Do you feel like you just don’t have any time to communicate or connect with your partner because of caregiving responsibilities? Do you feel responsible for meeting everyone else’s needs to the exclusion of your own? If you answered yes to either of these two questions then you would do well to continue to read this week’s offering.
Caregiving Responsibilities Are Ever-Increasing In Our World Today
In previous generations, many families wound up caring for older adults at some point down the line, but there perhaps has been no more stark change in our cultural experience than having three generations of a family living in one household. Once dubbed the “sandwich generation,“ children of aging parents are increasingly bedeviled by how to find time to nurture their relationship with trying to meet caregiving responsibilities for older adults, and trying to raise their children as well.
Caregiving Responsibilities Can Be a Constant Calling
Those who tend to get pulled into caregiving responsibilities are family members who all are already very functional adults. Many people fall into this category, and are prone to ignoring their own needs in order to help care for others in their family. This is where the problem starts, because everyone has needs, and unless these are met, they tend to breed all kinds of internal issues, as well as potential estrangement in a primary relationship.
What Relationship Therapy With Caregiving Responsibilities Can Look Like
Finding a time to meet while you and your partner are involved in caregiving responsibilities can be a seemingly impossible task. The main starting point for finding time to meet is recognizing that you two have a need to meet with someone to get support for your relationship and juggling your various tasks. Some therapists offer weekend hours, as well as evening hours that could potentially meet your need to have time for your relationship therapy. In addition, the advent of online therapy has made it potentially easier than ever to be able to meet from a car, or in a room of one’s home as well as in the therapist’s office.
"Rest and self-care are so important. When you take the time to replenish your spirit, it allows you to serve others from the overflow. You cannot serve from an empty vessel." — Eleanor Brownn
Caregiving Responsibilities and the Need to Focus on One’s Own Needs
Assuming you and your partner can find a time to meet someway, somehow, with a gifted therapist, the focus will then turn inward to the relationship and to oneself. Being able to look within and to connect emotionally with your partner becomes critical at this point despite the call of caregiving responsibilities. One form of couples therapy called Relational Life Therapy, or RLT for short, involves identifying a young child within yourself as part of the initial exercises in order to connect with a vulnerable part of yourself that exists within each adult no matter how old they are.
Caregiving Responsibilities Don’t Negate the Need to Care for Each Other
Good relationship therapy will help you both to focus not only on yourselves, but also on helping to tend to each other’s emotional needs from a place of what the couples therapist Terry Real calls “compassionate curiosity.“ This is a place of unconditional positive regard that you may have no trouble summoning for the family member that you are caregiving with or potentially someone that you help as part of your work responsibilities. The same attitude can be extremely difficult to direct towards a spouse because of emotional distance, or some built-up animosity or contempt from one another built up over the years. Everyone has this capacity, but unless you have been able to subdue the part of your personality that tends to be very judgmental and impatient, this could be a difficult task.
Relationship Therapy and the Next Step for Those with Caregiving Responsibilities
Supposing you and your partner find the time to meet with a couples therapist and you find someone you want to meet with, then the next step involves reaching out to them. I have helped numerous couples and individuals who have caregiving responsibilities for one or two other generations. I also have training in the Relational Life Therapy model that I referred to above. I would be happy to talk to you and your partner to give you a better idea about whether I could help you in your situation. Just call the number at the top of the screen, or click on the schedule consult button, or fill out the inquiry form below, and I can meet with you for a free 20-minute virtual consult if you live in Maryland or Virginia to give you a better idea of whether I can help you in your situation. Being a caregiver for multiple generations of a family is a very commendable thing, but you owe it to yourself and those you care for to take care of you and your relationship as well. Take the next step today!
Visit our page on couples therapy to find out how Scott can help you in your relationship with caregiving responsibilities.
About the author: Scott Kampschaefer, LCSW is a private practice therapist in Frederick, Maryland. He has an extensive background in working with depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder at a clinic for older adults with these disorders in Austin, Texas. He now works with adults and adolescents 14 and up in private practice. His most recent book is titled The 5 Pillars of Addiction Recovery and is available for purchase on Amazon and in paperback on this website.