In This Together: Building Resilience When Caregiving for Your Partner

30. Emotional Resilience in Caregiving

September 17, 2024 • Marika • Season 1 • Episode 30

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In this podcast episode, I define emotional resilience as the ability to recognize, understand, and process your emotions so they don't get stuck or interfere with your well-being. 

Caregiving is emotionally taxing, and in this episode, I contrast two fictional caregivers, Mary and Marianne, to illustrate the difference emotional resilience makes. Mary avoids her emotions, which leads to stress, unhealthy coping mechanisms, and strain in her relationships. Marianne, on the other hand, uses her emotional resilience skills to process her feelings and ultimately take care of her needs while caregiving.

Through these examples, I’ll break down how emotional resilience can drastically improve your experience as a caregiver. I cover what emotions really are, where they come from, and how to recognize and process them, so they don’t weigh you down. 

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed, anxious, or powerless in your caregiving journey, this episode is for you.

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:

Hello caregivers and care partners out there. How are you? I feel like I've been busy this last couple of weeks and I've got another trip planned this coming weekend. I'm actually going up to Bremerton actually not Bremerton, bellingham, washington, someplace that I've never been for my 51st birthday. I can't believe I'm going to be 51. Okay, so welcome to episode 30.

Marika Humphreys:

We're going to talk about emotional resilience and caregiving, and my goal in all of these podcasts is to be inspiring and also give you some things to think about, ways to think differently in your caregiving journey. So that is my ultimate goal. And when I talk about resilience, I think it's one of the most important things we need as caregivers. We need to develop as caregivers, and so I talk a lot about it, because caregiving takes energy. It takes physical energy, it takes mental energy, it takes emotional energy. Often, physically, we are doing more than we were doing before when we become a caregiver, so that takes physical energy. The mental energy it takes we are often making tough decisions and navigating difficult and often novel situations, so that takes a lot of mental energy and it can often feel like we're on emotional rollercoaster which just takes emotional energy.

Marika Humphreys:

So many emotions we experience, right, we experience the emotions of witnessing what our partner is going through as their illness or disease or condition affects them in their life, and sometimes it's the emotions of seeing how they have to cope with the treatments, which, for cancer, is often very difficult, so sometimes the treatments are equally as bad. I remember how heartbreaking it was seeing my husband go through chemo infusions, because he felt so awful afterward and there was so little that I could do to comfort him. So I felt terrible for him and I felt powerless at the same time. And I remember the changes his body went through as cancer started to affect him more and how sad and scared I felt just seeing those changes. So we have a lot of emotions that come up witnessing our partner and what they're going through. But we also have our own experience and the emotions around our own situation. Sometimes we feel overwhelmed with everything on our plate. Sometimes we feel stuck in the role of a caregiving. Sometimes we feel protective over our partner or our family, sometimes we feel guilty and resentful, and all of these emotions we're experiencing while trying to hold it all together, while trying to be strong and steadfast, and that can be a tall order. So because of this, it is just important to have emotional resilience, to be able to recognize all these feelings we're having, understand why we're feeling them and have a way to process through them.

Marika Humphreys:

So this podcast is the second in a four-part series. The first one in the series I did on mental resilience, that's episode 29. So you can listen to that after this. They don't have to be listened to in any particular order, it's all fine. However, you listen to them. So keep listening.

Marika Humphreys:

And let's just start by defining the way I think of emotional resilience. The way I define that is the ability to recognize, understand and process the emotions you experience so that they move through you instead of getting stuck or becoming intrusive in your life and or your body. And in this episode I'm going to flesh this all out a little more. So don't worry if that doesn't fully make sense, I'm going to walk you through it. And I'm going to start by giving you two examples of made up people and made up situations to illustrate what it looks like to have emotional resilience and then what it looks like as a caregiver without it. Now, these are fictional situations and fictional people, but I obviously drew from my own experience, from my experience of caregivers, and so it's elements of the truth, but this particular example is just totally made up. So Mary and again just the name I picked from my head, it's not specific to any person.

Marika Humphreys:

Mary is a caregiver for her husband, but she does not have strong emotional resilience skills. She has always pushed her emotions away and avoided them. That's how she's dealt with her emotions in her life. So she has that pattern and she and her husband usually go out with friends every other Friday night, something they've done for a long time. But due to her husband's declining health they had to cancel and they probably won't be able to even resume these social get togethers because her husband just doesn't have the energy to engage in this group setting anymore. And Mary understands this, but she feels the loss of that social connection that Friday night that was so fun for all of them. But she ignores it and tells herself okay, just be strong, just stay positive, and she kind of just pushes in her feelings under the rug. But she, over the next couple of weeks, just starts to feel more and more lonely, and so, to cope, she kind of really starts numbing herself in the evenings, when it's the worst. I stayed up late watching her favorite shows, drinking wine, eating chocolate, and she's doing it more and more often, much more than she was before. And because she's staying up late and drinking more wine than she normally would, she's not sleeping as well and she starts to become tired and worn down during the days. And because she's not sleeping as well, she's also more irritable and she has less patience with her husband and sometimes she loses her temper with him when that she feels terrible about afterward, and then she also starts to develop a kind of a weird pain in her chest area that starts to worry her. So that's Mary's situation.

Marika Humphreys:

Mary Ann is also a caregiver for her husband, but she has been working for a couple of years now on developing her emotional resiliency skills, and she and her husband also had to cancel their regular outing with friends due to his health. Marianne feels a tremendous loss about this latest development and she notices over the next week that she's just been feeling really down, and in moments of quiet she, her sadness, is like a heaviness in her chest. So she decides to use her regular journaling habit to explore her thoughts and feelings about what's going on During this process. As she's journaling, she's reflecting on her sadness and realizes that she's just been thinking this is just one more thing being taken from them and it feels so unfair that they can no longer go out with friends. So through journaling, she explores all the sadness she has around this and spends some time just acknowledging this latest loss in their journey together since he got sick. She decides to give herself a few weeks just to notice her emotions without judging them, and she gives herself permission to acknowledge the sadness and grieve, this loss, and that allows her to find some acceptance and move forward. And so, after she's done that and she's feeling a little more at peace and more kind of emotionally stable, she reaches out to some friends and some girlfriends of hers and she decides to set up a friend date every couple weeks so she can still have some social connection.

Marika Humphreys:

Now, again, I just want to say that these are made up people made up scenarios, but if you see any shades of yourself in them, and especially Mary, it's okay. Right, I took some of Mary's story from my own life. So we're not here to judge ourselves, we're just here to learn and grow. So let's talk about the difference between these two caregivers and their experience.

Marika Humphreys:

Mary lacks awareness of her emotions because she has kind of taught herself to just push her emotions away and push them down, so she doesn't actually even really become aware of what she's experiencing. She just feels an increased need to numb herself, which is why she turns to watching and staying up late watching TV and drinking wine. Right, she just doesn't want to feel the discomfort she's feeling. But by staying up late and drinking more than she normally would, it has this cascading negative effect in that she becomes more tired during the day, she becomes more grumpy, more irritable, she loses her temper with her husband more easily, which she then feels guilt around. So it compounds and then blocked emotions can sometimes show up in our body as aches and pains, which maybe explains the chest pain that she starts to experience. Marianne has a very different experience, right, mary Ann has some good habits in place to help her already identify and work through what she's experiencing. She has awareness, awareness of herself, and so she's quick to notice this heaviness she feels in her chest. She understands that she needs to pay attention, give voice to her emotions so she can uncover exactly what's going on underneath, which she does through journaling, and she allows herself some time to just process and grieve this latest loss and that is so key because it allows her to move forward and ultimately find some acceptance and a different way than to have a social outlet.

Marika Humphreys:

So having emotional resilience can make a huge difference in your experience as a caregiver and I use two fictional examples, but there's definitely elements of truth there, and I just wanted to show you how often our lack of emotional resilience can have compounding effects, just like our emotional resilience skills can also have an improved experience. So now I want to break down for you what goes in to emotional resilience. What does that actually mean? How do we have emotional resilience? What are the components of it? So the way I think of this is that developing emotional resilience is really a combination of knowledge and skills, and those combined allow you to have a increased emotional intelligence and build your emotional capacity, your capacity to feel. So the first couple components that I'm going to talk about go into the knowledge realm, their knowledge components, and I would broadly say that they're all part of developing greater emotional intelligence. So what do I mean by emotional intelligence? We all have some emotional intelligence.

Marika Humphreys:

We understand what feelings are. We understand the basics of that, because we all have feelings, but most of us have never been taught much more than that, and part of why we judge our emotions as good or bad is because we don't actually understand what emotions are. And we also judge ourselves for the emotions we have, because we don't really understand what causes our emotions, so we judge ourselves for having that. So the first component of emotional resilience is understanding that emotions, understanding what emotions are, and that is that emotions are feelings, but they, at a more technical level, they are vibrations in the body. So you might experience sadness as a heaviness in your chest, so the emotion of sadness is actually just a sensation in your chest, like Marianne that's what she experienced, right or it might feel like a tightness in your throat. So emotions are simply sensations in our body and they're not harmful in of themselves and they're neither good nor bad. They just are. So I know that I had never really given emotions much thought before, other than it's a feeling, and some I like and some feelings I don't like. But at the technical level, emotions are vibrations in our body. So that's the first component is understanding what they are. The second component is understanding where they come from.

Marika Humphreys:

All of our emotions are generated from our thoughts. How we think determines how we feel. So Marianne was able to uncover that she was thinking they had had so much taken from them, right, that was just kind of her opinion about this latest situation. We've had so much taken from us and that created the feeling of sadness for her. But she was able to uncover that feeling or that thought kind of in the back of her mind. So when we think, for example, when we think about how much we have to do and that there's not enough time to do it, we're probably going to feel overwhelmed. Right, that thought process, that thought, is going to cause the feeling of overwhelm. So how you think creates how you feel. But often we may have awareness of our emotions, because often emotions kind of demand our attention but we may not be aware of the thoughts behind it. And until you understand that emotions are caused by thoughts, you won't even know to pay attention to your thinking. So you won't even know where to look, where to look for the cause, and when that happens you just kind of end up at the effect of your emotions and it feels very powerless. Okay, so that's.

Marika Humphreys:

The second component is understanding where emotions come from, and then the third component is understanding the body connection. There is a connection between our thoughts and our, between our head and our body, very strong connection, and usually what contributes to the ways that we think, to our automatic thinking and then the emotions that that creates, is usually based on our past experience and kind of the habits we've developed over time. We tend to develop habitual ways of thinking and feeling and your body gets very efficient with these patterns, these habits that we create with our thought feeling patterns, our thought feeling habits. Really, our body gets very efficient at that and so when we get into certain situations, our body, the connection is so tight that our body will often create the emotion automatically. So a good example to illustrate this is social anxiety. If you have social anxiety, your body has learned that if you go into social situations you feel anxious. So it gets very good at creating anxiety the instant that situation comes up. But there's always thoughts behind it and sometimes they're just hidden deep. So when you understand the mind-body connection and how efficient your body gets at generating emotions, especially in certain situations, it makes it easier to understand why certain things may trigger you or why you feel certain emotions habitually.

Marika Humphreys:

Okay, so now I want to move on to the other three components, which are more skill-based and they just generally help you have a bigger capacity to feel your emotions. So the fourth component is awareness of your emotions when they come up. Now, this is a skill because we often ignore our emotions, especially the more subtle ones. We don't even notice and sometimes we don't even have the language for them, like for our feelings. So awareness of our emotions and part of that is, when they come up, having the ability to name them. And we may not even notice our emotions until they build up and overwhelm us.

Marika Humphreys:

So developing the skill of taking notice of the emotions you're feeling is really important. You want to have just an emotional awareness and that's a skill you have to practice, and you need to practice it without judgment. So I talked about how we often judge ourselves for the emotions we feel, because we feel like they're bad emotions or we shouldn't feel this way. So there's a lot of judgment involved. So this skill part of it is awareness of your emotions without the judgment attached to it. And when you understand that emotions just come from your thoughts, they're not good or bad, it's easier to just observe them without judgment. So fifth component is learning how to notice the specific way an emotion feels in your body. Each emotion will feel differently and those sensations are unique to you, so learning how to pay attention and get to know your emotions in this way is a skill you want to develop. How does sadness feel? What does your body feel like when you're feeling sad? Most people tend to experience emotions in their chest, their throat and their head, primarily Sometimes their back as well. But we can experience emotions in different ways and you really just want to learn the way you experience certain emotions. And when you get good at recognizing the sensation associated with a certain emotion, it allows it to be less scary, the experience to be less scary.

Marika Humphreys:

So for me, the first time I really did this in depth was with the feeling of anxiety, and this was when I was caregiving. I used to feel anxiety frequently and it would cause me, it would sort of derail me, especially during the workday. It would derail me because I wouldn't focus and I just had a really hard time concentrating when I was feeling anxious and, of course, it impacted my sleep as well. So when I learned that emotion anxiety is actually a vibration in my body, I learned how to notice what it felt like in my body, and so for me that is the feeling kind of a buzzing in my stomach area. That is what anxiety feels like for me, and I learned to just observe it. And I also learned that if I just allow it to be there, it will pass on its own. And this was a completely revolutionary experience for me, because beforehand I would just get Feeling anxiety, would sort of just drive the cycle of anxiety and I would try to find ways to escape it. But learning to see what it actually felt like and that it was just this buzzing in my stomach, I learned how to allow it to be there without needing to escape it and then, sure enough, it would just go away. Sometimes it was quick, sometimes it took a little while, but either way, because I became so familiar with the feeling, it was no. Sometimes it took a little while, but either way, because I became so familiar with the feeling, it was no longer scary to have. So when you get good at understanding and recognizing your emotions, as the sensation in your body that it is makes it much less scary every time that sensation comes up, and so instead of giving it some bigger meaning or feeling like it's much easier to just allow it to be there and let it pass through you. So that leads me to the sixth and probably most difficult component to learn.

Marika Humphreys:

As part of developing emotional resilience is the ability to process an emotion instead of reacting to it or avoiding it or suppressing it. We are taught from a young age that certain emotions are bad and that we should get away from them or we should not have them, or we should fix ourself as soon as we can. So we tell people just feel better, okay, it's okay, don't cry. Which is why most of us have learned to avoid our emotions in some way. We eat, we drink to numb ourselves and numb our feelings, or we simply ignore them and push them down. Or sometimes people just react out of them, right, they let their emotions control them, they lose their temper, they wallow. So we're never really taught how to allow an emotion to pass through us.

Marika Humphreys:

And that is what it means to process an emotion.

Marika Humphreys:

It means allow that sensation in your body to just pass through you.

Marika Humphreys:

That is the natural process of an emotion.

Marika Humphreys:

If you allow it and if you don't resist it, they will just pass like the tide right.

Marika Humphreys:

It will recede on its own Emotions are never permanent.

Marika Humphreys:

They may come back, but they will go again. They're not permanent states. But what prevents us from allowing this natural process is our resistance to emotions. And we resist emotions because we don't understand them. We don't understand all the pieces of them. So resistance is for what I've seen in myself and others, that our resistance is really almost like an automatic reaction. We resist emotions in some way, the negative emotions so, which is why you really have to learn to understand emotions and practice noticing them without judgment and allowing them.

Marika Humphreys:

So all of these are both the skill and knowledge is important. All of these components are important to allow you to learn to process an emotion. But you can absolutely do that. There are many ways to process an emotion, to allow an emotion to pass through you. I teach my clients two techniques in particular, and one is just an exercise where you close your eyes and you learn to focus mindfully on the sensation of your body. The other one is by using emotional freedom technique, which is also called tapping. So there are other ways to process emotions, but those are the two that I usually teach my clients and both very accessible to anybody. So learning how to do this is so helpful because it will allow you to have all those emotions that you're having anyway, but without them derailing you or impacting your life in a negative way right, impacting your body in a negative way, and that creates a very different experience for you as a caregiver. So to review components that go into emotional resilience are understanding what emotions are, where they come from, the bind body connection and then developing the skill of noticing your emotions, how they feel in your body and how to process them. Now I have done a whole podcast on the cost of avoiding emotions and the benefit of feeling emotions. So I don't want to go into that here, but you can listen to podcast episodes 11 and 14, where I go into that in much more in depth, kind of the benefit and the benefit of doing this, of feeling your feelings. But I do want to just close out by talking about why developing emotional resilience is important.

Marika Humphreys:

Because emotions fuel our actions, they drive. We act or don't act in our lives. That is right, because how we act, the actions we take or the things that we don't do, that creates our experience in our life, that creates our results. That's always happening, right, we are always taking actions or avoiding taking actions, and emotions are the fuel for that. So think about how you act when you're feeling fearful. Usually we want to hide in some way. When we're feeling fearful, we avoid difficult situations. We delay important decisions. Sometimes, when we're feeling fearful, we try to control others. Out of our fear, we try to like kind of seize control of things. So fear drives our actions.

Marika Humphreys:

Think about anxiety, right. How does anxiety affect you? Usually it makes it hard to focus, as it did for me. I think it also usually causes us to feel restless, impatient, I think, and it can be easy when we're feeling anxious to overanalyze things, like delay making decisions. We might delay taking action because we're kind of stuck in what if? Scenarios. So those are just a couple examples of how fear and anxiety impact us in how we act in our lives, and those are not great right, especially as a caregiver, because we need to be able to focus, we need to make good decisions, we have to learn that there are certain situations we have to let go of control of. We can't control our partner, right? So if you're feeling a lot of fear and anxiety, it's just going to be hard. It's going to be harder to do those things. But the opposite is true as well.

Marika Humphreys:

Now think about how you feel, how you act. Rather, when you're feeling confident, confidence helps us move forward. It helps us make decisions and take decisive actions. It's so much easier to take on hard problems, be a better problem solver, when we're feeling confident. It's easier to be assertive when we're feeling confident. Right, confidence, that emotion has all these great benefits in how we show up in our life. And once you understand that we create the emotions by our thinking, sometimes we do it on default and unconsciously, but we're always creating our emotions by how we think. So we actually have a lot more control and authority over our emotions than we might realize. So that is why emotional resilience is so important, because those feelings are always acting on us and showing up in our actions or in our lack of ability to take action. It's because of how we're feeling.

Marika Humphreys:

And then the other major reason why emotional resilience is so important is simply because emotions are an unavoidable part of the human experience. We are going to have them. We can't avoid them. We're going to have the good emotions and we're going to have the bad emotions. Right, we want to only have the good emotions without experiencing the negative ones. But that's just not how life works, which is a bummer. But when we understand how emotions are created, we understand what they actually are. They're just vibrations that. There's not actually a bad emotion or a good emotion. It's just a sensation in your body. It's not good or bad. Right and how to process them and let that sensation go through us, then having bad emotions doesn't feel like such a big deal. It's not something that you have to avoid. It's not something to be scared of, it's not a feeling to get rid of as quick as you can, right.

Marika Humphreys:

So I will just say that developing this skill in my own life has had a tremendous impact and it's always a work in progress. But I have developed the skill so much more through coaching than I ever had before. I would say I was completely disconnected from my body and really unaware and not of my emotions before I became a caregiver for my partner, for my husband, and through the process of really working on this skill, it is just totally transformed now my life, in my ability to do difficult things in all areas of my life, because I'm simply better at handling the emotions, the challenging emotions that come with doing difficult things, whether it's being vulnerable in a relationship or doing something new, that feels scary like starting a podcast. I still have all the emotions, all the positive ones, and I have all the negative ones, and some I'm much better at processing than others, but I'm just, overall, much, much better at recognizing and allowing my emotions, not judging them and not letting them derail my life right Like they once did. They once would sometimes just derail me, but that was a skill I really had to develop. I would say I worked most on it when, after, actually, my husband passed away and I was just feeling so much sadness and I realized I really had to learn this because it was just taking over my life, the grief was. So I want to say that this is available to everybody.

Marika Humphreys:

Okay, emotional resilience is a skill and you can develop it, just like all the other skills, and you probably already have parts of it already. But if you don't, this is what I help people do. This is something I feel very passionately about because it's had such an impact in my life. So you can always set up a consultation with me if you want to learn how to do this. This is something I teach my clients. It's a huge foundational skill. Okay, so next week we are going to talk about physical resilience. I love talking about this stuff. I hope this was helpful for you and I will see you next week.