How To See Dementia Caregiving As An Obstacle And Not Friction
Have you ever thought about how you view dementia caregiving?
Is it a challenge to overcome or an emotional struggle that tests your faith? In this episode, we explore how caregiving can be both an obstacle to tackle and friction that shapes your spiritual growth.
Understanding Obstacles in Caregiving
Obstacles are external challenges—tasks or situations that require problem-solving. In dementia caregiving, these might include:
1) Managing household responsibilities like meals or driving
2) Adjusting to a loved one’s changing abilities
3) Coordinating medical care
Obstacles are like roadblocks: you can go around them, find a detour, or solve the problem directly. Viewing caregiving tasks as obstacles empowers you to take actionable steps without letting emotions overwhelm you.
Recognizing Friction in Caregiving
Friction, on the other hand, comes from within. It’s the emotional resistance we feel when caregiving disrupts our expectations or desires. This might look like:
1) Frustration when your plans are interrupted
2) Anger or sadness about the diagnosis
3) Guilt for wishing things were different
Friction isn’t just a feeling—it’s an invitation for spiritual growth. Lizette highlights that friction often stems from pride, impatience, or unmet expectations, which God uses to sanctify us.
Transforming Friction into Growth
Friction, though uncomfortable, is part of the sanctification process. As Christians, sanctification means being shaped into Christ’s image through challenges.
By leaning into prayer and asking the Holy Spirit for guidance, caregivers can shift their focus from “Why me?” to “How can I serve in this moment?”
Combining Action with Faith
Caregiving is rarely one or the other—it’s both obstacle and friction.
By addressing practical tasks as obstacles and emotional struggles as opportunities for spiritual growth, you can find balance and purpose in your caregiving journey.
A Call to Reflect
So, which is caregiving for you right now: an obstacle to solve or friction to overcome?
Reflecting on this question can help you approach your role with a renewed mindset.
Read more:
Upstate Nonprofits Receive Funding Boost to Expand Dementia Services.
Ever Wonder How To Know What Is Causing Your Caregiver Stress?
Take Our FREE Caregiver Stress Assessment Today!
https://dignicarebydesign.com/quiz
Ever Wonder How To Know What Is Causing Your Caregiver Stress? Take Our FREE Caregiver Stress Assessment Today!
https://www.dementiacaregivingmadeeasy.com/dca
Transcript
[0:01] Hey, Christian caregiver. Welcome to Dementia Caregiver Support for Christians, the podcast where I teach Bible-believing Christians how to make dementia care
Podcast Anniversary Reflections
[0:11] easier today while also focusing on tomorrow. I am excited that we have just celebrated our one-year anniversary of this podcast. And I am excited that you are here and that you listen to this podcast. And after a lot of reflection and with feedback from multiple different people, you will notice a change in the podcast over the next week. This will be the last week where we will be having three episodes per week because I’ve received feedback from many listeners that sometimes three episodes are just too much in a caregiver’s journey to be able to listen to, reflect on.
[1:01] Catch up on every single week. So effective next week at the beginning of December, the podcast’s cadence will change from Monday, Wednesday, Friday to Tuesday, Thursday. Thursday with a lot more emphasis on bringing caregivers just like you into dementia caregiving support on this podcast and providing you with value related to how real people just like you are navigating their dementia caregiving journey. And I am excited that we are able to do this. And if you’re interested in being on one of those Dementia Caregiver Support in Action segments to please email me,
Rethinking Dementia Caregiving
[1:51] the link is in the show notes, and we can set up a time for you to be a part of this podcast.
[1:58] So without further ado, let us talk about today’s topic, which I think is kind of interesting. And I’m challenging us all to think a little bit differently, which is part of my platform related to dementia and dementia caregiving. So here is a question. Do you see dementia caregiving as an obstacle or do you see dementia caregiving as friction? And so I want you to think back on a time in your life when you were facing something. It could have been at work. It could have been while raising your children. It could have been if you are a business person starting a business. But it was something where you needed to do something to fix things in order to move forward. So it could have been something like losing weight, getting in shape, moving, taking a new job, all of those kinds of things. Those are things that we can solve by taking action.
[3:04] And that is an obstacle that we have to overcome, right? So an obstacle is something that we can go around, go under, go over. It’s something that we need to fix that is not necessarily having a lot of emotion attached to it. That is an obstacle. So next, I want you to think of a time in your life when you were frustrated and or annoyed and or angry and you felt stuck. Maybe it was with the relationship. Maybe it was with your spouse. Maybe it was with a friend at church.
[3:42] You feel something emotional like anger or fear or frustration. That, dear listener, is friction. Friction comes from inside me and an obstacle comes from outside of me. Now, both friction and obstacles are a part of life. We all have periods of time and related to different things that we have obstacles that we have to overcome. And sometimes we have friction that we have to overcome. So the next logical question is how on earth, Lisette, does this relate to dementia and dementia care? And I am so glad you asked, right? My little snarky humor coming out there. So let’s talk about this under three or maybe four different points. The first one is what is an obstacle? An obstacle is something that I need to solve that is outside of myself. It is immovable and will not change.
[4:43] You need to go either, like I said, around it, over it, under it, maybe not so much through it, even though, you know, in the analogy, we can go through it, but we have to make a lot of effort and do a lot of things in order to get through an obstacle. But an obstacle is something like a boulder or say, you know, we just went through Hurricane Helene and there were multiple, multiple trees over roads. That is an obstacle. It forces us to take a different road. It forces us to change direction. It forces us on to a detour if we cannot go through, under, or around it. My husband and I live on a very busy street that attaches two relatively busy roads. One is really super busy and the other one is relatively busy. And it’s a short little road. It’s literally up a hill. It’s called Hillside drive.
[5:40] And when the hurricane occurred, there were three trees across the road and we got super annoyed because people literally were driving by our house the entire time and then needing to turn around in our driveway or our neighbor’s driveway because you couldn’t see the obstacle across the road from the top of the road. So eventually we made a barrier so people couldn’t come down the road because they had to take a detour. There was no way through. They had to turn around. Some stupid idiots tried to go around the tree and ended up in the mud. So there is that, right? But for some people, dementia and caregiving is an obstacle.
[6:24] These people who see dementia and dementia caregiving as an obstacle are active problem solvers, and they’re not getting emotional about the fact that there is this process that they have to navigate.
[6:40] Which is obviously dementia or dementia caregiving, because they’re not getting emotional about the tasks that they need to perform. And we recognize that there are a lot of things that we need to do, because when we are helping somebody living with dementia, they typically land in one of three buckets. At the beginning stages, the first part of dementia, the person is starting to to require some assistance, but there are things like driving or housekeeping or meal preparation or all these other level, higher level self-care skills. The person’s able to take care of themselves entirely by themselves. They are able to do most things with really fair or good quality, and it is not necessarily as evident to other people that they are struggling with their thinking. When we get to the middle bucket with the tasks, this is where we come alongside a person living with dementia. We do not take things away from them, but we supplement what they’re not able to do. And then in the last stage of dementia, this is where the person is not physically or thinking processes wise able to do these activities or tasks for themselves anymore, and they require physical assistance.
[8:03] So those are the three big buckets. But people who perceive or see dementia as an obstacle and their caregiving as an obstacle to be overcome, they are action takers. They are problem solvers. And yes, there are emotions attached to being a dementia caregiver, but they are not emotional about the fact that they are a caregiver.
Understanding Friction in Caregiving
[8:31] So that is how a person perhaps could perceive dementia and dementia caregiving as an obstacle. So the second thing we’re going to look at is what about dementia caregiving and friction? So what is friction? Friction is resistance that we need to overcome. So a definition of friction is friction is the force that resists the movement of one surface against another. That’s the sciency version of friction. A better way for us, not thinking about it from a scientific perspective, but from a life perspective, friction is anything that holds you back. It is anything that holds you back from doing things that you want to do and is a part of life. We all have friction at various stages of our life. And how do you know something is actually friction as opposed to an obstacle? Well, you can know that something is friction because you feel emotional about it. You feel frustrated, annoyed, angry, overwhelmed, A different way of saying that is friction is anything that bothers you. So in terms of dementia and dementia caregiving.
[9:54] Something that can be causing friction is when we are emotionally attached to the diagnosis of dementia. And what that could look like is, for example, not quite coming to terms that this is actually happening in your life or in your journey. In my particular situation recently, I really had to sit with myself and talk to myself about the fact that I always seem to get so frustrated with my dad. And I had to ask myself, why do I get so angry? Why do I get so frustrated? Well, for me, it was because it’s friction. The friction in this particular situation with me and my dad is because somewhere in my brain, somewhere in my psyche, somewhere in the parts that we don’t like to talk about, I feel like I can’t necessarily do what I would want to do Maybe we would not be living in the upstate Greenville, South Carolina area.
[11:02] Whatever the case might be. But, and we’ll talk about that situation here in a second again, when I talk to you about the next point, which is where we’re going to talk about are all obstacles or friction bad? So friction is anything related to caregiving that bothers you. Now, sometimes things bother you, and remember the definition of what’s bothering you is something that you feel emotional about. If it’s bothering you, there may be a few reasons why things are bothering you. One could be you really don’t have the skills that you need in order to either communicate or provide the care that you are needing to provide as a Christian caregiver. And those are actually the easy things to fix. I know a lot of people feel or believe that caregiving is super complicated and super difficult, but skills.
[12:02] The skills to communicate and the skills to provide care are actually very easy to solve if you are in the right place. And so if you are ready to take the next step and feel like you need help a little bit more with some of the skills, I invite you to go to the website and schedule a 20-minute phone call, a strategy phone call with me, and we can see how I can help you on your journey with some of the actual nuts and bolts skills, the tools.
[12:37] The things that you need to be able to do in order to not get super frustrated or annoyed and have friction because of something that is very easy to solve. The second part of why things might be friction is a little bit harder, and we are going to talk about that in this next point, which are,
The Nature of Obstacles and Friction
[13:00] are all obstacles or friction bad? So that is a a good question for us to ask. So I want you to consider, dear Christian caregiver, that obstacles you can see in your mind as God’s providential hindrances.
[13:17] So one of my core values and something that I learned at boarding school is I detest being late. Can I say unequivocally that I’m never late? No, I’m human, but I hate not being on time. We were taught in boarding school that if you’re not five minutes early you are late. And so I detest being late. So we build in time when we’re going places that we need to be there at a specific time for us not to be late. However, sometimes there are providential hindrances that occur that result in my husband and I perhaps showing up late to a place. For example, you build in enough time to get there and there’s an accident on the road that puts you 30 minutes behind, right? Obstacles, which are things that we can go around, over, under, or take a detour for, are God’s providential hindrances.
[14:18] Dementia is a providential occurrence in your life as a family caregiver, as a Christian caregiver. Now, friction, on the other hand, and this is where I have to do a lot of soul-searching and praying about frequently, friction is a sign of my needing sanctification. So, what is sanctification? Sanctification is a work of God’s free grace whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God and enabled more and more to die unto sin and live unto righteousness. Friction, that emotional response that we get of being angry or frustrated or annoyed.
[15:07] Is a sign that we are in a sanctification process. Because most of the time, I almost want to say all of the time, when we are getting frustrated, annoyed, angry, whatever that emotion is, it’s because my will not be done. It’s because I feel that I deserve better. It’s because I am prideful. It’s because I want something different. And so friction, when we are experiencing friction as a caregiver.
[15:42] When we are experiencing these emotions of something that we need to, that something is holding us back, can be a sign that we need to be praying for sanctification, for the Holy Spirit to be talking to our heart about what it is that we need to be doing differently so that we can serve in the capacity that the Lord has
Your Perspective on Caregiving
[16:07] providentially put us in. And so my question to you today, Christian caregiver, is which one is dementia caregiving to you? Is it mostly an obstacle to work around or is it mostly for you friction? And if we are being honest with ourselves, it’s likely not either or, it’s probably and and. We probably at times perceive it as an obstacle and at times we perceive it as friction. But I want you to consider working on truly, truly understanding that as a dementia caregiver journey, we can see it as an obstacle to overcome because that then gives us the ability to actually solve the problem. When we feel like we do not have the ability to solve a problem, we feel.
[17:02] Oftentimes then, incapacitated or overwhelmed. But it is likely going to be both. Dementia and dementia caregiving is likely going to, at times.
[17:14] Be an obstacle and at times be friction, providentially hindered by the fact that we are helping somebody living with dementia as a Christian caregiver, whether they are a believing family member or an unbelieving family member.
[17:30] And then also dementia and dementia caregiving is going to significantly be a part of your sanctification process. So thank you for listening to today’s episode. I hope and I trust that you have found tremendous value in these episodes. I have a couple of asks. Number one, if you like these episodes, please share them with other people. Trying to grow the podcast because this is my way of serving other people in the world. The second thing is if you’ve not joined the Facebook group, there is a Facebook group called Dementia Caregiver Support for Christians. Come hang out with me there. I’m there to answer questions. If you’re ready for the next step, you can sign up for a strategy call from the website. And if you are needing some additional caregiver support, we can do a live dementia caregiver support in action where you and I can talk about your particular struggles as a dementia caregiver. And as I end all or most, if I remember, episodes, may the Lord bless you and keep you. And I will see you guys in the next episode.
