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Does anyone use this coping strategy? Please share.

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I like the previous answers. My addition is to stop and take a deep breath and slowly let it out - do it 2 or 3 times and if you have to step away. I know its hard but before you blurt something out you may regret, stop and take that breath.

I don't know if your dealing with dementia or just people rubbing each other the wrong way.

In dementia, you have to learn to let go - don't argue - don't correct, you won't get anywhere, the person's brain is being destroyed and their reality is as if they are in an alternate universe. Sometimes you have to visit their reality - find their point in time. Unless it is a safety issue let things slide.

Good luck.
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My dear family physician suggested that word to me when I thought I would collapse under the weight of going to my mother’s SNF every single day (twice on Saturdays and Sundays) and working a full time demanding job 5 days a week.

I started “looking at my mother’s life in the nursing home with new eyes”, and I gradually began to absorb the kindness, dedication, humanity, and even humor there. That was the “new frame” that I brought to how her life and mine continued after major surgery left her, at 89, totally dependent on the care of others.

I started to see each nurse, each aide, each food service worker, as a person who was performing hard work for my mom’s safety and comfort.

I saw decorations for each holiday and season, and the cheer they brought to the residents.

Didn’t happen overnight. It was a practice, and a persistence with seeing a glimmer of light and peace emerging occasionally from the previously ceaseless gloom of losing her.

Ultimately it was a feeling of the minuscule joys of adding some little joy to the people living there.

You need to push your sense of simple creativity and imagination a little farther than it might want to go Kaye55, so maybe it would help you at first to consider giving yourself the permission to just consider making one very small change in your thinking.

If you do that, and it feels OK, maybe you can add to that first little change, and then after a while, think about making another.

Hope you find peace in however you learn to reframe your life as a caregiver.
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A good friend told me this coping skill.

Go stand in front of a mirror and tell yourself
" I hate this disease and everything it causes. It is not my LOs fault he/she is doing this. His/ her brain is broken."
Do this several times a day, or whenever you start to feel overwhelmed.
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Can you give an example of something you'd like to re-frame?

Some folks do something called "awfulizing". A friend called me once in hysterixs bevause she'd been switched to our union's long term medication plan (meaning that she would save considerably on the medication(s) she was taking long term.

To her, being on a long term med meant she was "living on pills" and old expression meaning that she had no life.

Re-framing worked rather well for that.
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