In this article I’d like to zoom out a bit — beyond anxiety, worry and fear — because as humans we experience more than these three things. That said, these emotions are a common thread with everyone I work with, as well as with myself, so it’s important to be mindful of them.
Taking a step back and looking more broadly at emotions and thoughts, I found that I’ve had a lot of different caregiver-centric emotions including anger and resentment. At one point I felt resentment toward my wife, until I worked through it and realized this is not about her. She didn’t do anything to me. The resentment I felt was towards her health issues, not her, and this shift in understanding what I was feeling — AND what this feeling was connected — to helped me come to a place of acceptance over time.
There are a lot of emotions and thoughts that don’t really feel very good. Anger, hopelessness, depression, which some of us may have had before we became caregivers, and then once we become a caregiver that can really exacerbate, so much that it can be hard to function. Some of the emotions that have been hardest for me have been grief and loss for things I almost took for granted, and one day were just gone.
A lot of this can be traumatic as well.
We won’t talk too much about trauma today, that will come later in the year once I embark on a trauma certification, but I do want to mention it because it’s a real thing — and it’s not just trauma experienced by the person we’re giving care to. It’s trauma experienced by the caregiver, too.
One of the biggest things I learned, and it was a really big deal, was that you are not your thoughts and emotions. They are something you experience.
I was just thinking about this today, and remembered an analogy that really sums it up. Back in January, I facilitated an in-person workshop and it was freezing here in Madison, WI. And when I went outside, I felt incredibly cold, but I was not the cold, I was simply experiencing it (which is one of the reasons why I want to move to a warmer climate). And one of the cornerstones of understanding that we’re not our thoughts and emotions is the fact that we can create a little space there, right? A little separation between being the observer of what we’re experiencing, as well as the human being experiencing it.
All of a sudden, we’re not drowning in those thoughts and emotions, because there’s a little bit of space.
Once we start to practice this, we become the observer of our mind. And when we’re the observer, then we can make some room for something else, other than that thought or emotion, which can be totally overwhelming. I always joke with my kids, that if hold a photograph right in front of my face, real close, that’s all I’m going to see — and that’s what the mind can feel like when we’re fixated (aka, drowning in) our thoughts or emotions. But when we take a step back and make some space between the photo and ourselves, we start to see there’s more to our life than just that photo.