Difficult Seasons

A lot of our problems as care givers are of our own making because of our style of communicating with the person we’re caring for.

In the last several posts, I’ve written about the importance of not assuming the role of parent to the one you’re caring for.  It turns out that we often sound like a parent because of the way we attempt to communicate.  We can avoid that by intentionally adopting a different communication style.

Here are some general guidelines that will help you.

1. Avoid phrases such as:  “You should …”; “You need to …”;  “You’re going to have to …”;  “If you don’t … then …”;  “Why didn’t you …?”  “I can’t believe you …”
2. Use phrases such as:  “I’m concerned about …  Would it be okay if we talked about that?”  “I’ve noticed that you’re not …  Would you be willing to discuss why?”  “This doesn’t seem to be working very well.  How do you feel about it?  Can we explore some other options together?”

This works for several very simple reasons:

• You’re showing respect.
• By asking permission, you’re restoring a feeling of control to someone who likely is struggling with feeling that they are losing control of their own life.
• Stating your observations, feelings, and guesses leaves the door open to further constructive discussion.

This approach does take more effort and thought.  And asking permission always carries a risk that the other person will say no.  But in my experience, care givers who follow this communication strategy find that it lowers the stress levels on both sides and results in achieving good outcomes.

Tags: Care Giving, communication, control

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 11:11 pm 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.