MARRIAGE

Prevent Caregiver Stress & Burnout

Ways to Manage Caregiver Stress

The following article is an excerpt from:

A Caregiver’s Guide to Coping with Stress and Burnout – Caring.com

(downloaded March 21, 2023 from Caring.com)

 

Caregiver stress doesn’t just affect you mentally- it can also lead to physical problems, including chronic pain.  “The mind and body are connected. When you experience stress, there are a whole range of physiological changes — every organ in the body is affected,” says Vicki Rackner, a clinical faculty member of the University of Washington School of Medicine and the author of Caregiving Without Regrets. We recommend the following strategies to help you maintain your own wellness while supporting your loved one.

After You Cheated – (4) Keys to Coping with Your Partner’s Rage

You knew this was going to be hard.

After all, when you cheat on the person you love, there is going to be consequences. And this would involve more than a simple argument or disagreement. Your actions have damaged the core of your relationship. What your partner thought was stable, and perhaps even flourishing, actually had an unstable inner core that led to betrayal. That’s exactly how your partner is going to feel—betrayed—aside from a host of other emotions.

When they finally get to know the truth, they are going to be angry. And you can’t blame them. No matter how uncomfortable the situation may get, it’s important for you to know how to adequately cope with that anger so that both of you can move forward.

Consider these (4) keys to help you deal with their rage.

Worry, Worry

The Serenity Prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

It’s a good thing that almost all of us worry. Think of worry as a built-in alarm device. When it is used wisely, it alerts us to danger and prompts us to navigate our way through a maze of solutions to life’s various problems. We need to think through our options when we are faced with problems, weighing the benefits and pitfalls of each alternative, and then come up with the best solution. From there we take action which, we hope, solves the problem. Worry is helpful when it is used at the right time and at the right level for resolving our difficulties. Like many things in life, however, too little worry, or too much of it, can be harmful.

Procrastination Hurts Relationships

Almost every relationship has been affected by procrastination at one time or another–when one or both partners put responsibilities off to another day or time, only to endlessly delay completing the task at hand. For some people it is a persistent problem, while for others it happens only in certain areas of their lives such as their relationship.

It can cause suffering in a committed relationship, when one partner delays or avoids keeping promises or agreements, putting the relationship at risk. And relationships outside the home also requiring teamwork such as friendships; at work and in the community, can suffer. Being unreliable can jeopardize one’s personal reputation, making a partner, friend or coworker lose trust in the procrastinator. There are better ways of dealing with the demands of our everyday lives with needs of our partner, friends and coworkers, once we accept that we are a procrastinator and make a commitment to change.

Growth During Crisis

For many of us, life as we know it is or soon will be gone, be it socially, professionally or personally. Being aware of and expressing our thoughts and feelings during this crisis is important to our mental and emotional health. 

The Resilient Personality – Coping with Chaos and Hardship

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”                                                                                                – Ralph Waldo Emerson

All of us experience major disruptions at certain points in our lives. In fact, this is an expected and predictable hallmark of the human condition. For some, these hard times come frequently – the impact of the trauma is overwhelming and recovery, if it comes at all, can be painfully slow. Others show resilience and are able to glide through these times fairly easily, bouncing back to a normal life again quickly. Resilience – the strength required to adapt to chaos and hardship – lies at the heart of mental and emotional health.

Sometimes Love Is Not Enough

When we make a commitment to our partner, our usual expectation is that our relationship will last for life and that our love will see us through the inevitable hard times. Yet, when reality sinks in, we have to acknowledge that while love is one of the components of a relationship’s longevity, it really takes more to make it through the long haul. It takes skills that many of us haven’t learned. We don’t know how to negotiate our way through relationship difficulties to build a lasting connection, but we can learn.

No Secrets … Telling the Truth in Our Relationships

 

When we commit ourselves to a relationship with another person, we rightly expect to experience a sense of fulfillment that we didn’t have before. Humans, as social beings, seem to have a universal desire to find a partner. Sexual attraction often serves as the motivator for making initial contact with the other person, and this is usually replaced over time with a deeper sense of commitment and intimacy.

It comes as a terrible disappointment to some people when the sexual phase of their relationship fails to lead in time to something deeper. The task, then, is to understand the forces which block the development of a deeper sense of intimacy – and to do something about it. Fortunately, with some work – and it’s often hard work – couples can learn to move into the stage of deeper sharing and more fulfillment in their relationships.

Actively Listening – the Other Half of Effective Communication

 

Active Communication Requires One Person to Talk and the Other to Listen … and Both to Do Their Parts Well

Listening is the other half of communication. Our first thought, when we think about communication, may be to consider the speaker’s ability to convey ideas effectively. What we often forget is that without a listener the speaker may as well be talking to the wind. Just as effective speaking is an acquired skill, so is good listening. Some do it better than others. But all of us can learn to enrich our own listening skills.

Dealing with Controlling People

“If I Win, You Lose” is Not Our Only Option!

Control, like most facets of human behavior, is probably best experienced in moderation. At one end of the spectrum, control is a positive, adaptive tool. For example, control over prolonged and constant chaos in our lives is usually a good thing. At the other end, control can be seen as negative. People who are over-controlled to the point of being unable to feel or express emotion can find life’s expected turmoils to be difficult or even impossible to handle.