Difficult Seasons

When you become a care giver, the relationship with the person you’re caring for and even with other family members can become stressed.

Just becoming someone’s care giver changes the relationship because of additional tasks and responsibilities you have taken on and because of tasks and responsibilities that the care receiver is having to allow someone else to handle.

This situation very often leads to the care giver adopting a parental role and attitude.  This in turn tends to force the care receiver into a reactionary child mode.  We turn to this model of relating because it’s the most familiar way we know for one person being responsible for and providing for the needs of another person.

Here’s what it looks like.  The care giver gives orders.  The care receiver balks by refusing to take her medicine or maybe doing his rehab, fights back, or maybe pouts.  The care receiver gets more forceful, or tries a bribe, or attempts parental-style logic, something like, “It’s for your own good.”  The care receiver cries or throws a fit, or maybe complies, but with sullenness.

Relationally, it just doesn’t work because adults are not meant to be in parent-child relationships.  And if we act like a parent with another adult, even if we in fact are, the other person is going to respond as a child.

The relationship will suffer, and maybe even be lost.  There will be constant stress, and likely constant arguments.

So how do we as care givers preserve and nurture the relationship.  By making it our goal.  Here are three principles that will guide you well:

1. We go out of our way to not sound or act like the stereotypical parent.  We therefore don’t give orders or ultimatums.
2. We focus on respecting the independence of the person we’re caring for, even if that means that person makes some bad decisions.
3. We recognize that his or her situation has resulted in a loss of control, so we do everything within our power to restore a measure of feeling in control to them by asking permission, by offering choices, and by asking how they feel about things, how they would like to handle things.

Yes, there may be times we are forced to intervene for their protection or even the protection of others.   But even then, if we follow these three principles, we will be able to preserve and nurture the relationship.

It’s simply living by the Golden Rule, paraphrased for care giving:  Treat the person you’re caring for the same way you would want them to treat you if the circumstances were reversed.  If you do, you’ll both be blessed.

Tags: adult-adult, adult-child, Care Giving, control, golden rule, independence, relationships

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 3:37 am and is filed under Caregiving. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.