In This Together: Building Resilience When Caregiving for Your Partner

38. Empowered Caregiving - Release The Weight

• Marika • Season 1 • Episode 38

Share episode

Send us a text

What happens when the weight of caregiving becomes too much to bear? Join me as I uncover the transformative power of letting go. 

This is Day 2 of the Empowered Caregiving Challenge where each day I talked about one way you can bring more calm, control, and clarity into your caregiving experience. 

Today is all about how shifting your focus away from controlling outcomes can actually lead to a more empowered and fulfilling caregiving experience. Embrace the freedom that comes with releasing the need to manage everything, and find relief from the overwhelming sense of powerlessness that often accompanies caregiving.

In this episode, I tackle the emotional challenges of accepting the unpredictability of caregiving. Learn how to navigate regrets, missed opportunities, and imagined futures that didn’t pan out as expected. By staying present and processing emotions like fear and anxiety, you can become more resilient and adaptable in the face of caregiving's inherent messiness. 

Tune in to explore reflective questions designed to help you shed unnecessary burdens and cultivate self-compassion, allowing you to manage the chaos with greater ease and grace.

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:

Welcome to day two of the Empowered Caregiving Challenge. I'm Marika Humphries, I'm a resiliency coach for people who are caring for their partner, and this challenge is all about giving you one thing to focus on each day to bring some more empowerment to your life and to the caregiving journey. Because it is hard, my friends, it is hard. So, caregiving we are literally caring for someone else, right, where we have responsibilities for their care in some form. Or, if you're a care partner, you're partnering with your partner to make decisions around their care and you'd be taking them to appointments and working through things together. But in either case, our focus and our attention is on another person and their life and their needs and their wants and their challenges. And so the very nature of being a caregiver means we're focused externally on somebody else, and it's really hard to not get focused on the things about that person's life or that person that you're caring for, to not get focused on the things that we really also can't control. So it's a weird dichotomy, I think as a caregiver is because you may have some responsibilities or some roles in another person's life in a big way and yet you don't have control. It's their life right, it's their choices. It's ultimately their outcome and their challenges. And when that person is your spouse, I think it's especially difficult. So caregiving is this challenging balance and a lot of times we want our partner to take better care of themselves, or sometimes it's just simply do things differently. We think they should be doing it in a different way that's better for them, or we want them to feel better. We don't want them to be hurting so much or be so sad or fearful. We get invested in their wellbeing and that is a beautiful thing. But it is also what can kind of disempower us when we get too attached to their wellbeing and their life, and often at the neglect of our own.

Marika Humphreys:

So today is focused on releasing the weight of control. It's essentially letting go and we don't think about that. I think enough in caregiving. What do I need to let go of? There's so much that we hold on tightly to and sometimes we have to let go. Sometimes holding on tight, holding carrying that weight of responsibility of the things outside of our control, it exhausts us. It's like trying to swim against the current right. You just swim and swim and swim and swim and you don't get anywhere and you get it and you end up exhausted. So caregiving challenging in that way, and today we're going to talk about letting go, releasing the weight of control. And the reason I want to talk about this is because when we try to hold on to things that we can't control, it is disempowering. It's not only exhausting but it causes us to feel frustrated and often overwhelmed and powerless. So that part of caregiving, if we don't identify it and I don't see it is very disempowering.

Marika Humphreys:

In my journey I spent a lot of emotional energy and physical energy trying to ensure that my husband didn't get upset and trying to smooth things over, because I saw that as his cancer progressed, he increasingly got more frustrated with things, more angry with things, and when he was upset I was upset and I tried to essentially alleviate or fix anything that might potentially upset him, which I will tell you did not work. It was it kind of made me anxious and uptight and it would just I would really just irritate him and I still ended up frustrated and he had the emotions he had. His frustration and anger were part of how he was coping with his disease, and so I had to really learn to not try to control his emotions, because his emotions weren't within my control. His mood wasn't within my control, and I had to be able to separate and let go of that, separate myself, my emotions from his. So that is one of the areas that we can tend to hold on tightly to as caregivers.

Marika Humphreys:

Anytime we are trying to change people around us or things around us, it will create unnecessary suffering, unnecessary frustration for us and, a lot of times, a sense of failure and powerlessness. The more we want someone to behave differently than they're behaving or to do something differently than they're already doing it, the more they will either push back because we'll be pushing right and when someone pushes you, most people want to push back or they may change or do what you ask just to please you, and in which case then it's kind of it's not a genuine thing, right, they're doing it just to essentially get the pressure off their back. So, either way, letting people be who they are and how they are doesn't mean you don't have influence, but letting go of wanting to control it is one of the things that will help you feel more empowered. So today we're going to talk about releasing the weight and learning to let go.

Marika Humphreys:

I've already talked quite a bit about letting go of people's emotions, of other people's emotions, but that is a huge area in caregiving that I think we tend to hold on tightly to other people's feelings, and sometimes that's your partner, but sometimes it's your children. Sometimes it's other family members. Trying to protect other family members from pain, trying to make other people feel better. Maybe you don't tell everybody, the whole family, the whole story of what's going on, because you don't want to upset them. All of those are ways that we try to protect other people and try to control or have a sense of control over their emotions, which get. It comes from a good place, right, it comes from wanting to protect them, but in doing so we're trying to control something we don't, which is we don't have control over, which is other people's emotions. Other people get to feel how they want to feel, right, and so a lot of times I think, as caregivers, we take on that responsibility when it isn't ours to take on, and it will weigh us down. It really will. I've seen it lots of times, especially with women tend to take on the responsibility for lifting up all these other people around us, and yet we can't. Ultimately, so that will weigh you down Another area that I think we tend to hold on as caregivers and that weighs us down is our fears A lot of times.

Marika Humphreys:

If our partner has an illness or a serious condition, a lot of times we have this worst case scenario in the back of our head, something that we are just so afraid is going to happen, and learning to a lot of fear that we carry around. A lot of times we just don't want to face it. So one of the things I do with my clients is I have an exercise called the worst case scenario and we go through whatever their worst case scenario is. We take it out of the closet, we shine some light on it and we talk about if that were to happen, what would they do, how would they handle it, and most of us already have strengths in our toolbox right now that would help us get through whatever that scenario is. But it's a fear that often lurks in the background. So taking it out, shining a light on it and letting it go and trusting that you will get through it. A lot of the things that we fear never come to be, but it doesn't mean they don't weigh us down the fear of them, the things that might happen.

Marika Humphreys:

One of my clients. Her husband had cancer and he collapsed when they were traveling back from a trip. So it was in the airport and he just collapsed and because it was in the airport, there were I don't know EMTs around. There were I don't know what the EMTs around, basically there were medical personnel who came to his aid and handled the situation, and so she was very thankful that it happened in an airport where there were, there were people to help. But she had this big fear afterward that that might happen again when she was all alone and by herself and she didn't know what to do. So that sort of weighed on her, this possible scenario weighed on her as this fear of something that might happen, and so we had to work through that and figure out what would she do if that were to happen, and play it out and take this fear out of the closet of the back of her mind and shine some light on it, and so she could let it go, kind of release the weight that that was weighing on her, taking up in her mind. So when we can release those fears, it lets us be more present. It lets us have a little more energy to be more present Another area that caregivers tend to hold onto is perfectionism wanting to get it right.

Marika Humphreys:

There is no such thing as the perfect caregiver and there is no right way to be a caregiver. It is a role that you have to figure out for yourself, because you have constraints. You have energy limitations, you have time limitations, you have responsibilities that are all unique to you, and while it would be great if somebody gave us a handbook and said this is how you do it, there isn't one. So you have to trust your own sense of what is right for you, and that requires letting go of needing to do it right quote unquote right. Being willing to find our own way, being willing to trust ourselves, letting go of this idea that we have to have everything figured out. We have to have a plan and a way ahead and have solutions and the process figured out. It's going to be messy. Often it's going to be imperfect. We don't have to have it figured out because we can't always so.

Marika Humphreys:

Release the weight of perfectionism. If it's showing up in your caregiving, or this need to do it right or that there is a right way, release that weight, decide there is no right way and I'm going to find my own way and similar to that, is letting go of the opinions of others. It is likely that you have people in your lives probably well-meaning people that have opinions about what you should do or judgments about what you are doing. That is not uncommon. A lot of us have those people in our lives and, again, most of the time they're well-meaning people that care about us, and a lot of those opinions come from a good place, but sometimes we don't always want the opinions. Good place, but sometimes we don't always want the opinions. So, letting go needing to satisfy other people's opinions right, needing others' approval, letting go of that and that lets us focus on what truly matters, which is your way in figuring out what that is and having trust in yourself. So I want to encourage you be willing to let go of the opinions of others, unless you can ask. When you ask for others' opinions, that's one thing, but often it's unsolicited advice that we get and I think that can make it harder to trust ourselves and finding our own answers. So there is, again, no right way in caregiving. Be willing to let others have their opinions and know that that's fine, they can have their opinion and you can still decide to do it the way you'd like to do it, and when you are able to let go of that pressure of needing other people's approval or wanting to live up to other people's expectations. That takes a lot of energy to try and please others, and so letting go of that is how we gain some energy back. That's how we feel more empowered.

Marika Humphreys:

This one is hard to talk about, or hard to face, I should say, and it's letting go of the health of our loved one. It is hard to accept, but the health outcome, what happens with our partner, is something that we don't have control over. It is something that none of us really have control over. When I say none of us, like the doctors don't know. They will give you their best options and we don't know. Right, but how the health of our partner goes and what that outcome is is unknown and we have to be willing to let go, be accept that this is something we can't control. And that is a hard thing with people we love. It's hard to see people we love their health degraded. It's hard to see that. It's hard to see them struggle. It's hard to see them in pain and yet we don't have control over it.

Marika Humphreys:

So finding. If that's something you struggle with, I want you to think see that, find that and find ways. How can I let this go? How can I have love and let this go For me? One of the ways I think about is this is just where they are, this is their path. We don't always know why, we don't always like it, but we all have a different path, right. We all have different struggles in this lifetime, and I also find it helpful to trust that my loved one is strong and will get through it. I believe in that. I believe in the strength of others, so that is one way that you can find some comfort and be willing to let go of the outcome of their health, what happens.

Marika Humphreys:

Another thing to let go of is regrets from the past. Many times, as caregivers, I hear my clients say gosh, I wish we had just gone to the doctor sooner. I wish we had gotten a more accurate diagnosis the first time around. If this had been caught sooner, we might've been able to head it off. All of those things are just kind of unuseful ways to spend our mental energy, because the truth is we don't know what would have happened even if we'd gotten a better diagnosis, or even if they'd gone to the doctor sooner, or even if right, sometimes it's easy to think if we had only done something different in the past, it would be better now. But we don't know that that's not necessarily true. It might've been different, but it wouldn't necessarily be any better. So regrets from the past can weigh us down, and be willing.

Marika Humphreys:

Being willing to release those past decisions will lift the weight off your shoulders, and, similarly, ideas we have for the future this is another thing that can really weigh on us is ideas that we have. We get so attached to this imagined future that we all create. When we have a partner, we have a life and we have this future together that we've imagined. For me and my husband, we were always thinking about a dream house we wanted, and when he got sick, those dreams just went out the window. And for all of us, our future, our imagined future, is always just an idea, and it's when we get attached to that idea, then that idea, with their health, becomes like no longer probable that we suffer because of it. But it was never a guarantee in the first place. It was just an idea that we had that we got attached to, so, letting go of our ideas about how the future was going to go or quote unquote supposed to go. Often we feel like, well, this is not the way it's supposed to go, but we have no idea how it's supposed to go. The way it's supposed to go is the way it's going right. We only have the reality that we're in.

Marika Humphreys:

So take a look and see if you are holding on to ideas for your future that are weighing you down, because now your path does not look like it's heading that direction. Nothing is ever guaranteed and all we have is this present moment. So, these weights, when we can let go of them, they let us be more present. They let us show up for the moments that we have right now, for the reality that we're in right now. And that's where we want to be as caregivers, to be our best with what we have right now, with the circumstances as they are, no matter how undesirable, but it's what it is. And so how can I be the best with what I've got? What is important to me right now with the way things are? So I want to give you some questions to think about, to really identify what are the weights that you're carrying on your shoulders. What are the things that you need to let go of? So the first question is what am I holding on? To Make a list of all the things that you feel like are weighing on you, All the things that you're holding on, to Try to write as much as you can. And then the next question ask yourself why am I holding onto these? What do you think the feelings are? Why? Why are you holding on to whatever it is that's weighing on your shoulders? And then the last question how can I have compassion for myself while I let this go? Often we need to just find a way forward, and sometimes it's having compassion for ourselves that lets us let things go.

Marika Humphreys:

One of my favorite sayings in caregiving is it's going to be messy. Things are often not pretty, they're not planned, they're unexpected, they don't go as we'd like, and that's okay. A lot of life is messy, and the more we can get comfortable with the mess, the more empowered we're actually going to feel, because it lets you focus on what you do have control over. And that, my friends, is what we're going to talk about tomorrow, in tomorrow's challenge focusing on what you do have control over. So if this is something you want to work on, then I want to encourage you, set up a consultation with me. I work on teaching you.

Marika Humphreys:

One of the biggest things is how to process the emotions that come up when we're dealing with all the things that weigh on us the wanting to control things and so when we learn to process those emotions associated with that whether it's fear or anxiety or resentment those emotions don't then add to the weight. So one of the things I teach you in my program is how to process through the emotions and let them go as they come up, and so you learn that skill of handling any emotion. It doesn't matter what it is, because you process it and so it just becomes something that goes through you. The better you get at feeling your emotions all of them, even the resentment and anger the less you feel the need to control things around you, because we often want to take control of things because of how it makes us feel.

Marika Humphreys:

We feel worried. We feel scared when we don't know. We feel worried when our partner isn't feeling well. We feel scared when we don't know what the future holds. But when we are good feeling those emotions, when we recognize how they feel in our body and we let them wash through us, we accept how we feel and those emotions go away quickly. Then it's no big deal and we don't need to have the world around us so controlled. It can be messy, because we can handle it. That is what resilience is, and that's what it means to feel empowered as a caregiver. So think about those questions. Go take a few minutes and answer them for yourself, and then join me tomorrow where we talk about adjusting your focus.