Caregiver Anger and Guilt What Getting Mad at Your Loved One Says About YOU
The 7 Deadly Emotions of Caregiving click here: How to Cope
By Paula Spencer Scott, Senior Health Writer
Nobody would ever choose a smiley face as the perfect symbolic emoticon for a caregiver. Caregiving for an ailing loved one is just too stressful -- often triggering damaging emotions that can not only undermine your good work but harm your health, as well.
Here's how to cope with that Guilt, Resentment, Anger, Worry, Loneliness, Grief, Defensiveness,
No, it's not all sweetness and light taking care of an ageing loved one. They can make us mad. Very mad. Very, very, very mad.
Take, for example, some things I've heard caregivers say (or, uh, said myself. . . though I won't say which ones!):
· "I try to do something nice for her and she ignores it, or complains!"
· "She makes me so mad because she doesn't trust me!"
· "I could throttle him when he launches into that same story again. . . ."
· "How can I help but lose my temper with my mom when she ticks off the aides I've so carefully hired?"
· "Why why WHY does he keep doing that? He should know better!"
· Fill in your own blank!
What follows when our loved ones make us angry is often worse than pure anger: It's anger mingled with guilt. We feel guilty because often the person can't help being the way he or she is (dementia, depression, difficult illness). We feel guilty when we keep the upset feelings bottled up and simmering inside. We feel guilty when we snap and say something rude or sharp to the person. We can't win.
So here's one guilt-soothing thing to remember about caregiver anger: It reveals something very important about you.
No, not that you're short-tempered or foul-natured. Not that you lack self control. Not that you're uncaring or mean. Not that you're even doing anything terribly wrong, really.
Getting mad at your loved one when you're a caregiver reveals this about you: You're human.
You're only human.
So stop beating yourself up for what are, let's face it, often perfectly natural responses to extreme stress. Do work on reducing the causes of that stress. But don't add to your misery with a needless layer of guilt.
If you neverevereverever get mad, hats off; you're human, too, though with a much longer fuse than the rest of us. But if you're like the rest of us, you've gotten mad before, and you'll be mad again.
And it's okay. Because it's normal :-)
The National Alliance of Caregivers reports that around 67 percent of caregivers are women and that half of the adults caring for a family member also have a full-time job. But caregivers across the nation come in all genders and from very disparate backgrounds, which means they deal with a number of different challenges, ranging from socioeconomic issues to emotional, mental and physical ones.
Even with the diversity of caregivers and their related situations, some common themes develop. This guide is designed to provide an overview of what it means to be a family caregiver as well as some information about overcoming common challenges.
https://www.caring.com/caregivers/family-caregivers/#the-7-deadly-emotions-of-caregiving
Do click on the side headlines too :-)
One way for you to de-stress ------
Smells of Nature Lower Physiological Stress
For many years now, there’s been a consensus that being in nature contributes to good physical and mental health, says Marcus Hedblom, an ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences who helped run the virtual reality experiment. Research has shown that viewing natural scenes can lower heart rate and restore focus, both of which are important for combating physical and mental health disorders.
Even more intriguing, he says, was the result that the rated pleasantness of smells was the strongest predictor of stress—with high pleasantness being associated with lower initial physiological stress responses and faster recovery—suggesting that smells might have a much more profound effect on reducing stress compared with sights and sounds. Adding the smell stimuli “is very exciting,” says green-space researcher Matilda van den Bosch of the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the study. “I honestly don’t know of any high-quality study that has been able to incorporate the smell sense.”
Smell is an intriguing sense because of its wiring in the brain, says study coauthor Johan Lundström, a neuropsychologist at Karolinska Institute in Sweden. It’s “unique among the senses,” he says, because it is not first processed by the thalamus—the brain’s switchboard. Instead, the smell signal is sent straight to the hypothalamus, a brain region involved in stress responses, in addition to the olfactory cortex, where odors are processed and perceived.
From the olfactory cortex, the signal is relayed to the amygdala, the brain region that detects threats, and to the hippocampus, which is responsible for forming and recalling memories. Bypassing the thalamus means that the hypothalamus, hippocampus, and amygdala can respond faster to smells than they do to other sensory inputs, Lundström says.
Such direct wiring, specifically to the hypothalamus, has led researchers to suspect that smell might regulate stress. But past studies that have tried to measure the impact of odor on stress have not used control odors or other sensory stimuli and therefore haven’t been able to determine if natural scents induce a general pleasant feeling during the experiment that then helps to reduce stress or if the odor itself directly drives the reduction.
The new study suggests that there’s at least some direct stress-reducing effect, Lundström says. Although the visual and auditory stimuli in natural environments got generally higher pleasantness ratings from participants than odor stimuli did, the natural odor stimuli had the greatest impact on physiological stress reduction.
0 * 0 * 0 * 0 * . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
http://mhr4c.com.au/about-this-program/
This program is designed to support carers of people who have a mental illness living in Queensland.
Carers are usually family members and friends who provide support to children or adults who have a mental illness such as anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or other mental illnesses.
Carers commonly find mental illness and the mental health system confusing; want to hear how others are coping and often wonder if they are doing the right thing.
29 December 2020
The 7 Deadly Emotions of Caregiving click here: How to Cope
By Paula Spencer Scott, Senior Health Writer
Nobody would ever choose a smiley face as the perfect symbolic emoticon for a caregiver. Caregiving for an ailing loved one is just too stressful -- often triggering damaging emotions that can not only undermine your good work but harm your health, as well.
Here's how to cope with that Guilt, Resentment, Anger, Worry, Loneliness, Grief, Defensiveness,
No, it's not all sweetness and light taking care of an ageing loved one. They can make us mad. Very mad. Very, very, very mad.
Take, for example, some things I've heard caregivers say (or, uh, said myself. . . though I won't say which ones!):
· "I try to do something nice for her and she ignores it, or complains!"
· "She makes me so mad because she doesn't trust me!"
· "I could throttle him when he launches into that same story again. . . ."
· "How can I help but lose my temper with my mom when she ticks off the aides I've so carefully hired?"
· "Why why WHY does he keep doing that? He should know better!"
· Fill in your own blank!
What follows when our loved ones make us angry is often worse than pure anger: It's anger mingled with guilt. We feel guilty because often the person can't help being the way he or she is (dementia, depression, difficult illness). We feel guilty when we keep the upset feelings bottled up and simmering inside. We feel guilty when we snap and say something rude or sharp to the person. We can't win.
So here's one guilt-soothing thing to remember about caregiver anger: It reveals something very important about you.
No, not that you're short-tempered or foul-natured. Not that you lack self control. Not that you're uncaring or mean. Not that you're even doing anything terribly wrong, really.
Getting mad at your loved one when you're a caregiver reveals this about you: You're human.
You're only human.
So stop beating yourself up for what are, let's face it, often perfectly natural responses to extreme stress. Do work on reducing the causes of that stress. But don't add to your misery with a needless layer of guilt.
If you neverevereverever get mad, hats off; you're human, too, though with a much longer fuse than the rest of us. But if you're like the rest of us, you've gotten mad before, and you'll be mad again.
And it's okay. Because it's normal :-)
The National Alliance of Caregivers reports that around 67 percent of caregivers are women and that half of the adults caring for a family member also have a full-time job. But caregivers across the nation come in all genders and from very disparate backgrounds, which means they deal with a number of different challenges, ranging from socioeconomic issues to emotional, mental and physical ones.
Even with the diversity of caregivers and their related situations, some common themes develop. This guide is designed to provide an overview of what it means to be a family caregiver as well as some information about overcoming common challenges.
https://www.caring.com/caregivers/family-caregivers/#the-7-deadly-emotions-of-caregiving
Do click on the side headlines too :-)
One way for you to de-stress ------
Smells of Nature Lower Physiological Stress
For many years now, there’s been a consensus that being in nature contributes to good physical and mental health, says Marcus Hedblom, an ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences who helped run the virtual reality experiment. Research has shown that viewing natural scenes can lower heart rate and restore focus, both of which are important for combating physical and mental health disorders.
Even more intriguing, he says, was the result that the rated pleasantness of smells was the strongest predictor of stress—with high pleasantness being associated with lower initial physiological stress responses and faster recovery—suggesting that smells might have a much more profound effect on reducing stress compared with sights and sounds. Adding the smell stimuli “is very exciting,” says green-space researcher Matilda van den Bosch of the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the study. “I honestly don’t know of any high-quality study that has been able to incorporate the smell sense.”
Smell is an intriguing sense because of its wiring in the brain, says study coauthor Johan Lundström, a neuropsychologist at Karolinska Institute in Sweden. It’s “unique among the senses,” he says, because it is not first processed by the thalamus—the brain’s switchboard. Instead, the smell signal is sent straight to the hypothalamus, a brain region involved in stress responses, in addition to the olfactory cortex, where odors are processed and perceived.
From the olfactory cortex, the signal is relayed to the amygdala, the brain region that detects threats, and to the hippocampus, which is responsible for forming and recalling memories. Bypassing the thalamus means that the hypothalamus, hippocampus, and amygdala can respond faster to smells than they do to other sensory inputs, Lundström says.
Such direct wiring, specifically to the hypothalamus, has led researchers to suspect that smell might regulate stress. But past studies that have tried to measure the impact of odor on stress have not used control odors or other sensory stimuli and therefore haven’t been able to determine if natural scents induce a general pleasant feeling during the experiment that then helps to reduce stress or if the odor itself directly drives the reduction.
The new study suggests that there’s at least some direct stress-reducing effect, Lundström says. Although the visual and auditory stimuli in natural environments got generally higher pleasantness ratings from participants than odor stimuli did, the natural odor stimuli had the greatest impact on physiological stress reduction.
0 * 0 * 0 * 0 * . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
http://mhr4c.com.au/about-this-program/
This program is designed to support carers of people who have a mental illness living in Queensland.
Carers are usually family members and friends who provide support to children or adults who have a mental illness such as anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or other mental illnesses.
Carers commonly find mental illness and the mental health system confusing; want to hear how others are coping and often wonder if they are doing the right thing.
29 December 2020