness, sometimes resentment Grief encompasses all of those, and a lot of times those feelings do conflict with each other. And then, secondly, I like that the definition points to the end of, or a change in, a familiar pattern of behavior. So I think that's a much more broad definition and especially for our purposes today, it's really useful because I'm not actually going to focus on the loss of someone from when they die. I'm going to focus on just the little quote, unquote little losses that we experience all along the caregiving journey, and a lot of those are just simply changes in familiar patterns.

Marika Humphreys:

So when it comes to grief, part of the challenge we have with this emotion is that we don't understand it and the messages that we grow up with and in our society are just not super helpful. There is a great quote in the book that says we are taught how to acquire things, not what to do when we lose them, and I think that is so true. So much of our focus in life from an early age is on what we can acquire, getting things right, and the more we get, the supposedly happier life we're going to have. So we work to get the good job, to find the right person, to get the nice home, and when we lose something that we've worked hard to get, it totally makes sense that we're not really equipped for that. We're not thinking about that part of it, of course. When something that we've worked really equipped for that, we're not thinking about that part of it, of course. When something that we've worked hard to get changes in a way that we weren't expecting like becoming a caregiver for your partner is often a change that most of us don't expect we're not prepared for that and there is loss associated with that. And then there's just the challenge of the messages that we get around loss and grief that are not super helpful. I think I would say that our society doesn't really know how to acknowledge loss or how to acknowledge grief, and we kind of want to brush it under the rug. When someone experiences a loss, we say things like don't be sad or better luck next time, be grateful for what you have, that's a big one, right. And again, well-meaning, well-intended we say things like oh, they're in a better place or there'll be another opportunity. And don't get me wrong, those things are well-meaning. When we see someone sad, we don't want them to feel that way, so we try to make it better with words that want to be encouraging, but it doesn't actually acknowledge the feeling that they're having. It doesn't validate their feelings of loss, and I think we also learn then to not validate it for ourselves.

Marika Humphreys:

As a caregiver, there are lots of changes that we encounter, and some of them may be really difficult. Some may be much more difficult than others. For example, seeing physical or mental changes in your partner can be really hard. Changes in your relationship. Your partnership feels no longer equal or feels very one-sided. Maybe you can't do the same things that you used to do together because of their health situation. There may be changes in your own life as a result of being a caregiver. You might need to be around the home more often, or you can no longer go out and do the friend's night like you used to do. There could be changes with your job. Maybe you can't work the same amount of hours, or you're just not as focused, or you've had to give some things up because of needing to be home or just because of caregiver responsibilities. So when one person becomes sick or has a condition or a serious illness, it can change everything in your life and some of those changes could be really challenging. Others maybe not as much. And, to be fair, the changes are happening for your partner as well. They're experiencing massive changes and some of those I think I talked about in previous episodes too. Just recognizing that your partner also is undergoing lots of changes and probably grieving some of those as well.

Marika Humphreys:

I experienced a lot of losses during my husband's battle with cancer. But one experience sticks out to me, partly because it was so intense, and I'm going to share my story with you here. But I do want to warn you this could be a little bit emotional or could bring up emotions for you, especially if you have a partner with cancer. If you're not in a place to have emotions come up, like you're driving, for instance, you may want to listen to the rest of this later, but if you do listen and you do get emotional, just know that that's okay. You can breathe in to those emotions and it just may mean that there's something sensitive for you here and really worth exploring. So emotions, remember, are okay. They're okay to feel, them, we can relax into them. So if you get emotional, it's okay.

Marika Humphreys:

So a few years after my husband's initial cancer diagnosis, he had treatment and he had surgery and the tumor in his arm was removed and he was cancer-free as far as we knew. For a while life went back to what felt like mostly normal. But then he started getting really strange symptoms and we found out that he had a brain tumor and he ended up getting medevac to a hospital to have emergency surgery, which was successful. But the scans they did when he entered the hospital revealed that his cancer his initial cancer from the three years prior had returned and spread to his chest area. And I remember that when I learned this news my husband was recovering from the surgery in the room down the hall and I just knew right then what the coming year was going to be for us. It was going to be all about fighting the return of this cancer.

Marika Humphreys:

And I was angry and I was heartbroken and I went and I found an empty hallway in the hospital and I just sat on the floor and bawled my eyes out, just sobbed. People wanted to comfort me but all I wanted at that moment was just to cry and grieve. I was grieving what felt like in that moment the loss of our future. We had already been down the road of cancer and I knew exactly what was going to happen and so looking ahead in that moment just felt like we're going to lose. Another quote, unquote normal year of life to cancer and I just needed to grieve. Now, in that time of my life I didn't really have a choice. Grief sort of overtook me.

Marika Humphreys:

But as caregivers we often don't give ourselves permission to grieve our losses. It might feel like there's just no time. We're too busy taking care of everything and everyone. It might even just feel indulgent, like it's pointless to focus on the past when we need to keep moving forward, and we've already talked about the messages we get from society. So the society teaches us that we need to move on and focus on the positive, and so often we just don't allow ourselves to acknowledge our losses. And moving forward is great. I'm not saying you shouldn't move forward, except when you're not able to.

Marika Humphreys:

One of the ways you'll know if you're struggling with that is that if you find you just can't let go of something, you keep thinking about it and thinking about it and maybe you feel angry or sad. You feel like you're stuck there. Perhaps what you keep thinking about feels like a quote, unquote, little thing. For example, one of my clients she and her husband used to go out to eat and that was what they did together. That was kind of their together time. It's how they stay connected. But because of his cancer they can't do that anymore and it's not a huge loss, but it's a loss. And so if you have something like that, that doesn't seem particularly big, but it's not a huge loss, but it's a loss. And so if you have something like that that doesn't seem particularly big, but it's something you can't stop thinking about or feeling angry or sad about, then it needs some attention.

Marika Humphreys:

And I think there's a couple reasons why we can get stuck with a feeling of loss. One is that we just haven't fully acknowledged what we've lost and secondly, I think we don't like the feeling we're having, so we try to fight it or ignore it, and that's essentially what I talked about in the last episode. So my point here is that grief can demand to be heard, and I think it needs to be heard. And again, grief is that umbrella term that we give to all the complicated and sometimes conflicting emotions that we have around change and loss. So it is important to recognize your losses and allow yourself to grieve them if you need to, no matter how seemingly small or trivial those things are. Sometimes it's the little things that are the hardest.

Marika Humphreys:

But when we don't acknowledge loss and grief, that is how we actually keep ourselves stuck and grief can kind of fester in your body if you don't bring it out into the open. It could show up as chronic aches and pains, insomnia, irritability, feeling stuck. So it needs a voice. So I hope I've shed a little light on grief and why it's important to bring it out of the shadows, the grief around the losses that we experience during the caregiving journey, not just with the loss of someone. So one of the ways you can do that is you can spend a few minutes right now just thinking about what you've lost and what of those things do you feel like you're still struggling with or can't let go of. Maybe it's a regular night out with friends, carefree evenings with your partner that you don't have anymore, making travel plans together, grieving, grieving fact that you just can't plan your future right now. Maybe you're grieving your me time that seems to have completely disappeared. Give a voice to your losses, make a list.

Marika Humphreys:

Some of those things may feel harder than others, but again, it's sometimes the little things that we grieve the most and it is okay to just acknowledge that you miss those things. And it's okay to miss things, to feel sad about them, to feel angry about them. We don't have to be positive all the time, right, we don't have to rush to a place of acceptance either, but at the same time, the emotion of grief doesn't have to take over your life. When you acknowledge it and allow yourself to feel it essentially give yourself permission to feel it that doesn't mean it has to take all of your focus right, you can still go about your day and take care of all your responsibilities. Grief will take as long as it takes, and when you've given yourself that time, without judging it or judging yourself for having these feelings, then it is easier to move forward. But it takes what it takes, and just want to encourage you to give a voice to the things that you feel like you've lost, that you haven't fully acknowledged yet.

Marika Humphreys:

So give this a try. I'd love to hear what you think and if you've got questions about caregiving in general, I would love to hear those as well, so you can send those to me in an email. Marika at coachmarikacom is my email and if you are enjoying this podcast is my email. And if you are enjoying this podcast, please leave a rating and a review. That is super helpful and I would be grateful. It helps other people find the podcast and with that I will say thank you all and I will see you next week.