Episode 107 : Desperately Stuck in Caregiver Mode and How to Escape it

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Episode 107 : Desperately stuck in caregiver mode and how to escape it

Do you suffer from having your caregiver armor on so securely that it’s almost impossible to take it off? Do you have times when you want to just relax but can’t get yourself to do it?

Let’s talk about being stuck in caregiver mode.

When you first became a caregiver you might have felt like everything was just dumped on you. There was a diagnosis for your loved one and you were expected to figure things out. Figure out how to adapt their living situation if they needed to be with someone who can watch over them. Figure out how to afford all the care they now needed. Figure out how to simply do everything needed to keep them alive. 

At some point while this was all happening you left your old way of life. Becoming a caregiver is a life change. The quicker you can realize that the faster you begin to figure out what life as a caregiver means for you. However, most people don’t become caregivers and realize that it’s really happening and what it will really mean for themselves.

When you become a caregiver you are almost always blindsided. There is very little to no warning and most times no guidance on how to navigate this change in your life. Your life is turned upside down and you’re too stressed out and busy to notice.

What you do notice are all the sirens going off and all the fires you try to put out. From trying to find a doctor for your loved one that you don’t have to travel to go see to handling the reactions of your family and friends when they find out.

You don’t make yourself part of that equation because you are too hyper focussed on what’s happening to your loved one. You don’t realize you’ve let go of all the things you need to do for yourself especially now that you’re under more stress than you probably had been in the past. 

In order to get through this you probably started to direct all of your energy and focus to what your loved one needs. You made sure they got to their appointments, had the medicine they needed and tended to all of their needs while trying to keep the rest of your life together. After a few days, week, months of that you became fatigued, you were overwhelmed with anxiety, overloaded with stress and scared. 

That’s when it happened. That is when you unconsciously became a caregiver at least 90% of the time. It might not have happened all at once. But once you became overwhelmed by everything happening you did what you thought you needed to in order to continue on with the pace. You turned that caregiver switch on and didn’t even notice it got stuck there. 

Now you might say, I don’t understand I’m a spouse, parent, child. I am things other than a caregiver. I don’t switch back and forth between anything. 

Let’s take a look at that I’ll use myself as an example because that’s what I know

Before my husband was diagnosed with cancer I was not his caregiver. I may have done some things I do now as a caregiver like cooking meals and cleaning up but I did not do them because he couldn’t. When I was just his wife I lived my life as my own person separate from his needs. We both had our own needs and largely we both attended to them. 

We each supported each other. If one of us got a bad cut the other would run for the first aid kit. If one of us wanted to work on a big project in the yard the other would go out and help. One of us got sick the other would hold down the fort for a while. We did these things out of love and out of the responsibility of living in a house together. 

Now, when he was diagnosed with cancer this relationship became unbalanced. He needed reassurance. He needed help with putting together a care plan and course of action. The deal we made without words was that he was going to survive cancer and I was going to make it as easy as I could to do that by shielding him from people taking any energy from him, only giving him information that was relevant in the moment and time to relax. That’s when the taking care of the household became 100% my responsibility as well as getting him in to appointments, scheduling surgeries and coordinating recovery afterward. It was making sure the FMLA paperwork was filled out, people were updated and cancer research was done anyway possible. All while trying to keep a home enjoyable to live in for my daughter. 

I became his caregiver because he needed help living. He needed help finding and holding on to hope and positivity. He needed help to recover from surgery and find out how to enjoy life as it was with cancer. 

I might have still made him meals but it was now because it was more difficult for him to do for himself. 

 

If you’d like to hear some of my caregiving confessions and find easy ways to care for yourself along with links to resources that will help you let go of feeling you need to be a caregiver all the time, download the free issue of caregiving confessions HERE.


When I first became my husband’s caregiver I didn’t even think of continuing to do the things that helped me enjoy my life and have fun. I no longer went throughout my day without worrying or trying to keep up with the things he needed help from me to do. 

It became increasingly harder to just be his wife. 

Here’s why that matters. 

When I was more focused on what he needed 100% of the time there was very little opportunity to just be his wife. 

I made sure he was cared for but for a time I never really saw him. I, of course looked at him to make sure he was ok, or to see if he was pale. I checked incision sights to make sure they were healing properly. But I don’t remember just looking at him, the man I love, just because I love his face!  I would bring him something to drink not out of love but out of the need to take medicine. And when I sat next to him to watch TV I wasn’t really there. I was trying to go through my todo list or wondering when then oncologist was going to call back or even try to put together a plan or calculate how many frozen meals I had left before I’d have to cook again.

I wasn’t present… and I noticed that when he was in the hospital. I didn’t have anything I needed to do but be there to keep him company and I realized that is maybe the one major thing I failed to do well in the first couple of months of his diagnosis.  

While he was in the hospital recovering I was able to just sit there and look at him, thankful he made it through surgery. We talked and told jokes. We watched movies and laughed at comedians. As sad as it might sound, it was a little vacation from the scary world we had been living in for a few months. 

Before his surgery it would have been very hard for me to have fun with him. It would have been difficult to laugh at anything, enjoy just spending time and do it all without running lists of things that needed to get done in my head. 

When you get stuck in caregiving mode and aren’t able to live your day just as the person you are.  You loose the ability to be present and enjoy it. You miss the smiles and the tears. You miss the moments when things might have been said that actually mattered. 

I lost sight of how much I needed to just sit with him and have fun. I forgot how good it felt to be able to laugh at something with him even though life was as nasty as it had ever been for us. Most importantly I didn’t realize that I needed this connection just as much as he did. That was when I realized I had spent way too much time with my caregiver switch on and that’s how I learned being a caregiver and being a wife are two different mindsets. 

The thing is, when you keep that caregiver switch on it feels like you’re protecting yourself from getting hurt. Distancing yourself emotionally from the person you care for can be a way you try to protect yourself most times unconsciously. It’s just easier to know exactly what you need to do and feel like your day is fully under your control. We have this need to be able to have control over something because every day you feel like the rug is going to be pulled out from under you can. You find it hard to enjoy a moment because you’re worried it’ll be be followed up by something bad happening. Or maybe you’d like to watch a movie with the person you love but you don’t think you have the energy to handle emotions coming up that you’ve been successful at hiding from for a while.  

Being a caregiver all the time becomes a coping mechanism that helps shield you from the pain you’d like to avoid. 

Thing is, you can’t avoid loss this way. It will be just as difficult to lose the person you care for wether or not you were a caregiver all the time or not. The only difference is if you don’t get to enjoy time with the person you care for 

If you aren’t open to having fun with the person you care for you probably also aren’t open to allowing yourself to have fun. As you learned in last week’s episode there are it has been proven by scientific studies that  there are physical and emotional benefits to having fun. I’ll leave the link in the transcript of this episode on the website.

I know it can feel so much easier to just be their caregiver because to be yourself with them requires you to be vulnerable. That takes a lot of strength and energy to do. But if you can find it within you to just take a few minutes at a time to really sit down and talk with them, play a game, watch a show it will help you just as much as it will help them. 

Allowing yourself to have time to just have fun will make more of a difference than you know. 

Make a plan to try it this week.

Thanks for listening.