How to Do the Hard Stuff
How to do the hard stuff when caring for elderly parents means getting clear about duty, responsibility, and the sacrifices caregivers are willing to make. Caregiving is an emotional experience. The ability to bring logic into care decisions and examine the consequences of actions and decisions can help individuals make thoughtful and practical decisions.
Caregivers do many hard things and gain skills they never imagined they might need. The hard stuff may be having a difficult
conversation with an aging parent about health concerns or talking with a sibling about sharing the responsibilities of caring for an aging parent.
The hard stuff may be making the decision to
move an elderly parent to a care community. If you are a person with health problems or memory loss, the hard stuff may be writing up an estate plan, including
choosing a power of attorney agent to make decisions for you when you can no longer do this for yourself.
The challenge with these decisions is that juggling caregiving, daily life, and emotions can lead to feeling out of control in many parts of life. Because caregiving is so personal, emotions can outweigh factual and thoughtful decision-making that has long-range consequences.
Four Steps to Do the Hard Stuff
In this presentation, caregiving expert Pamela D Wilson discusses the following:
1 How to understand when a problem or question is more complex than it looks, which is often the case with caregiving. There are often more details or challenges than meets the eye. A simple problem may appear to have a simple solution when, in reality,
the solution is much more complex and detailed.2 How emotions and feelings of guilt impact doing the hard stuff and making hard decisions about participation in the care of aging loved ones.
3 Why waiting to deal with uncomfortable issues may make working through issues in the future more difficult instead of easier.
4 What are the benefits of initiating actions and conversations that move doing the hard stuff to the next step?
1 How to Understand When a Problem or Question is More Complex Than It Appears
This concept falls into the category of we don’t know what we don’t know because we lack experience or knowledge. A simple math problem can make this easy to understand.
- A baseball and bat cost $1.10. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
- The most common response for the cost of the ball is $.10. The correct answer for the cost of the ball is $.05.
How do the numbers work?
- If you say the ball costs $.10, then the bat would cost $1.10, making the total $1.20, which is .10 more than $1.10, corresponding with the original statement of a baseball and a bat cost $1.10.
- The correct answer is that the ball costs $.05, making the bat cost one dollar more or $1.05. The ball at $.05 and the bat at $1.05 equals $1.10.
The Easy or Obvious Answer is Not Always the Best
This math problem shows that it is easy to jump to a simple conclusion when the problem or the question might have a lot of other aspects that should be considered. This is why giving more thought and consideration to care, health, financial, and legal considerations around caregiving is very important.
Let me offer an example related to caregiving. I talked recently to a caregiver about a Medicaid spend down. The caregiver understood the concept of spending down money to qualify for a state Medicaid program. The caregiver did not consider that applying for, qualifying for, and receiving Medicaid services can be a lengthy process with several steps and many details.
Depending on the state and the county where one lives, applying for Medicaid and being approved can take one month, 6 months, or a year. If you don’t submit the application perfectly, it can be rejected, and you might have to start all over again. This can be challenging if your aging parents are out of money and can’t pay for their care. Who pays? Usually, the adult children.
Math and Timelines Related to Medicaid
Let’s say mom and dad can’t live at home anymore, and you are looking at long-term care communities, also called nursing homes. A nursing home may accept Medicaid as a payment source but does not have a long-term care Medicaid bed available when you need one.
There may be a waitlist of 3, 6, 9, or 12 months. The application must be completed and approved. Let’s say this takes 12 months. The nursing home won’t put your parent on their waitlist until the application is approved.
Add another 12 months for a waitlist. Twelve plus twelve months is two years of waiting.
Timelines, deadlines, advance planning, and circumstances out of the caregiver’s control are reasons why waiting to discuss and do the hard stuff related to family caregiving can be disastrous. If you wait and your parents need services today, you may end up in a complicated situation, having to make sacrifices you never imagined.
Medicaid can be difficult to understand. 2 How Emotions and Guilty Feelings Impact the Ability to Do the Hard Stuff
What are emotions and guilt? Where do they come from?
For most people, emotions or guilt are gaps between behaviors and personal standards or beliefs. Everyone experiences emotions differently.
Some people live in their emotions. Others prefer to live in facts.
Let’s talk about guilt. Caregivers faced with making hard decisions often tell me that they feel guilty.
Caregivers struggle to deal with guilt. Most of these caregivers did not create the situation or the decisions facing their aging parents. These factors and decisions are part of their parent’s life that they were pulled into by virtue of wanting to be helpful.
What Words Equate to Guilt?
When caregivers look at guilt, what do they hear themselves saying? Do they say words like, I have to, I must, I don’t have a choice, this is what mom or dad expects?
If you feel guilty and are not saying these things, look at areas of your life where you find decision-making to be emotionally challenging. Where are you struggling?
Are you the caregiver who says, “I believe I should help my mother or father?” If so, look at your beliefs and the standards you carry that make this statement true for you.
If this is your standard or belief, to what extent do you believe you should help your mother or father? Do you also believe, “I must put the needs of others before mine?”
What Are Caregivers Willing to Sacrifice?
What does this mean if you have a belief and a standard that you must care for aging parents?
What are you willing to sacrifice? Does it mean you are okay with:
- Becoming physically and emotionally sick to the degree that this affects your day-to-day functioning?
- Giving up your job, income, and retirement savings?
- Getting divorced because your spouse is not on board with giving up everything to care for your mom or dad?
- Ignoring your kids because your parents come first.
- Placing your children in abusive or toxic family situations that are likely to affect them for the rest of their lives?
Beliefs and standards are individual. They come from culture or family expectations. The effects, positive and negative, of caring for eldelry parents are long-lasting.
Differences in Beliefs and Standards About Caregiving Exist
Some children cannot imagine not caring for or helping elderly parents. For other children, the decision not to be the caregiver is easy.
Some caregivers go all in and give up everything in their lives. Others set boundaries and say, “I can do this, but I’m not willing to do that.”
Neither person is right or wrong. Right or wrong, guilt or peace of mind is connected to each person’s beliefs and standards.
One of the most significant differences between adult children is a belief in the necessity to care for parents at the exclusion of everything else in life. This gap in beliefs and standards causes a lot of siblings to disagree.
This gap in beliefs and standards ends family relationships because one or both sides dig in their heels instead of dealing with the emotional hard stuff it can take to maintain and preserve family relationships.
When one side wins at all costs, the other side loses. It can be difficult, if not impossible, to repair fractured relationships where kindness, compassion, compromise, and consideration are not extended.
Do you see how beliefs and standards work? They can work for or against you in all areas of life, not just caregiving.
Caregiving: How to Do the Hard Stuff When Everything Else Gets in the Way
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Pamela’s YouTube Channel3 Why Waiting To Do the Difficult Stuff Doesn’t Make It Get Easier
Let me ask a simple question. When is it easier to resolve small problems?
The answer is when they are small and don’t take much effort. When a problem grows, it can become so big that it’s difficult to know how to solve it easily.
It’s like that little noise you hear when you start your car. You ignore it because you are too busy. The noise isn’t that loud. It doesn’t seem like a big deal.
Then suddenly your car doesn’t start. That little noise becomes a 1,000 repair.
Life is like that. Being a caregiver with a decision to make or a person with a health problem who ignores the problem usually doesn’t make doing the problematic stuff easier later. Waiting to make decisions can mean that choices one might have had before are no longer options when the problem grows in complexity.
A practical example of this is a mom or dad with memory loss, Alzheimer’s, dementia, or Parkinson’s who didn’t want to talk about or create an estate plan with powers of attorney, a living will, and a will. Now, mom or dad’s memory loss is so advanced that they do not understand the choices before them. An attorney refuses to draft the documents because they say your parent is incapacitated.
If medical evidence supports a diagnosis of advancing memory loss, drafting an estate plan may not be possible.
So, the choice is to petition the court for
guardianship and conservatorship, which can be more expensive, time-consuming, and emotionally distressing for the family. If only Mom or Dad had completed an estate plan before their memory loss advanced, no one would be in this situation today.
Sometimes, there is no going back when decisions and the hard stuff are delayed too long.
4 The Benefits of Doing the Hard Stuff
Few people enjoy having uncomfortable conversations. Few people want to examine how their personal standards or beliefs can cause problems.
However, in many cases with aging and health problems, doing the hard stuff to consider the pros and cons of best and worst-case scenarios is precisely what is needed to avoid catastrophes and making decisions later in a rush or under pressure.
The benefits of dealing with difficult problems and coming up with solutions and options are that this experience builds creative thinking about what might be possible.
Doing the hard stuff builds resilience when plans are made and may not work out as expected, which happens in caregiving. As much as we’d like, no crystal ball predicts the future.
Dealing with the hard stuff has other benefits, like learning how to fail and working through the emotions of anxiety and depression.
Confidence Rises When Doing the Hard Stuff
Think about it this way. When things keep happening, and you keep solving problems, you begin taking those hard things in stride.
You say, “I’ve got this. It’s just one more thing to deal with.”
Your confidence level rises. Fear and anxiety become more manageable and eventually go away.
Your patience level for dealing with the hard stuff grows. Suddenly, these annoyances become one more thing you check off the list because you deal with them as they arise.
You don’t put them off for tomorrow. You have learned the skills needed to do the hard stuff and survive.
Looking For Help Caring for Elderly Parents? Schedule a 1:1 Consultation with Pamela D Wilson Today.
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