Careblazer, I came up with the idea for this post after spending a day crying on and off.
That’s not something I do easily. I’m not a crier. If I’m being honest, I’m not even someone who shows my emotions very much.
On this particular day, I felt devastated. It was painful and my heart hurt. I couldn’t focus. I literally felt like I almost couldn’t catch my breath. It felt horrible.
So this is a different post than normal. But if you’ve ever had a hard or uncomfortable emotion in your caregiving that you didn’t like, this one is for you.
I want to share three things: the hard truth about caregiving that nobody talks about enough, what all those self-help tools are actually for, and what you can do the next time you find yourself in one of these really hard moments.
1. The Hard Truth About Caregiving: Nothing Stops Emotional Pain
Here’s the hard truth nobody talks about enough. There is nothing that exists that will stop you from feeling emotional pain. Nothing.
If you’re new here, I’m a clinical psychologist, and a board-certified geropsychologist. That means I know how our feelings work. I know what creates our feelings and how to change them. I have the self-help tools, strategies and resources we’re supposed to know to help people through difficult emotions.
Every single week, I help members inside our Care Collective work through painful feelings, especially despair, hopelessness and guilt, and even change some of those feelings if that’s what they want. I do that day in and day out.
But despite all of my knowledge, and despite all the self-help tools, therapy, medication and meditation, there is nothing that is meant to take away our emotional pain.
So long as we are human, and so long as we love and care for another human being, we are going to experience emotional pain. If you love somebody, emotional pain is going to be on the other side of that love. You might feel it when the person you love gets sick or gets hurt, when they’re diagnosed with dementia, or when they pass on.
It doesn’t mean something has gone wrong. It doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong. It doesn’t mean you’re not meditating hard enough or practicing gratitude often enough.
It means you are human, and you have a heart.
The hard truth is, it’s going to hurt. It’s going to be painful. It’s going to feel uncomfortable. You’re not going to like it. And it’s okay.
That’s the hard truth of being a caregiver for somebody you love. Quite frankly, it’s the hard truth of being a human being and choosing to care for anybody.
It’s also the first of the 5 dementia caregiving truths I wish every caregiver knew.
2. What Are Self-Help Tools For, If They Can’t Stop the Pain?
So if we have to experience emotional pain no matter what, what’s the point of all those self-help tools and resources?
They’re not meant to keep you from ever feeling hurt. They’re not even meant to wipe away your pain the minute you practice them.
What all of those tools do is widen your capacity to feel the discomfort when it happens. They’re meant to help you through difficult feelings. They’re actually meant to help you feel those feelings.
Hear me when I say this: feeling your feelings is never wrong. It’s okay to do, even when it’s hard.
Use your tools to help you allow the pain and process through it, not to get rid of it. Because the truth is, we’re never going to get rid of emotional pain from the human experience. It’s going to keep popping up, so long as we’re human and we care about things.
So it makes sense that we get comfortable with feeling the discomfort. It makes sense that we practice the tools that help us move through it, knowing they won’t wipe it away right away.
With time, with practice, and with this basic understanding, our experience of uncomfortable emotions becomes easier. It becomes a little gentler. We know we can get through it, because we’ve gotten through it before, and we have tools and resources we can rely on.
We’re just never going to get rid of it all the way, or keep it from ever happening again.
3. What to Do When Emotional Heartbreak Hits
The most important thing you can do the next time emotional heartbreak sets in is acknowledge that it’s normal. You’re human, and this is part of the human experience.
You don’t even need to try to fix it right away. After all, there is no fix for the heartbreak of:
- losing a loved one
- having a loved one diagnosed with dementia
- watching them decline in front of your eyes
- watching your loved one struggle with basic tasks
There’s no fix, no Band-Aid, no cure that’s going to stop our heartbreak in those situations. It makes sense that we would feel it. I think those things are always supposed to hurt.
But you can use some of your favorite tools to help you move through that hurt.
I name more of the heartbreaks caregivers rarely say out loud in 13 unspoken griefs dementia caregivers carry.
Getting Through the Hard Days
I’m not going to lie. The day I went through recently was hard. It was miserable. It was awful.
But here I am on the other side of it, and I feel so much better.
Was I able to change the thing I was struggling with? No, not necessarily. But having this understanding helped.
And don’t get it confused. Just because something helped doesn’t mean it took away my emotional pain that day.
If you’d like more support and guidance through the heartbreak, the emotional pain and the grief, take a look at the Care Collective. We have support rooms, dementia expert Q&As, and an entire library of resources for whatever you’re facing, whether it’s getting your loved one to bathe or accept more help, or getting the legal side and future planning in order. You can learn more here and see if it’s a good fit for you.
