Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Hello and welcome back to Louis body and mindful caregiving. I'm Crystal Jakowski, your host, and I am really glad that you're here today. I'm thrilled about this moment and sharing with you.
[00:00:23] What did we do for self care? The first thing that we cover every week is, what did you do for self care?
[00:00:31] I did something big. I actually recorded two weeks ahead so that I could take a vacation. I had my sister come into town partway through my vacation so that my mom had somebody to look forward to and she would be okay. My son also came in after my sister left, and then I took my mom to California with me so that she could have something else to look forward to. So I made all of the plans necessary so that I could then go and enjoy and let everything just fall away, shed it all. And it was fantastic.
[00:01:12] I was able to really breathe and let go. And I read a couple of very spiritual books that just made me think and uplifted me, gave me a little bit of a new perspective.
[00:01:26] I love reading these books because you read them once and you apply them for a little while, but over time you've applied them and you kind of forget what the core of it is. So you read them again and then you go back to them. And I was very grateful for this. I was grateful for the books and the insights that they gave me, but I was really grateful for the time that I had to read them and soak it in. Because normally I wouldn't actually soak it in. I might read a different kind of book that is a fantasy or history, but not something that I wanted to take in and remember and assimilate and apply to my life, this vacation gave me that, and I was very grateful for that.
[00:02:13] It was beautiful.
[00:02:15] Whether you did something huge for self care and really, truly gave yourself a break or you did something smaller, I don't care. I just hope that you did self care. It is so hugely important. And it's more than just words. This is not just a platitude. This is you need to take care of you. You need to fill your cup. You need to help yourself out so that you can give them what they need, so that you can support them without completely draining yourself. So take it seriously. I hope that you are doing self care and that you have wonderful things that are filling your own cup.
[00:02:58] After I came back from the trip, I met with my talk doc. Now, I've told you guys about my talk doc before. She is absolutely fantastic. She is trained and well versed in helping people who are taking care of people who have terminal illnesses. So whether it's cancer or Alzheimer's or dementia, a long term illness, she is versed trained in helping those people who are caring for the people with the illness.
[00:03:35] It's specialized. And I swear to you guys, it is so important if you are in this situation, even if it's not caregiving. If you are in a caregiving role, I pray that you find a therapist, a talk doc, that can help you through it. Even if you're not caregiving, I hope that you have some kind of relationship with another talk doc, because it's better to have them and know that you jive with them and you work with them so that you can call on them when you need them than it is to be in a moment of desperation and chaos and then need to find someone. It's so much better if you do it when you're not in that acute tragedy moment and you're actually able to find them and know that you jive with them on this level. So therapy, therapy, therapy.
[00:04:32] I was sitting in our office and we were talking and I said, there's just this thing. It's been a year and things are different.
[00:04:44] I've talked to you guys about it before, and at some points I've wondered if it was adrenal fatigue. I've wondered if I'm just apathetic. I've wondered if I'm depressed. I've wondered why I'm just like, whatever, but this is a little bit different.
[00:05:00] I feel strong. I feel confident. I feel able to face what's in front of me and deal with it. I feel like I've really got my arms wrapped around my mom's stuff, and now I can look at my own.
[00:05:23] In the beginning, I told her that my fears were regrets. I didn't want to look back on this time with my mom and regret anything about the way that I took care of her.
[00:05:40] I wanted to make sure that I was making decisions and choices based on her life desires.
[00:05:50] I wanted to make sure that I was loving her the best that I could.
[00:05:56] I was afraid that I would lose myself in caregiving and not know who I was after. What do I do with me once she's gone?
[00:06:12] I didn't want to put my life on hold in order to take care of her. I wanted to make sure that there was something more afterwards. Kind of like parents facing the empty nester. What are you going to do to help you with that transition when those kids are leaving the house?
[00:06:29] Now that my mom is like, I understand it and I've got this. I see the decline and I know that she's going to continue declining and we've dealt with several new issues and increasing meds and I'll go into where she's at currently in a future podcast in a couple of weeks. But now that I feel like I'm confidently competent in it, I'm excited about adding some of me back and finding joy again.
[00:07:10] Finding those things like socializing, dancing, pickleball, finding those things that fill my cup, bring me joy, get me out with community.
[00:07:28] And I can do that.
[00:07:31] I can do that now because I feel freer being able to wrap my arms around all of her stuff. And I looked at my talk doc and I said, Annie, it's been a year.
[00:07:47] It's been a year since this first came up and I am just blown away that it's taken a year. And in the same aspect, I feel pretty good that it was only a year. Like how do I rectify, reconcile those two things? And her response to me was, that's actually normal. And I'm surprised I didn't tell you that in the first meeting that we had. This will take a year, believe it or not. They say people, experts, whoever they are in big quotes say that when a big thing happens, you should do nothing big for a year. Make no large decisions. So when you retire, don't sell your house and move to a different state.
[00:08:37] Don't make any big plans. Just retire and stay and continue living life where you are at for a year. If you lose a loved one that's very close, a spouse or a child, don't move.
[00:08:52] Don't do any big decisions. Don't go buy a new car, don't go whatever that is. No big decisions for a year.
[00:09:02] Work through it.
[00:09:04] If you get a divorce, no big decisions for a year. Give yourself time to work through it.
[00:09:15] The thing is, with this year, in every one of these examples, you've had a loss, whether it's death or a relationship or a job, the way that you are used to living. And now you can't live, whatever that is. You have had a loss. And grief takes time.
[00:09:43] We are a society that seeks out instant gratification. We really want it here and now. We want to be able to say, oh yeah, I adjusted to that and I'm good to go and move on. The problem is that we are archaic in our brains and we take a long time to adjust to that shift. It takes a while for us to grasp, acknowledge, sift through adapt to the new state of being.
[00:10:15] You're developing a new skill.
[00:10:20] Developing that new skill. You don't sit down at the piano and play Mozart perfectly the very first time.
[00:10:28] It takes practice.
[00:10:31] Mastery takes practice. It takes time.
[00:10:36] Those people out on the football field or on the basketball court, they weren't the top of their game. Automatically they had to work at it. It took time.
[00:10:47] So here you are in this situation where you are taking care of a loved one and that loved one. You now have a diagnosis.
[00:10:57] Your life just changed in a major way.
[00:11:04] You are now grieving the loss of your parent the way that they were.
[00:11:10] You are recognizing that you are going to let them go. And this is the long goodbye, which in and of itself is grief. You are grieving the knowledge that they really are losing their mind, their memories, their ability to function.
[00:11:28] You are mourning the loss of your relationship with them.
[00:11:34] And not only your loss of the relationship, but the loss of possibility where you may have hoped for healing and reconciliation with them.
[00:11:46] Now you know it's just not going to happen because mentally, they are unable to do that. They are unable to meet you in that space that you so desperately wished and hoped that they could do.
[00:12:03] You are mourning.
[00:12:05] Grief takes time.
[00:12:09] It's time to adjust.
[00:12:16] In this year, there's been a ton of adjusting.
[00:12:24] There was time when I felt like I was free falling and I was scratching at the walls, just hoping and praying that I would stop falling down the hole, hoping that at the bottom of the hole I didn't go splat. And instead I was like Alice in Wonderland and everything. My skirt would poof out and I'd float gently to the bottom and everything would be fine.
[00:12:48] There have been times when I thought, everything's fine, I'm okay.
[00:12:52] And then I would crash because something new would happen.
[00:12:59] This up and down, this constant shift and change continuously kept me off balance.
[00:13:13] I had to learn how to be present with it, to not judge it, to not rail against it and be angry.
[00:13:29] Now, when I was in California, I was reading one of the books that I read was the four agreements.
[00:13:37] And I've read this before and I applied it before and I thought it was lovely.
[00:13:44] After I read the first couple of agreements again and refreshed my memory, my husband and I had a conversation and some of it really works out and some of it doesn't, which was frustrating.
[00:13:58] But the bottom line was I was able to step back. And one of the agreements is to not take it personally.
[00:14:09] My mom has dementia.
[00:14:12] My mom is declining. My mom is struggling.
[00:14:16] That doesn't make it my dementia.
[00:14:20] I have an experience with her. I'm standing next to her and I'm supporting her, but it's not my personal thing. I can offer her love and assistance. I can be present. I can nurture. I can watch when she has another physical ailment that needs to be addressed or her meds aren't working quite right.
[00:14:42] I can be that facilitator, but I'm a facilitator.
[00:14:48] Not taking it personally and remembering that it's hers, not mine, is a great way to be. And I'm able to be there now because it's been a year now. Six months ago wouldn't happen.
[00:15:03] Six months ago, I was still struggling with the new news that, oh, my gosh, now she's got diabetes from the medication and I don't know what to do and how do we adjust that? And some doctors don't believe it's that. And now we have to add a new medication. And how's that going to affect the other medications and other side effects? Six months ago, I was still deep in the trenches and I was struggling to claw myself out. I was struggling to adjust.
[00:15:32] Today I can look at it and say, yes, we have a new symptom, and she has swelling.
[00:15:44] And I just went to the doctor and I was like, okay, this is where we're at now. I just emailed them. It was like, no big deal. We don't even have to come in. We just got to talk about this.
[00:15:53] Less of a reaction, more of an action. I got this. Not a big deal. We can move through this. It'll be okay. But it took a year.
[00:16:06] It took a year.
[00:16:11] I didn't know that it would take a year. Nobody told me it would take a year. If somebody had said it would take a year, I simultaneously would have been okay with it and pissed off at them. Don't freaking tell me that it's going to take a year because that feels like forever. That feels like a bad pun, a death sentence.
[00:16:33] That's horrible. I don't want to hear that it'll take a year for me to be okay and on top of it, especially because I'm such a go doer and I just attack things and I'm like, no, yeah, this is good. I got it. And it's not going to take a year. It's just going to take a couple of months. I would have laughed in your face if you had told me that. So any of you out there who want to laugh in my face, I absolutely encourage you go ahead and feel that emotion and call me all sorts of names. That's fine, I hear you, I understand. And then when you hit a year and things seem just a little bit easier and you don't understand why, because magically it just is.
[00:17:15] I hope that you remember this podcast and you go, oh yeah, it'll take a year. In a year I'll have this.
[00:17:25] And if you don't want to do that and you'd like to plan ahead and maybe take a more positive outlook on it, maybe you can start marking it off on the calendar and say, okay, this was a really rough month, but that was month seven.
[00:17:37] So I'm over the halfway point.
[00:17:40] I'm going to give it a year and see how I'm doing.
[00:17:47] Stop being a victim and grab onto it. Take some of your power back and say, God, this is hard, this is really difficult. And yet I know we'll get there.
[00:18:01] Let it take its time.
[00:18:04] And my other thing for you today is don't judge your emotions. Throughout that year. Your emotions are there to let you know that something rough is going on, that something needs attention.
[00:18:20] Don't judge them as right or wrong, they simply are.
[00:18:26] Instead, I would encourage you to look at your behaviors.
[00:18:33] Doing, what are you doing, how are you supporting them.
[00:18:40] It helped me a lot when I recognized and realized that, you know what, I take my mom for a pedicure every month. We go out for steak every month. I check on her every single day. We do this and this and this. And I made a list. What do I do on a daily, on a weekly, on a monthly basis so that I could then look back and say, I'm doing a lot.
[00:19:05] My behavior, how is my behavior? If you recognize that you have those emotions and say, oh, okay, so anger is here, you can come in anger and you can just be right there with me. But I'm not going to let you control me because I need to be kind and gentle right now. So I'll just acknowledge that you're there and do my thing.
[00:19:28] Don't judge it.
[00:19:31] When you get angry, when you yell, even though you didn't mean to, when you get really upset, when you're frustrated with what's going on, it's okay. It's okay to be frustrated. It's okay to be angry. It's okay to be upset. It's okay to be all of the fields, it's okay to not be okay. And then remind yourself, it'll take a year, give yourself a break and acknowledge it'll take time, it's grief.
[00:19:58] Where are you at in the grief process, in the denial, the bargaining, the acceptance.
[00:20:06] Where are you at?
[00:20:10] It's okay.
[00:20:12] You're doing great. Give it time.
[00:20:16] It'll be okay.
[00:20:19] Take it to heart.
[00:20:21] Take a nice, deep breath. Remember that you are not alone. There are so many millions of people out there going through the same thing that you are.
[00:20:34] Some of the details are different, but the basic foundation is the same. You're taking care of somebody who can't take care of themselves. You love them. You're watching them decline, and it's heartbreaking.
[00:20:50] Give yourself permission to feel it all, to see it all, to acknowledge it.
[00:20:59] And then it'll take a year.
[00:21:03] It'll get better.
[00:21:04] It will get better. Not that they will improve and they'll be healthier and better able to do stuff, but you will be able to manage it better.
[00:21:15] Like when you're in a new job and you're drowning because you don't feel like you can grasp everything that they want you to do. But over time, it gets better and it improves, and you are more capable of navigating their needs and expectations of you. It's the same thing. This is a new job. You're learning. Give it time.
[00:21:39] Thank you for coming. Give yourself some self care, and I'll see you next week here on Louis body and mindful, caregiving.
