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Managing The Stress ~ Making The Decisions ~ Discovering The Meaning |
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Caregiving |
Solutions To Your Caregiving Situations Throughout Your Caregiving Years |
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(Each month, we take a closer look at an aspect of your caregiving experience. In October, we're taking a closer look at how our care recipient's past affects our caregiving relationship today.) Their Past and Our Present How well do we know our care recipients? Perhaps as well as they'll let us. We may know where our parents, or spouses, or other aging relatives lived during the Depression or WWII. But, do we know how they felt about living through a Depression or a World War (or two, for some of our care recipients)? We know our care recipient's personal history through what they tell us, although perhaps it's only what they themselves can bear to tell. We may only now learn of the pain of their past lives' trauma; we may only learn now as we take a trip back in their lives through their own short-term memory loss or their own life review process. Only today, in our present, may we learn about the heart-ache of unemployment, the continual worry about money, even though the Depression took place seventy years ago. Only today may we feel a care recipient's pain over the death of a child or a spouse. Only today may we understand our care recipient's unnerving emotional distance as we come to understand their survival of a childhood trauma. Our care recipients often tried to keep their past in the past, folding it neatly into a pile that's kept in the back of a closet. As we form the intimate attachments inherent in a caregiving relationship, that past may take life again. And, that past will certainly affect a caregiving relationship today, much as it may have altered a care recipient's life years ago. In this issue, we take a look at how past traumas, including the Holocaust, may affect how a care recipient reacts to care today. And, we feature interviews with family caregivers who take a look back in time and reflect on how what was becomes what is.
I have my dark days, but I don’t ask “Why me?” I ask, "What now?” —Daryl Mitchell, a Hollywood actor who damaged his spinal cord in a 2001 motorcycle crash.
Communication is to a relationship what breathing is to living. —Virginia Satir
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. —Mahatma Gandhi Index of Articles Health care settings may stir up tortured memories of past Survivors can’t tell, but also can’t forget When they change for the better What is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder? |
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