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Understand Your Role
Understand Your Role
- It is crucial to realize that you are the caregiver and not the patient. This means that you may have to watch your loved one suffer much misery, pain and suffering. If you identify with all this, you yourself will be emotionally drained. In turn, this causes immense depression and physical exhaustion. If you are unable to control your own responses, you will not be in a position to offer strength and support.
- Consciously avoid imagining "how much it hurts", "how scared you must feel", "how depressed you must be", etc.. This type of empathizing has no constructive result.
- Similarly, if your patient happens to be a loving and considerate person, he/she may often feel concerned, guilty or depressed about all that you have to undergo, because of their illness. It would be appropriate to remind them of their role too.
- Instead of both experiencing the agonies of both roles, by deed or imagination, it is far more strengthening to understand clearly, the role each has to play. There is no way for you to take on the patient's miseries and nor can the patient spare you from whatever you have to face. So at least try and keep the sum of both challenges down.