How To Adjust Your Role And Become A Dementia Caregiver
Have you ever thought about the many roles you’ve adapted to throughout life? Caring for someone with dementia is one of those unexpected transitions that can feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be.
Let’s explore how embracing this new role can be an opportunity for personal growth and connection.
Adjusting to Your New Role
Life is a constant series of adjustments, and caregiving is no different. You may have become a spouse, parent, or employee, each with its own set of responsibilities.
Becoming a caregiver for a loved one with dementia is another shift that can feel daunting. But just like other roles you’ve embraced, this one can also be navigated with intention and support.
Caregiving is a Mindset Shift
One of the most profound insights from the podcast is that caregiving is not just about the tasks or physical demands—it’s a mindset. When you shift your thinking about dementia, you realize it’s not solely a burden. Instead, it can be a journey where you can develop new strengths and abilities.
Consider reflecting on where you are in your caregiving journey and where you hope to be in a few years.
What challenges can you overcome, and how can you grow both personally and as a caregiver? These are the questions that will guide your path.
Understanding Your Strengths
Each caregiver brings unique strengths to the role. Some need detailed information and structure, while others may thrive with flexibility. Understanding your own strengths and how you naturally problem-solve can make caregiving less stressful.
By aligning with your natural tendencies—whether it’s seeking knowledge or relying on intuition—you can better manage the challenges that come with dementia care.
Balancing Emotions and Realities
Acknowledging the emotional toll of caregiving is crucial. It’s okay to feel loss, grief, or frustration. These emotions are valid, but they don’t define your reality.
By recognizing and addressing these feelings, you can avoid getting stuck in them. Instead, focus on the ways you can find peace with your caregiving progress and celebrate the small victories.
Finding Support in Community
It’s easy to feel isolated as a dementia caregiver, but remember, you’re not alone. There are communities of caregivers who are walking similar paths. Seeking out support from others who understand your struggles can make the journey more manageable.
Joining a meetup or support group, where you can share your experiences and ask questions, can provide the strength and encouragement you need.
Embracing the role of a dementia caregiver is not without its challenges, but with the right mindset, understanding your strengths, and leaning on a supportive community, you can find purpose and peace in this vital role.
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Read More:
How to Recover from Dementia Care: The Caregiver Recovery Strategy
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Transcript
Introduction to Caregiving Roles
[0:00] Have you given any thought to how many times in your life you have had to adjust to a different role or different responsibilities? And when you stop and think about how many times you have successfully already adjusted a role, taken on a new responsibility successfully, it makes it easier for you to then transition and become a dementia caregiver. Today’s episode is there to help empower you how you can really look at adjusting your own role and becoming a more effective dementia caregiver. So check out this next episode. Hey Christian caregiver.
[0:49] Welcome Welcome back to the podcast where I teach Bible-believing Christians how to change the dementia narrative so that we can ease caregiver burden and build community of like-minded people around you on your caregiver journey. We are going to talk today a little bit about how to adjust your role and become a dementia caregiver. I think this is not something that very many people talk about, is looking at our unique roles and responsibilities when we come into a caregiving journey. Our lives are a series of adjustments. We are constantly in flux. Today isn’t the same as tomorrow, and tomorrow isn’t the same as the next day. And in our lives, we have held or we hold multiple different roles and they each impact one another. And just think about yourself. How many different roles do you have? Are you a wife, a mother, a granddaughter, a grandson, a husband.
[2:00] A employee, a boss, an elder in a church, a spouse, a parent? These are all unique roles that each have different responsibilities as we are in these different roles. And whenever we are going through our lives, our lives are really just a series of adjustments to different transitions.
[2:27] Require an adaptation to a different role. When we were young and we grew up, we at one point were a young adult and maybe we got engaged and then we got married and that turned us into somebody’s spouse on top of being a person’s child or the daughter or the son. But that role of being a a husband or a wife needed time to be adjusted to. The same thing when we became parents. We had to adjust to the role of being a parent. Sometimes the responsibilities come sooner because there are tasks attached to the responsibilities, but it takes us time sometimes to adjust to a new role.
[3:13] A lot of people struggle when their children leave the house, when they become empty nesters. They go through a period of transition because of those unique role of being the mom or the dad and the 24-hour parent of a child who has now left the home. And now we have to get back into the relationship of perhaps we had neglected our husband or our wife, and now the children aren’t there. So we have to adjust to another transition. So every transition that we have in life requires an adaptation to us assuming a different role. Our lives are not static. Another way that I describe it is life and dementia
Transitioning to a Caregiver Mindset
[3:57] is an ever-rolling stream.
[3:59] And what I want us to remember today is that we have to adjust to different roles as we become a dementia caregiver. It may not have been a role that we were actively seeking. I don’t know of anybody other than maybe a professional caregiver who actually seeks to become a dementia caregiver. But it is a transition. It is a change. It is an adjustment in our lives. And it is okay to recognize that. Then after that, in our process of adjusting to becoming a dementia caregiver is a recognition or a realization that caregiving is a mindset.
[4:43] Most things in life require a different way of thinking about something. When you are in school, you are thinking in the ways of learning and being in school. When you have to transition to becoming a university student, you have to have learned certain skills and certain things. But a big part of it is thinking about yourself now as a university student or thinking about yourself now in the role of a spouse, the same thing related to caregiving and caregiving it.
[5:18] Absolutely 100% a mindset. And if you haven’t listened to episode 167 last week, I invite you to go and listen to the caregiver reflection question.
Reflecting on Caregiving Progress
[5:32] It can help us adjust to our caregiver role is. Imagine you and I having this conversation a year or two or three from now, And you are reflecting back on this particular caregiving season of your life. What needs to have happened to feel happy and at peace with your progress, both personally and professionally, as well as in your caregiving role. And for you to reach that point of being happy and at peace with your progress, please note I’m saying happy and at peace with your progress.
[6:13] Not happy, but happy and at peace with your progress? What challenges do you need to overcome? What new opportunities do you need to explore? And how can you draw on the strengths that you already have? So we unpack that in episode 167. But the essence of this is, is that caregiving is a mindset. And like any type of mindset, whether it be thinking God’s thoughts after him or, you know, learning to be resilient or having a gratitude, grateful, thankful mindset. It’s a way to harness your thoughts and learn to think God’s thoughts after him. But it is important for us to really reflect on what it is that we want to accomplish in our caregiving journey. Many, many people are constantly just in a reactive state in being a caregiver as opposed to a proactive state where we are taking action, where we’re taking control, not perfect control, but working towards learning what we need to do in order to be an effective caregiver. The third thing that I want us to consider today as you adjust your role and become a caregiver, a dementia caregiver, is that you need to use all three parts of the mind.
[7:41] Our mind is divided into three parts, the thinking part, the feeling part, and the doing part. So the thinking part is where we train our brain, think how we think about dementia. This is one of my core beliefs, my core focuses, is that there is such a negative culture and negativity related to just the thought of helping somebody with dementia, that the journey is going to be hard, going to be overwhelming, going to be stressful.
[8:18] Going to be devastating. That is very much the narrative surrounding dementia and dementia caregiving. And I’m here to challenge you that it doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. It doesn’t have to be overwhelming and stressful and decimate your life. But it starts with how we think about our caregiving journey, what we think about dementia itself. When we put dementia into the framework of God’s journey for us and that the wages of sin is death, then dementia is no different or no harder or easier than any process that separates
The Three Parts of the Mind
[9:02] us from the people that we love. And so I challenge us to think differently about dementia. So that’s the first part of your brain. The second part of your brain is the emotional side, the feelings. And when you are transitioning and becoming and adjusting to your role as a dementia caregiver, you do need to acknowledge your feelings. Yes, there is a sense of loss. Yes, there is a sense of grief. Yes, there is a sense of sadness. Those feelings are real, but they’re not necessarily reality.
[9:39] And I just last week had an episode where we talked about how to cope with negative emotions of being a dementia caregiver. Giver. That was episode 168. But we do need to acknowledge your feelings. You do need to acknowledge what you are experiencing and what you’re feeling. That doesn’t mean that we stay there. It doesn’t mean that we wallow in them. But we do have a feeling part of our body and we need to acknowledge those emotions. And then we go into the doing part of the mind. And each person has a different way of combining their strengths related to everything that we do, how we strive when we’re free to be ourselves to problem solve and take action on things. And this part of the brain is called conation. It’s not a word that very many people are aware of, but conation is really just our way of doing things. And each of us is wired differently. We’re not all wired the same. And if you know your Colby Index, K-O-L-B-E Index.
[10:50] How you intuitively take action and strive to do things when you’re free to be yourself to solve a problem, you can leverage those strengths in order to
Utilizing Your Innate Strengths
[11:02] be able to be a better caregiver. So a few things related to that. Some people need a lot of detail. Some people need a lot of information in order to be able to make better decisions. If you’re that person, then research and learn and buy books and spend time in courses or coaching programs where you can learn what you need to know in order to be an effective caregiver. Some people just need an overview of the caregiving and what dementia is and can kind of just need it a little bit more simplified. Some people need a lot of structure in order for them to be able to be effective. They may need schedules and checklists and routines very structured in order to be able to be an effective caregiver. Some people more like me can kind of fly by the seat of their pants, do really well with little structure and can just kind of put it together on their own without having a very formal or structured process.
[12:05] Other people might need to brainstorm a lot of different possibilities, whereas if you have a different strength, you may need a lot more stability and not that many choices and just have one or two that you really are considering. Other people may really need to learn the actual physical skills of providing care or doing the tasks of caregiving. And so these, knowing what your innate strengths are and how you spontaneously take action and problem solve can help you be a more effective caregiver. It can help you adjust to your role as a dementia caregiver.
[12:44] And at the same time, these exact strengths, these same things that we just talked about, our innate abilities, our conation is exactly why some things are harder for us as a caregiver. When we go with our strengths, when we’re using our natural abilities and strengths for anything, the task is easier. When we’re constantly going against our normal innate strengths that God gifted us with, it is going to be harder. If you want to know more about how your innate strengths work, I invite you to go to the Colby Index. It’s K-O-L-B-E Index. And take the Colby Index and learn what your innate strengths are. And when you get your Colby Index, reach back out to me and I’d be happy to sit with you and see how we can use your innate eight God-given strengths to
Steps to Adjust as a Caregiver
[13:41] be able to make your caregiving journey easier for you. So adjusting to your role as a dementia caregiver does take several different steps.
[13:51] Remember, each transition in life will require an adaptation for us to adjust to a different role. That caregiving is a mindset. It’s something that we can continue to work on our mindset related to caregiving. There are some some practical steps that you can take to use and leverage your innate strengths and abilities and recognizing that if you go against your innate strengths and abilities,
Monthly Meetup Invitation
[14:20] your caregiving journey will be harder. And so I invite you, if you haven’t yet joined me for my Ask the Dementia Coach monthly meetup, the next one is September 19th.
[14:34] Next Thursday, which is my birthday. And I invite you to come and be with us in a monthly meetup where I invite my listeners of this podcast to interact with me, to interact with one another, come find support, know that you’re not alone, ask your questions, and become a part of being a co-creator for this podcast and be able to really help me in my journey to serve you at a deeper level. So if you want to sign up for that, the link is in the show notes below, or you can just message me on Instagram or Facebook, the word ask, A-S-K, that’s the word ask, to get the link to sign up for the Ask the Dementia Coach monthly meetup. And as I end all of my podcasts, may the Lord bless you and keep you. And I really look forward to seeing you next week.
