Taking Good Care Of Other People Is Not An Easy Task
How can we take good care of others who depend on us without letting the situation wear us down and consume us?
You don’t know how, but one day your parents can’t take care of themselves anymore. Those people who seemed invincible have gotten old and you need to start taking care of them. Suddenly, you find yourself taking on responsibilities that you didn’t want to and that you thought you’d never have to take on.
But you love them and they gave everything for you. How not to take care of them now that they need it most? After all the sacrifices they made so you could have a good life… The truth is, you feel more and more nervous and upset about being in this situation. Are you a bad child?
The stress of taking good care of other dependent people
Being involved in the task of caring for a person who can no longer take care of himself or herself can be a considerable amount of stress. On the one hand, we are with a loved one who is no longer what he was before. We see how problems arise in both behavior and memory, in addition to physical and mental weakness.
This leads us to constantly monitor this person, as well as to control their eating and/or hygiene. All of this can be unpleasant for us, which can lead us to undertake these tasks with reluctance.
Stress is not only associated with taking good care of other people, it also spreads to other areas of our lives. Thus, professional, financial, marital or family problems may arise. There is a kind of “contagion effect” that makes conflicts settle in our daily lives.
The difficulties of caring for someone
It is normal for negative emotions such as anxiety, anger or sadness to appear, in addition to guilt for feeling that the situation is out of our control or for the desire to be somewhere other than taking care of this person, which conflicts with the moral obligation to care for our parents.
On the other hand, our social relationships are undermined, whether due to lack of time to be with other people or to generate conflicts due to the discomfort we feel. This, in turn, can re-emerge negative emotions, thus establishing a circle of negative affect.
On a physical level, numerous illnesses can appear. From different psychosomatic disorders (that is, physical illnesses caused or aggravated by emotional and psychological factors) to problems related to certain tasks in the person’s care, such as helping them to move.
What can help us alleviate the burden of caring?
Nowadays there are many people who take care of elderly parents. Why don’t they all go through the psychological, social and physical problems we’ve seen here? Because each person’s resources and situations vary considerably, as do other psychological disorders.
Strategies used to deal with stress are very important to protect us from stress. Because the problem is not so much related to what happens, but to what we do and how we face the situation. In that sense, ruminating and turning your head about the bad time we are going through or trying to avoid these situations will not help.
On the contrary, trying to find the best option and putting into practice what we think will help us (ie, act) without fear of error is very beneficial. In fact, who doesn’t make mistakes? And who has never heard that this is how you learn?
But, regardless of how the person handles the situation, we cannot forget another great help: social support. We need to have strong interpersonal bonds, so that other people help us with the most varied tasks, understand us, recognize our value and want to share with us the burden of caring… After all, you need to take care of yourself to be able to take good care of other people !
Images courtesy of Jake Thacker, JD Mason and Cathal Mac An Bethatha.
