Are You Struggling in the "Caregiver Fog?"

Hi, I'm Peter Rosenberger, host of Hope for the Caregiver.

Glad to have you with us here again for another episode. We're talking about things that relate to the family caregiver. Maybe you're taking care of an aging loved one. Maybe you're taking care of a special needs child or someone who's a victim of trauma. Maybe you're taking care of a veteran, somebody with mental illness, somebody who has an alcohol or addiction issue. There are lots of different kinds of impairments, but wherever you find a chronic impairment, you're going to find a caregiver. Today, we're going to talk about the fog of caregivers. You know what that is? The fog of caregivers?

Fear, obligation, and guilt. That's what I call the fog of caregivers. Now, what do you do when you get to a fog? You slow down. That's the big marker right there for fog. You always slow down. Just slow down.

The fog of caregivers, the fear, obligation, guilt can lead to heartache, anger, and turmoil. If you put that together, it says fog hat. Fog hat. What was the big single for fog hat?

Slow ride. See what I did there? Try to make it simple because for caregivers, we need those simple reminders. When it gets pretty gnarly for us, we kind of lose our minds. Ma'am, maybe you don't.

I have. In doing so, we pop off or we'll say things that we wish we hadn't said, do things we wish we hadn't done, and end up having to go back and make amends for things that are very painful. These simple reminders that I've kind of come up with for myself during my years, decades now, I'm in my 35th year as a caregiver, are things that I can remind myself of how to function. That fog of caregivers is a very dangerous place for us. We get disoriented. We don't know where we're going. We're going to run right off a cliff, right into a tree. We're going to get hurt. We're going to hurt the people we love by saying things and doing things and behaving in a way that is destructive.

This is what happens when you get lost in a fog and you don't slow down. You can get really hurt and take everybody with you. So that fear, obligation, and guilt. Let's talk about that a little bit. We caregivers live often in the wreckage of our future. My wife's a double amputee, both legs. You ever heard of phantom limb pain? Well, it's a real phenomenon. You can feel the limb, even if it's been amputated for years, and in her case, decades. It still has that residual feeling there for her sometimes.

It's kind of weird. Well, we caregivers have what I call a reverse phantom pain, and we feel things that haven't even happened yet. That's when we live in that fear. And in that fear, it can paralyze us in the present because we're so worried about what's going to happen if. What are we going to do about this?

What are we going to do here? And we live in the wreckage of our future. It's hard to live that way, isn't it? We have to understand that as caregivers, there are a lot of different scenarios of this thing that can go wrong. And there are a lot of moving pieces at any given point. Every time we get behind the wheel of a car, we run the risk of something crazy happening.

We can't live in risk management and risk aversion 24-7. Things are just going to happen. And the question is, can we have a sense of purpose in that, of recognizing, okay, it's going to happen. I'm not going to react. I'm going to respond. And I'll deal with that when it happens.

But right now, I'm going to deal with where I am. And I remember one time during a surgery, a series of surgery that my wife had, she said over 80 that I can count. And 100 doctors now have treated her. This has all been going on since the car wreck in 1983. So we're talking a vast medical problem.

And I remember this one surgery, it was a back surgery. And the doctor came up to the room when I was waiting. And he said, look, we got a problem.

Don't you just hate those kind of moments? I said, what is it? He said, she's got an infection in her back. And we know what to do with this.

There is a protocol, but we've got to deal with this. I said, what's going to happen? He said, well, we're going to have to keep her in the hospital here for, you know, up to three months, it looks like. And about every other day or so, we're going to have to go in there and open her up and irrigate that out with a saline solution to get that stuff out of her.

She can't raise up more than 15 degrees. We had two small children at home. And I'm thinking, oh, crap, you know, what are you doing? I just looked at the wall.

I didn't even know how to respond. I said, I can't do this for three months. And he put his hand on my shoulder and he said, and he put his hand on my shoulder and he said, you know, you're not going to do it for three months. You're going to do it for 24 hours. Sufficient for the days is the worry we have right now.

He was quoting Matthew 634. Tomorrow will take care of itself. That's how we had to live during that three months.

And many, many times since then. In fact, that's really the only way to live when you're a caregiver. But it's hard to do so because the what if questions come at you so hard and so fast, but I'm going to purpose that I'm going to live today to the best of my ability. I'm not going to get it right every time, but I'm going to make progress at it.

And you can too. You know, we live with a lot of fear in this world right now. The COVID-19, what are we going to do about this? What are we going to do about this?

You know, nobody knows how this is going to play out. New administrations or, you know, all the stuff going on with politics and so forth. There's a lot of fear.

There's a lot of fear worthy things. We can't live in the wreckage of our future. We're going to have to deal with just today and respond accordingly. Not react, but respond with a sense of purpose.

I will live today and do the best I can with what I'm dealing with today. Okay. Now let's go to obligation, fear, obligation, and guilt. Excuse me. I'm not going to even edit that out and just, you know what? I'm a caregiver.

35 years, I'm going to cough. Fear, obligation, and guilt. Obligation. You know how you can tell when you're dealing with obligation as a caregiver? When you say words like I need to, I have to, I must, I should be, I'm supposed to be.

And those are hard behaviors and belief systems to push back against. But it occurred to me many years ago that this thing with my wife, I didn't do this to her, and I can't undo it. I am a steward of this. I'm not obligated. This is way beyond my pay grade. And for me to somehow put myself in that sense of obligation, it implies some level of ownership.

And I'm punching above my weight class. I don't have that kind of ownership. I'm a steward. This thing belongs to God. This is in God's purview. This is not mine. I am powerless to fix this, but I'm not powerless to deal with the things at hand and to be a good steward of me, of my resources, of my wife, dealing with doctors and so forth, and be a good steward of it. Stewardship takes all the burden off of that ownership and that obligation. And I tell you what, if you live in that obligation moment, if you live in that obligation sense of mentality that it has for you, it takes about that long to get to resentment. Some of you have been doing this for long enough, you know that.

It doesn't take that long to become resentful. And that's a terrible place to live. That's a very burdensome place to live. So try shifting it to stewardship. So instead of fear, we're going to live with purpose.

Instead of obligation, we're going to live with stewardship. And the last one is guilt. And guilt's a booger, man. It is a hard thing for us to deal with. And I'm not talking about guilt over big sins.

They get great press. I mean, those are guilt-worthy things and I get that. We all have things in our life that we don't know. We all have things in our life that we're guilty of and we should feel guilty about. But I'm talking about other kinds of guilt. I'm talking about special needs parents who feel guilty for bringing the child into the world. I'm talking about feeling guilty that you can get up and stand up in the shower and they can't, or you can go for a walk and they can't.

I'm talking about feeling guilty for wanting to just to watch an hour's worth of TV without being interrupted. There's a lot of different things that come at us and make us feel like we're guilty of something. And in that place, you give grace. Now, I married a woman named Grace. I think that is the most beautiful word in the English language, grace. And give ourselves some grace. Think about somebody you know who's serving as a caregiver, or if somebody was doing what you do and you ran into somebody who does what you do every day as a caregiver, how would you treat them?

Would you treat them with compassion and graciousness? Yeah, but you're not doing that to yourself, are you? I know.

I get it. I'm the same way. But here's the path. And I'd be lying to you if I told you I've got all the solutions because I don't.

What I've done is I've gone down the wrong road so many times, I've learned a better way to do it and a safer and a healthier way. And now I have to reorient myself and say the same thing that I say to you. I'm saying it to myself. I can't just lob guilt at myself. I change the things that I can. I ask for God's grace to change the things that I can't or help me deal with the things that I can't and extend grace to myself.

And I found that when I extend grace to myself, then it better equips me to extend grace to others too. So grace, purpose, stewardship, instead of that fog, grace, purpose, stewardship, GPS. That's how you get to a fog. Use a GPS.

Orient yourself in time and space with something with something other than your own senses. That's how pilots do it. That's how ship captains do it. Grace, purpose, stewardship, GPS.

We're all going to hit that fog of caregivers. Slow down. Give yourself some grace.

Recognize that you're going to purpose to live in the moment, not out in the future. And that you're a steward. You're not an owner of this. You didn't do this.

You can't undo it. You're a steward of this and you do the best that you can with it. In the process, you'll find that you can live a calmer, healthier life as a caregiver, even while dealing with harsher realities. Now, you're not going to get this right every time. If you do, please call me.

Let me know how you did it because I'd like to know. But you can navigate to a place of safety better and more effectively by just keeping these simple things in mind. The goal is for us to not be happy and feel good about all this stuff. The goal is to be healthier. Healthier people in the midst of this and healthier caregivers make better caregivers. So if you come across that fog of caregivers, that fear, obligation, and guilt, use that GPS, that grace, purpose, and stewardship. Slow down and navigate your way through this a little safer. All right? Go to HopeForTheCaregiver.com. For more information, I'm Peter Rosenberger. See you next time.