Episode 127: How to Process Caregiver Grief So You Can Get on With Your Life Already

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You’ve lost a lot more than you probably realize now that you’re a caregiver. Let’s see what losses we’ve all encountered and how to get through the grief without anymore shame or regret. Without making the emotions small or unimportant because you deserve to be able to grieve no matter how trivial another person might think your loss is. 

Let’s get started.

You don’t have to lose something to feel loss. Someone doesn’t have to die for you to feel grief. But when there isn’t an opportunity to understand what you’re feeling there also isn’t an opportunity to address what you’re going through. 

When there are transitions and changes in your life you need to be able to grieve and process your loss. 

Oftentimes these transitions come suddenly and require us to jump into action to help the person we care for and make sure they get the care they need. Or they happen gradually and we are all too busy to realize what is happening until we wake up one morning and wonder what the hell happen to our lives. 

It’s hard to name grief as an emotion you’re feeling when you haven’t lost something in a way we traditionally allow grief to show up for. And if you can't name what you’re feeling it just gets mixed into all the other things you’ve been stuffing away. Things you keep saying you’ll get to when you have the time, when things get easier, when you have the energy. 

Then we wonder why our lives feel so hard, why can’t we feel joy. Or maybe you already are at a point close to saying 

I’m just destined to be unhappy for the rest of my life. 

Grief is the natural reaction to loss. As a caregiver loss presents itself in many ways. It might be hard for you to allow yourself to grieve things that don’t seem worthy of grieving. You might shut down any need to process grief if you think people around you will judge you for it. 

It’s so easy for you to make your emotions small, inconsequential, unimportant. So grieving for anything less than something big like a loved one or your house seems impossible and wrong. 

You might not have noticed but loss has been following along with you from the moment you became a caregiver. 

When you became a caregiver, officially or gradually, your life changed. The transition to caregiver can be largely unfair and poorly supported. When you took on the duties of caregiving your life changed. You had to let some things go, mostly things you enjoyed doing or made up a big part of who you were at the time. Your focus in life changed. This transition created loss that you most likely did not have the time to grieve for either because you didn’t realize it was happening at the time or because you didn’t think you had permission to. The loss of the life you had and the person you once were is worthy of the feeling of loss you experienced. 

You have most likely experienced loss in terms of the relationship you have with the person you care for. I am a caregiver for my husband. Our relationship changed the moment he told me he had cancer. I jumped into a mode of protection and did what I thought needed to be done to keep him well… alive. He fortunately, has been able to live with his cancer for the last decade but there’s no remission, no chance of being cancer free. Cancer works hard to stay alive in him and we work hard to make that difficult for it to do. There have been many times when I’ve resented having to be a caregiver. Days when I would like to not have the gnawing uncertainty that Cancer brings to life. When cancer seems to be winning things get very complicated and of course I end up being more a caregiver than a spouse.

No matter why you care for your spouse or loved one there will probably be more times than you’d like when you feel lonely. Times when you miss what you both once had. Maybe you miss having your spouse really see you. Maybe you both don’t connect the way you used to.  Part of how you feel when you start to miss the way things were is grief. You’re grieving the loss of being in the relationship you started out with. You’re grieving the loss of being able to connect with the person you love. Then when you feel this you maybe act out in anger and frustration, hide behind self loathing, feel resentment and regret. Maybe you feel these things and then you try to ignore them because you feel shame for even feeling them in the first place which makes you feel even more misunderstood and lonely. 

There are so many things we loose when we become caregivers. Sometimes it happens right away and other times it is a slow progression towards life change you weren’t expecting. As diseases progress and new disabilities start to show up you keep stepping in without realizing how it will affect you. 

There’s nothing wrong with being realistic and understanding how the choices you make in life will affect your quality of life. If you were considering moving to a new city or change jobs you would make sure you understood how this would affect your way of living. So there is nothing wrong with doing the same with your caregiving. Understanding that grief is a emotion caused by loss and that loss can be big loss and little loss is important for you to understand. You need to know that you don’t need permission from anyone to grieve the losses you’ve incurred as a caregiver. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else but you. 

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What is important is for you to give yourself time to process the loss and the grief caused by it. Oftentimes grief is short lived or it chooses to run it’s course over time. However, if it isn’t attended to then the heartache it causes will be prolonged.

For big losses there is usually some kind of ritual that takes place to mark a loss. There are of course funerals, memorials and wakes when a person dies. If you were to loose your job there could be a way you’d commemorate that. No one would thing twice about those things happening. We do these things to acknowledge the loss of a person or job. It gives us a way to experience the grief with a group of people and helps us move through some of the emotions that come with that. It also allows us to begin the process of letting go. 

Now I’m not saying to put together a memorial for the loss of your life before caregiving. Although… I’d go to that party. It would help to find a way to acknowledge the loss, see the grief it has caused for what it is and feel so that you can move on in time. 

What does that look like?

Thant’s up to you.

Some people like to release things in fire. You could write out the things you’ve loss on pieces of paper and make a bonfire. Sit and hold those things for a while. Think of them and reminisce. If you have someone there with you, you can tell them about the things you’ve lost and then throw the paper or maybe it’s something that is a big signifier of the person you used to  be or the relationship you once had into the fire. This would be a beautiful way to say goodbye, have some time to sit and feel the emotions that come up. 

You could write yourself a letter to say good bye to the old you or write a letter to your relationship. Writing things out allows you to connect to your thoughts and feelings on a different level. Or you could simply write out how you’re feeling about these changes in your life and take your time with it to explore those feelings. Sometimes you don’t realize how big and small some things really are until you get them out of your head. Getting things out on paper. can be just the release you needed and the best way for you to process what is going on. 

However you commemorate and start to say good bye to the things you’ve lost can be as elaborate or simple as you’d like. The thing to remember is that you are focussed on the activity you’ve chosen to use to say goodbye. 

In the end what is important for you to remember is that when there is any type of loss there will be a certain amount of grief. If you are able to understand you are grieving, give yourself permission to feel this grief especially when you don’t think anyone will understand how you feel and find a way to commemorate the loss you incurred you will be on your way to being able to move through that emotion in a healthy way. 

If you don’t realize you’ve actually had a loss because it doesn’t look like what people usually grieve and/ or don’t attend to your emotions and instead try to ignore them then you will find yourself unhappy. 

The act of understanding that you are grieving does not make your life easier. Being able to grieve makes it possible for you to love your life as a caregiver. 

Thank you for listening.