In This Together: Building Resilience When Caregiving for Your Partner

29. Mental Resilience in Caregiving

September 10, 2024 • Marika • Season 1 • Episode 29

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In this podcast episode, I dive deep into what mental resilience truly means for caregivers. As someone caring for a partner, mental resilience is the ability to stay strong and adaptable amidst ongoing challenges. It means recognizing when you're feeling stressed, worried, or anxious and having the tools to move out of those states instead of getting stuck. 

To illustrate, I share two powerful examples of caregivers, Mary and Marianne. Mary lacks mental resilience skills, leading her down a path of increasing anxiety, sleepless nights, and guilt. In contrast, Marianne, who possesses these skills, navigates the same situation with clarity, calmness, and proactive action.

I explore the components of mental resilience: understanding how our minds work, observing and shifting our thinking, recognizing triggers, focusing on what we can control, and being results-oriented. I also discuss the profound impact these skills can have on your daily life, both during caregiving and beyond.

As a Resiliency Coach for people who are caregiving for their partner, I'm here to support YOU, the caregiver. Learn more about my work at www.coachmarika.com.

Marika Humphreys:

Hello, caregivers and care partners, welcome to episode 29. We are going to talk about mental resilience today, but first I just want to check in. It is becoming fall here, or really I will say summer is ending and fall is in the air. You can kind of tell it. The weather has cooled off in the last week, the leaves are just beginning to change and, of course, back to school time. I have actually a junior. I can't believe it. My teenager is now a junior in high school, which is crazy to me. But I do love fall. It's actually one of my favorite seasons. I love the changing leaves and I love fireplaces and getting cozy in a big sweatshirt and I love the crisp air, and so I am looking forward to kind of things cooling off a bit. I am going to miss summer, though, so I hope you have something that you enjoy about this time of year. I know it's also the preliminary of the holiday season kind of is starts. People start thinking about it once summer ends, because it feels like the holidays are right around the corner, and actually I will be doing some special webinars for the holiday, so I'll announce that more as we get closer. But yes, the holidays can be challenging for caregivers.

Marika Humphreys:

But today, again, let's go back to mental resilience. So when I work with people who are caring for their partner, I help them build their resilience in four different areas, and those areas are mental resilience, so that is, their ability to handle the mental stressors that are associated with caregiving. We work on emotional resilience, which is really building up their capacity to recognize and process the abundance and rollercoaster of emotions that we often experience when we are caregivers. We also work on physical resilience, and that's really about maintaining their energy and their health so that they can sustain, because caregiving is often something we do for a long period of time and our energy and health is important to have so that we can be a caregiver. And then also we work on spiritual resilience, and the way I think of that is I help my clients really develop or strengthen their connection to themselves and to the world around them, and that includes their relationships, and there are things that bring them joy and fulfillment. So that's what I call spiritual resilience. So all of those areas are so important to your coping skills when you're caregiving, because caregiving takes, because curating takes mental energy, it takes physical energy, it takes emotional energy and it can impact all areas of your life, so it's really important to maintain your strength and build up your resilience in each of those areas.

Marika Humphreys:

So, starting with today's episode and over the next four episodes, I'm going to go deep into each of those resilience areas and really explain what I mean and what resilience in that area actually looks like when you're caregiving. So I do want to say from the beginning here that resilience I wanted to be clear that resilience is a skill that you can build. It's not a matter of something you have or you don't have, and while I do think some people are naturally more resilient, it's just simply because of the way their mind works and the beliefs they've adopted and the patterns of behavior that they have created or adopted over time. But resilience is available to everyone. So, as I talk about mental resilience today, I want to be clear that this is a skill that can be learned and is available for anyone out there. Okay, so let's start with what mental resilience is, what it actually looks like. Mental resilience for someone caring for their partner is the ability to stay mentally strong and adaptable in the face of ongoing challenges and stresses, and it means having the ability to recognize when you're stressed or worried or anxious, and having tools to move yourself out of those states so you don't get stuck in it. So that's essentially what I mean by mental resilience. And I want to give you an example of two different types of caregivers. I'm going to call them Mary and Marianne. I'm going to call them Mary and Mary Ann, one who has mental resilience and one who doesn't. So Mary does not have the skills of mental resilience, mary Ann does, and I will just give you a fictional example of the difference that that makes in each of their lives with the same situation.

Marika Humphreys:

So Mary, again, does not have the skills of mental resilience and she has been noticing that her husband has seemed way more forgetful recently than normal. And she keeps noticing it and she starts to worry. And then she wonders is this a symptom of his illness? Is this just aging? She starts to kind of ruminate about what could be causing this. She thinks about bringing it up to her husband, but she doesn't because she doesn't want to worry him. So instead she just starts reminding him of the things that he forgets and she kind of takes that on as her job, and every time she notices him forgetting something, her anxiety just goes up a little notch and she complains to her friends about it, because it's starting to wear on her, this constant worry. She keeps seeing the signs that he's becoming more and more forgetful, which makes her more and more anxious, and that anxiety, as she feels it more frequently it starts to impact her sleep and she ends up waking up in the middle of the night and has trouble going back to sleep. And then, because she's not sleeping well, she becomes irritable and less patient, and one day, one morning actually, when her husband can't remember where he put the keys, she just loses her temper and yells at him and then immediately feels terribly guilty for her response. She knows it's not his fault, and so, after weeks and weeks of worry and anxiety, they finally go to a doctor's appointment that was already scheduled, and then she brings up her concern to the doctor and her husband, meanwhile, is wondering all along why didn't she say something sooner? So that's my story of Mary, who does not have the skills of mental resilience.

Marika Humphreys:

Now let's look at Marianne. Marianne does have the skills of mental resilience. She notices that her husband has been more forgetful recently and she starts to worry. Worry is not helpful, so she reminds herself to focus on what she can control. And she realizes she can control how she responds. And so she decides she just needs a little more information Maybe she's blowing it out of context. And so she decides that she just needs to start with talking to her husband about it. So she shares her concerns with him and asks him with genuine curiosity if he's noticed anything and if he's at all concerned about forgetting him, being a little more forgetful. And he confesses that, yes, he actually has felt a little more forgetful. And and he confesses that, yes, he actually has felt a little more forgetful and is a little concerned. So they talk about it some more and decide together that they should call the doctor and set up an appointment.

Marika Humphreys:

Now, mary and Marianne, they both experience worry over their husband and a symptom that they start to see the forgetfulness. However, marianne has the awareness to recognize her worry and then decide consciously how she wants to respond to it. So she takes action right away. She doesn't stay and dwell in worry and she's able to have a calm conversation with her husband because she hasn't let worry become too intrusive and wear her down and drive her anxiety up and all of these other consequences, because she's able to spot it right away, and so the whole issue gets addressed very quickly with her husband because they decide together to call the doctor.

Marika Humphreys:

Mary, on the other hand, who doesn't have the resiliency skills, she doesn't even realize her worrying thoughts, and so she starts to become a victim to them. And so she starts to become a victim to them and she, instead of talking to her husband, she just tries to manage his symptom by taking the responsibility to just remind him every time he forgets something. But that takes a toll on her and she ends up feeling more anxious and that affects her sleep and then her mood. And then she starts responding in a way that she later feels guilty about. And while it eventually gets addressed because they have a doctor's appointment, it takes a long time and by that time she's worn down, she's anxious, she's not been sleeping well and she's in a much more fatigued state.

Marika Humphreys:

So those are just fictional examples, but I wanted to point out here that being mentally resilient, having those skills, doesn't mean that you don't still feel stress or anxiety or have worries. It simply means that you have the awareness to see the negative thought patterns and the skills and the tools to shift yourself out of them and take more deliberate action, so you don't spend as much time in stress and worry and they don't wear you down. That is the single biggest difference. You still experience those emotions, they just have less of an impact in your life. So what does it require to become mentally resilient, to build those skills? What does that actually require? But it is not something that we are commonly taught. So many people have learned some of this in their life, but many of us have not, and that's why I think it's so important to teach people the skills of mental resilience. So I'm going to go over now what I think the components of mental resilience are and the way that I teach them to my clients.

Marika Humphreys:

Okay, and the first one is that you have to understand how the mind works and the role of thinking as it relates to our emotions and our actions. Now, you don't have to become a scientist here, but you do need to just understand the mind a little bit to know that when we form thoughts, which we also call opinions or judgments, assessments, conclusions those are all just other words for thoughts we form them about the things in our life. When something happens, we have a thought. When somebody says something, we have a thought about it. When somebody says something, we have a thought about it. When somebody does something, we have a thought about it. When someone veers in front of us on the freeway, we have a thought about that. When a friend shows up late for a lunch date, we're going to have a thought about that. When our spouse starts to become withdrawn, we're going to have a thought about that and all the thoughts we think they cause how we feel and that emotion will drive our actions. So when someone veers in front of us on the freeway and we think, oh, what a jerk, we're going to feel angry because our thought is going to cause how we feel. When our friend shows up late and we think, oh, that's so rude, we're going to feel irritated. And if our spouse is withdrawn, and if our spouse is withdrawn, we might think, oh gosh, something must be wrong. We're going to feel worry. So how we think creates how we feel and that's going to drive our actions.

Marika Humphreys:

But our thoughts are actually something that we have control over, because deep people have different thoughts in those situations and that means that we can choose our thoughts once we have awareness around them. So that's the part, the knowledge part. Right, having an understanding that thoughts are not just something that we have and that they're just the way things are, they're actually something we can control. And their judgments, their opinions, their interpretations of the world around us. And when we see that distinction, that is huge. That's the foundation for building your mental resilience seeing the distinction between the things that happen in your life, the things that people say and do, and then your thoughts about them. Okay, so that's the foundation.

Marika Humphreys:

Like I said, another component of mental resilience is having the ability to notice and observe your thinking. We are not practiced in doing that. Most of us don't pay attention to how we think. So you have to practice that skill, you have to develop it. But when you do, you start being able to more easily separate out. This is what happened. Oh, and this is my thought about it. This is what I judged about what that person said. This is the opinion I gave to how they behaved. Those are all just thoughts, right? We start to be able to separate what happens, the circumstance, and then our thought about it, and we see that it's not the circumstance that causes how we feel, it's how we think about the circumstance. When a person again veered in front of us on the freeway. That is not what caused us to be irritated or angry. It's our thought that they were being a jerk that caused us to be irritated or angry, and we all have automatic thoughts. But knowing that thoughts are something within your control, once you become aware of them, you start to notice your automatic thinking and it allows you to make then decisions. If that's what you want to continue to think, is that how you want to continue to choose to interpret something Because of how you makes it feel, how it makes you feel? So having the ability to notice and observe your thinking is another component of the skill of mental resilience. It also involves getting good at finding the circumstances that trigger you, because all of us, and especially when we're caregiving, certain things trigger emotions for us Certain behaviors, certain events, certain situations. They will be more triggering for us, they will cause us to feel something more immediately. And the skill of mental resilience you want to get good at knowing what your triggers are and then uncovering the actual thought behind it. So I'll give you an example of that.

Marika Humphreys:

For me, one of the triggers when I was caregiving for my husband was that whenever he would get quiet or become a little more withdrawn. I got worried. That was a trigger for me. His behavior of becoming a little more quiet or withdrawn was a trigger for me to feel worry and I had to uncover what my thought was behind that. And my thought always was something must be wrong. So with the skill of mental resilience, I started paying attention and noticing this was a pattern for me. When he did this, this is how I behaved and this is how I felt. So I had to figure out what was my thought. You know, oh, he's falling into depression or something must be wrong. So a skill of mental resilience is getting good at finding the circumstances that trigger you and then uncovering the thought behind behind it.

Marika Humphreys:

Another skill, or component, I should say, of mental resilience is having the ability to shift your thinking. When you notice that thoughts are causing you worry or anxiety, one of the best things you can do is just shift what you focus on, because what we tend to do is zoom in on something. We tend to zoom in on a problem or one aspect and we sort of conveniently ignore everything else and we get so focused on that one thing that's usually a negative thing that we don't actually see a bigger picture. So with mental resilience, you have the ability to shift your mind to, sort of, sometimes it's pulling back and seeing a bigger perspective, or sometimes it's simply shifting your point of view and seeing what else is also true, what else is going well, what else is positive, what else is something that I can appreciate. So that is the ability to shift your thinking and that's a component of being mentally resilient.

Marika Humphreys:

Another component is having the ability to sort out what you can control from what you can't control, and as a caregiver, there is so much. It's very easy to focus on the things that we can't control how our partner feels, what their prognosis is, how they behave, some of the things that they say, what happens, what's going to happen in the future. There are so many things that we can't control, and so mental resilience is that. Component of mental resilience is the ability to recognize that those are things outside of your control and instead, where you can control is how you respond to those things, how you decide to think about them, how you decide to feel about them and how you decide to act in the face of them. So always bringing yourself back to what you have control over.

Marika Humphreys:

And in my example with Mary and Marianne, this is what Marianne did. Right, she brought herself back to what she had control over, which is how she responded once she recognized that she was starting to worry. And so, instead of just quietly continuing to worry, she asked with curiosity her husband what might be wrong and if he noticed anything. So we can't control how our friend shows up to the lunch date, but we can decide how we want to interpret that behavior and we can have curiosity and compassion instead of judgment and irritation. So always having a way to remind yourself that your thinking is what you have control over, and that helps you stay in control in your life and feel powerful instead of feeling like a victim of things, and it allows you to take more deliberate action instead of just reacting unconsciously.

Marika Humphreys:

And then I think a final component that I will talk about here is that because you have this understanding of how the brain works and that it's not what happens in your life that makes a difference. It's how you think and feel and act when something happens. It means that you start to see that you can shape your experience in the world by focusing on the result you want. So mental resilience is the ability to direct your mind to focus on results instead of problems. I call this result-oriented thinking, and one of the ways we do that, one of the tools of mental resilience, is using questions to direct yourself. How do I want to be during this time? What kind of spouse do I want to be? What kind of friend? How do I want to respond when someone is rude? How do I want to respond when I get bad news? You know, those are the questions that help us focus on the result we want to create instead of just the problem, and that makes us more proactive instead of reactive. So that is what I think makes up this mental resilience understanding how the brain works and the role of our thoughts, and being able to notice and observe our thinking and then learning to recognize our triggers and uncover the thoughts behind them. Being able to shift your thinking so that you can get perspective, and always coming back to what you have control over, and then being results focused in your thinking instead of problem focused.

Marika Humphreys:

So mental resilience, it isn't a destination. I want to be clear. It's not somewhere that you arrive at and then you just are. You just are mentally resilient. It's a skillset that you have to keep developing and you have to keep practicing, and I want to then kind of finish up here by talking about all the impact that having mental resiliency skills makes on your life. There are a ton of benefits, and I am probably just going to cover the surface here, so I'm going to talk about the ones that have made a huge impact on my life, both when I was caregiving and just now, because of what I've learned and the skills and the practices I've developed to develop my own mental resilience. It has completely changed how I think really on a daily basis, so I'll give you some little bit more concrete examples of that.

Marika Humphreys:

When you start observing your thoughts, you start seeing patterns that you weren't aware of, and so mental resiliency skills gives the ability to understand and know yourself so much more clearly than you did before, and instead of thinking, oh, this is just how I am, or this is just what I always do, you shift to oh, this is what I tend to do when I think this way. You see your behavior as a result of your thinking and not just a fact of how you are an unchangeable thing about yourself, and that means that you can shape who you are. You can shape your identity and that you can shape how you show up for yourself and how you show up for others. And it's so powerful to be in control of who you are, as opposed to just feeling like you're stuck with yourself, especially if you don't like yourself very much. Mental resilience is the knowledge that, oh, all of our behaviors are just an effect of our thinking, which means we have control over them.

Marika Humphreys:

As I reflect on my own journey, how I handle things now and how I think about things have totally changed as I've learned to manage my mind and observe my thoughts, changed as I've learned to manage my mind and observe my thoughts. And when I was caregiving especially, this skill really helped me become aware of my patterns and my triggers, and I already mentioned one of my patterns of thinking around my husband and him getting quiet. But that mental resilience skill that I started developing at that time gave me the ability to respond to that more deliberately and more consciously instead of just reacting and dwelling in the worry that it would trigger for me. So that's one of the impacts is that it gives you the ability to understand yourself deeper and also recognize that you have the ability to shape yourself and who you are and how you behave. Another benefit of mental resilience is that the more you manage your mind, the less you become a victim of your thoughts. If you are one of those that sometimes feels tortured by your mind, mental resiliency skills gives you ability to interrupt that pattern. You spend less time in worry and anxiety because you're able to spot those patterns quicker. It doesn't mean they go away. They will still come up, you will still experience worry, you'll still experience anxiety, you will still experience fear, but you will spend way less time in them because you'll notice them and you'll understand that they are the result of your thinking.

Marika Humphreys:

I remember having days on end where I would sort of be stuck in what I would just call a funk. I would go on for days, sometimes even weeks, and I would struggle to get out of it. And now I definitely still have those moods happen. I would say less so overall, but even when they occur, I rarely spend more than a day in that sort of funk because I have the awareness around it. I'm able to see it very quickly and notice it about myself, and I also know that it's driven by something I'm thinking. And even if I can't always uncover what that is right away, I know that that's the cause and it's less just something I kind of am a victim to. So that means that when you're caregiving, you just are better able to separate out the things that happen in your caregiving journey, like your partner's diagnosis or the way other people respond, and you become less of a victim to it because you see it's your thinking about it.

Marika Humphreys:

Another benefit of mental resilience is that all of these things that I've already mentioned it gives you more control in your life. Instead of letting what happens in your life dictate how you feel, you recognize you have control over it and you can respond and decide consciously how you want to respond to the events in your life. So when you spend more time focused on the things that you do control, you will spend less time and less wasted energy focused on the things that you do control. You will spend less time and less wasted energy focused on the things that you don't control. And while that's not always perfect, we don't always stay focused in the areas that we control, when we have the skills of mental resilience, we spend much more time there and much less time focused on things outside of our control. And that also means, too, that you are more able to take responsibility for your choices, because once you realize that how you think about something is within your control, it also means your decisions, both past and present, are your responsibility, and when you take responsibility for them, you also take responsibility for the consequences of them. We're more likely to do that because we become less judgmental, because we recognize it's just thinking. It's not who we are. We no longer have it associated with our self-worth isn't just a matter of this is who I am. It's no, this is how I'm thinking right now. So all of that means that you are more able to take control in your life, because you're spending more time focused on what you have control over and taking responsibility for that.

Marika Humphreys:

Another impact of mental resilience is that you actually understand other people better, because you see that their thoughts are affecting their feelings and their actions. You start to see how their thinking is driving them, and that just, I think, gives us more compassion and it allows us to connect to others better, because we just see that we're all humans driven by thoughts that sometimes are intrusive, often are negative, often are unhelpful to us, and that connects us as humans. We all struggle with that and when you're caregiving, I think this gives us so much more of an insight into what our partner is going through, to, what other people in our life and their actions and their emotions, and we just start understanding others better because we understand ourselves better. Another benefit, I think, of mental resilience is you recognize that you don't have to believe everything you think.

Marika Humphreys:

Just because you have a thought, it doesn't mean it's true or valid or the way that world is. It just means it's a thought and many of our thoughts are unhelpful. They're from our past conditioning. They're from our past conditioning, they're from our experiences and they're just what our brain offers up during certain times. But we also know that we have the ability to decide how much attention we want to give those thoughts and if we want to some, we don't need to give any attention to at all. A lot of our fearful thoughts, our anxiety causing thoughts we don't have to give attention to. But if you don't understand how the brain works, you will give attention to those thoughts because they just seem like reality to you. You don't have the knowledge and the understanding to separate out. Oh, this is what happens and this is my thought about it to separate out oh, this is what happens and this is my thought about it. So you don't believe everything you think and all the negative, unhelpful thoughts you have with the skill of mental resilience.

Marika Humphreys:

And then I think, finally, one of the biggest components or benefits of mental resilience is you become less reactive because you have a more awareness and more understanding of your triggers and so you're no longer just reacting, or even if you do react, you're quicker to catch yourself. You don't live just on autopilot, because you have this whole new awareness that your thoughts are driving your emotions and driving your actions. So by taking control and being more proactive there, you feel not only in control which I've already talked it also just creates more peace. So building the skill of mental resilience just allows you to handle the challenges of caregiving so much more easily, and it's skills that, once you develop them and practice them, you will have for the rest of your life. So every challenge that life offers up, you will have this foundation of mental resiliency skills and it gives you so much more control and ability to handle bigger and bigger challenges and just all the things that life tends to throw our way.

Marika Humphreys:

So the benefits of building mental resilience are really, again, so numerable, but for me, these were some of the biggest impacts that I've seen in my own life, and then I see a lot with my clients. So I want to say that again, mental resilience is something that's available to everyone and, again, it's not a destination, it is a skill and a practice, and it requires knowledge and developing, learning, some tools, but it's something that all of us can acquire and it makes such a difference as a caregiver. All right, so that is what I've got for you. Next week, I'm going to dive into emotional resilience and what that looks like and how that benefits you as a caregiver. So I hope this was helpful. Go out and leave a review If you have not done that already. Please leave a review. That helps other people find the podcast. I'm still new to podcasting, but I would love it if you shared this, if you find this helpful, and I will see you next week.