When we’re helping our clients develop their Aging & End of Life Plans, caregiving is always one of the big concerns. When you get older, who do you want taking care of you? What if you get sick or injured? If something happens to your spouse or another loved one, are you prepared to step up as a caregiver? Care work—both paid labour by caregiving professionals like personal service workers (PSWs), and unpaid labour by family members and loved ones—holds our society together. We all rely on caregivers to take care of our most vulnerable community members, so that everybody can live their healthiest and happiest lives.
But acting as someone’s caregiver can be a gruelling job. If you’ve ever taken care of a young child, or an older relative, or a loved one with a disability, then you know firsthand how all-consuming caregiving can be. Caregiving may mean looking after all of someone’s physical needs, from feeding them to medicating them to helping them go to the bathroom. It may mean scheduling their daily life, driving them to medical appointments, and being prepared to change plans at a moment’s notice in case of an emergency.
Bearing those responsibilities every day can be exhausting—not just physically, but also emotionally. That raises an entirely new challenge: managing tough emotions without letting them affect the person you’re taking care of. This is a form of emotional labour, and we need to talk more about it.
The emotional toll of caregiving
Being somebody’s caregiver can bring up a lot of really difficult feelings. For one, if the person you’re caring for has a lot of needs, it’s likely that your caregiving responsibilities are taking time away from other important things in your life. Your career and hobbies might take a backseat to caring for your loved ones. You might have to put some of your goals and bucket-list items on hold while you focus on caregiving. You may have fewer chances to see friends and other family members because your daily life is taken up by caregiving responsibilities. The list of stressors goes on.
For those who are looking after an older adult, or somebody who’s sick or disabled, they may have to act as caregivers at the same time that they’re grieving (or preparing to grieve) a big loss. When you know that the person you’re taking care of is most likely not going to get better, caregiving means confronting that person’s mortality on a daily basis. In a culture where most of us would rather look away from Aging & End of Life for as long as we possibly can, this is a really hard situation to be thrust into.
Caregivers may also be the main emotional support for the person they’re looking after, helping them process their own heavy emotions. They may bear the brunt of that person’s anger or frustration about the situation.
Caregiving is thankless work
On top of all of that, caregiving is often a thankless job. Our culture systematically undervalues care work, even as our society ages and a greater number of people are in desperate need of help. Our public health systems are buckling under the weight of demand, and loved ones are left to pick up the slack. One study found that the value of unpaid work by family caregivers in Canada clocks in somewhere between $97.1 billion and $112.7 billion each year.
The undervaluing of care work might have something to do with the fact that it remains more associated with women than men. Here in Canada, more than half of women and girls over the age of 15 act as caregivers in some capacity; women are also more likely to take on kinds of care work that need to be done regularly or on a set schedule, as opposed to one-off tasks like house maintenance and outdoor work.
Caregiving and emotional labour
All of that being said, it’s very common for caregivers to feel resentment, bitterness, and other difficult emotions. No matter how much you love the person you’re taking care of, it’s normal to feel the weight of the sacrifices you’ve made in order to take care of them. Faced with so many sources of stress, from social isolation to financial troubles to general burnout, caregivers often feel a lot of difficult emotions about their situation, and even toward the person they’re taking care of.
For many people, the instinctive response to these feelings is to try to suppress them. That means that in addition to the labour of caregiving, they are also doing the emotional labour of putting a lid on their feelings, to avoid having them spill over onto the people around them.
Suppressing your feelings might work for a time—but it’s not a sustainable solution. As a caregiver, it’s important to give yourself space to feel these emotions, and to find ways of taking care of yourself too.
Managing caregiver resentment
First things first, let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room: the main reason caregiver burnout and resentment are so common is that our society is failing its most vulnerable people. If we had a better safety net for individuals and their caregivers to rely on, the burden of care work would not fall quite so heavily on the shoulders of family members and loved ones. The thing we really need to manage caregiver resentment is a system that gives caregivers the support they need (and have long been asking for).
In the meantime, there are many things individual caregivers can do to respond to their own emotions in a self-compassionate, productive way, while still minimizing the harm those emotions cause to others. Below are just a few suggestions.
Connect with other caregivers
Many caregivers keep their feelings of resentment and burnout to themselves, because they feel guilty or ashamed of them. But if you are in this position, just know that you are not alone. These experiences are common, and talking about them with other people who are in the same boat may help you get some of your frustrations off your chest. Fellow caregivers can also help to validate what you’re feeling, provide emotional support, and offer insights from their own lived experience. They can be an outlet and a source of hope in difficult moments.
There are many dedicated support groups for caregivers, including many that operate online. Ask your medical providers and community support services if they can point you toward a local peer support group, or take a look at this list of resources. If you’re based in Ontario, you can also take a look at the Ontario Caregiver Organization’s website to find supports and tools for caregivers.
Make time for self-care
If you’re constantly pouring into other peoples’ cups, it’s even more important that you have ways to refill your own. Self-care doesn’t have to be elaborate or expensive (although we’ll never tell you not to go for a spa day if the opportunity arises). Instead, try to come up with some small acts of kindness that you can do for yourself every day. This could be something as simple as going for a midday walk, giving yourself a solid chunk of time in the morning to drink your coffee in peace, reading a cozy book in bed before falling asleep, and so on.
Ask for help
Nobody is an island, and there’s no shame in leaning on our loved ones for support when it’s needed. If you have other family members around who may be able to assist with caregiving—even in small ways here and there—ask them if they can get involved. Offloading even the smallest responsibilities means a slightly reduced mental load for you, giving you back time and energy that you can use to take care of yourself.
Bring in a professional
If you’re an unpaid caregiver and you have a little extra cash around, it may be worth looking into hiring someone like a PSW or another professional to help manage your loved one’s care. Even though this can be a significant upfront cost, having hired help even for a day or two a week frees up time that you can use to rest and recharge, to connect with friends, or to pursue the things you’re passionate about. Consider it an investment in your own health, both physical and mental.
Planning ahead
When you’re young and healthy, caregiving often feels like an abstract concern—until it isn’t. In a blog post for the Home Hospice Association, Christine Smith, an unpaid caregiver to her husband with multiple sclerosis (MS), recounts how quickly caregiving went “from being a side note of our story to being the plot.” We are all more fragile than we’d like to think, and at some point—if we’re lucky enough to live long, healthy lives—we will all be in a position of relying on somebody else to be our caregiver. Whenever that moment arrives, an Aging & End of Life Plan can help ensure that you and your loved ones are prepared to face it—including planning for ways that family caregivers can take care of themselves. Reach out and let’s chat about what that might look like.
