Posts Tagged ‘Managing Emotions’
Mindful Caregiving Thought Tools for Resilience (Part 5)
Setting Life-Serving Limits & Boundaries
By Holly Whittelsey Whiteside
This series of articles teaches ways to strengthen your resilience.
Article #1, Utilizing Your Emotions introduced tools for managing self-talk and learning from anger.
Article #2, Conserve Your Energy, offered tools for recouping energy.
Article #3, Building Well-being helped you to scale down your activities and take care of yourself.
Article #4, Survival: Managing Your Emotions helped you fine-tuning your emotional accessibility and adjusting your shifting caregiving role
This article, Setting Life-Serving Limits & Boundaries concludes the series of articles that teach ways to strengthen resilience as a caregiver.
Setting Life-Serving Limits & Boundaries
(Harmony) is when…”Yes” is tempered by a gentle “No,” and “No” is expanded with measured compassion. – Mrs. Chana Rachel Schusterman
While times for silence in caregiving are often a rare gift, opportunities for speaking out abound, offering you practice in setting boundaries. As your loved one ages, your role can shift before your eyes. Within a given day, you may function as child, nurse, entertainment committee, adult friend, healthcare advocate, and sibling, each role requiring a somewhat different voice. Notice that most of these roles are in response to others. (How easily we forget ourselves!)
While dancing with your various and mutable roles, you can remain effective by staying centered in yourself. To stay centered in yourself during caregiving, develop the habit of protecting and asserting your own boundaries. Notice where your responsibility stops and another’s begins. Notice what is yours to do, and what could or should be done by others. Notice what you need in order to be effective. If what you need must come from someone else but is not forthcoming, ask for it. Setting your bounds and limits in your relationships and in your life is an art of balancing controlling with allowing. Here are some guidelines for promoting healthy limits and boundaries:
Mindful Caregiving Thought Tools for Resilience (Part 2)
Conserve Your Energy
By Holly Whittelsey Whiteside
Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind. – Bruce Lee
This series of articles will teach you ways to strengthen your resilience by building an internal toolkit that will last you for the rest of your life.
Article #1, Utilizing Your Emotions, introduced tools for managing self-talk and learning from anger. This article, Conserve Your Energy, offers approaches for gaining control over troubling issues.
Future articles will include:
- Build Well-being (Clearing Your Calendar, Practicing Self-care, & Adjusting Boundaries)
- Design Survival Strategies (Managing Obstacles, Knowing Thyself)
- Build A Support Team (Utilizing Family & Community, and How to Ask for Help)
Conserve Your Energy: Fine-tuning Your Commitments, and Choosing Your Battles
What you resist persists – Carl Jung
All struggles have one thing in common — they arise from some form of resistance. When our lives (or people) don’t measure up, we find ourselves in an emotional traffic jam somewhere between frustration and anger. It pays to look a bit closer at what is really happening.
In ordinary times, society encourages us to be on-guard, defend our rights, and complain about the state of things. When there are no outer battles to wage, we wage inner ones. But caregiving is no ordinary time. Energy conservation takes on a whole new meaning. When you know the source of your discontent, you can take care in the way that you address it. Feelings of being bound up, or are about to do battle, can arise from a host of causes which can include false assumptions, unexamined expectations, conflicting commitments, and childhood triggers. Understanding the root cause will allow you to address upsets appropriately and effectively.
Fine-tuning Your Commitments
Commitments source your energy and drive your life. They’re personal. A commitment is a driving principle, something you are unwilling to compromise that is fueled by a deeply held value. Behind every one of your upsets is a strong commitment to something. For instance, if you are upset with a doctor, it may be out of a commitment to your loved one’s safety, or a commitment to feeling supported by the medical community. Acting blindly on unarticulated commitments makes you far less effective. Identifying your root commitment in a situation lets you align the way you speak so as to achieve your desired result. But what about when you’re incapable of action?
Mindful Caregiving Thought Tools for Resilience (Part 1)
By Holly Whittelsey Whiteside
Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind. – Bruce Lee
This series of articles will teach you ways to strengthen your resilience by building an internal toolkit that will last you for the rest of your life. Article #1, on building emotional resilience, introduces the powerful tools of managing self-talk and learning from anger.
Future articles will include:
Balancing Your Life (Picking Battles, Fine-tuning Relationships & Commitments)
Vitalizing Your Self-connection (Building Well-being & Boundaries)
Designing Survival Strategies (Managing Obstacles, Knowing Thyself)
Building A Support Team (Family, Community, How to ask for help)
Utilizing Your Emotions: Managing Self-talk and Learning From Anger
The voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes but in having new eyes – Marcel Proust
Saying “Yes” to caregiving feels risky, as it contains many unanswerable questions. Acceptance of unknowns is perhaps the first lesson in caregiving.
You are visiting your parents, as you have done many times before, but this time things seems a little different. You can’t quite put your finger on it at first. Maybe things are less tidy than usual, maybe not. Then it happens. Hamburgers are planned for dinner. While casually looking through the icebox for snacks, you see that the hamburger is 2 weeks past its expiration date. It hits you. Your normally meticulous parents are becoming old. Later that night, you think of other signs of decline. It is clear your parents are going to need help, increasingly as time goes on. Your relationship with them has shifted irreversibly, in an instant.
As caregivers, we are characters in a complex play we cannot fully understand and certainly cannot control. Caregiving can feel like concentrated life–life, but with the emotional volume turned up. Even more than in ordinary times we sometimes feel victim to our emotions. Here are a couple of alternatives.