Taking Care Of Others And Doing It Well Is Not An Easy Task
You don’t know how, but one day it turns out that your parents no longer take care of themselves. Those people who seemed invincible have grown older and you have to start taking care of them. Suddenly, you find yourself assuming responsibilities that you did not want and that you thought you would never have to assume.
But you love them and they have given everything for you. How can you not take care of them now that they need it? After all the sacrifices they have made for you to have a good life … The reality is that you feel more and more nervous and angry about being in this situation, is it that you are a bad son?
The stress of caring for dependent people
Being involved in the task of caring for a person who cannot help himself can be a considerable stress. On the one hand, we find a loved one who is no longer who he was. We see how both behavior and memory problems appear, as well as physical and mental deterioration.
This means that we have to monitor you continuously, as well as control your diet or hygiene. All of this may not be pleasant to us and we may be upset for having to do it, which is going to make us carry this task reluctantly and badly.
Stress is not only associated with caring for another person, but also spreads to other areas of our life. Thus, labor, economic, couple or family problems may appear. There is a kind of ” contagion effect ” that causes conflicts to be established in our daily lives.
The costs of caring
It is normal for negative emotions to appear such as anxiety, anger or sadness, in addition to guilt for feeling that the situation is overwhelming us or for the desire to be somewhere else that was not taking care of that person, which collide with the moral obligations of caring to our elders.
On the other hand, our social relationships are undermining, either due to lack of time to be with other people or by generating conflicts by paying with them for the discomfort we experience. This, in turn, can cause negative emotions to reappear, thus entering a spiral of negative affect.
On a physical level, a myriad of discomforts can appear. From different psychophysiological disorders (that is, physical diseases caused or exacerbated by emotional and psychological factors) to problems related to the tasks of caring for a person, such as moving them from one place to another.
What can help us ease the burden of caring?
Today there are many people who take care of their elders. Why don’t all of them suffer from the psychological, social and physical problems that we have seen? Because the resources and situations of each one vary enormously, as with other psychological disorders.
Stress coping strategies are very important to protect us from this wear and tear. Because it is not so much what happens but what we do and how we deal with it. In this line, staying ruminating and thinking about how bad we are going through or trying to avoid situations is not going to help us.
On the contrary, trying to find the best option and implement what we believe will help us (that is, act) without fear that we can make a mistake is more beneficial. In fact, who doesn’t make mistakes? And who has not heard that this is how you learn?
But apart from how the person handles the situation, we cannot forget our other great help: social support. That we have strong interpersonal bonds, so that other people help us with different tasks, understand us, recognize us and love us, reduces the burden of caring … Take care of yourself to be able to care!
Images courtesy of Jake Thacker, JD Mason, and Cathal Mac An Bheatha.
