Coping With The Guilt Of Not Being Able To Look After Your Aging Parents Anymore
Coping With The Guilt Of Not Being Able To Look After Your Aging Parents Anymore. There is nothing more heart-wrenching than looking after the elderly ones in your life, it teaches you a lot about how fleeting this life really is. But in terms of the vast emotions when it comes to looking after people like our parents, one of the major ones is that we can feel very guilty. After all, we may be able to look after our parents up to a point, but then we have to weigh up the impact it has on us, not just in terms of our ability to look after them, but our mental health. So, with this in mind, how can we cope but also provide a suitable solution for our parents?
Understanding Our Limited Role
When we are a family caregiver and we look after our parents, we do it because we love them. As such, this comes to a place of love, but we have to remember that, although we are doing our best to accommodate them in every way possible, there are things that we may not know about, that we may not be able to physically provide, and this could be due to time constraints, or we just don’t have the necessary skills. It’s important that we don’t feel guilty when we say that we can’t do it anymore, but this is when care homes and resources like Pegasus Senior Living provide the right balance. We want to feel that we are doing right by them, and not making them feel they are just been put out to pasture. A lot of this is in choosing the right retirement community, but we also have to realize that we don’t have all the skills necessary to look after our parents. Ultimately, this means that we need professionals to help fill in our knowledge gaps.
The Anxiety Of Feeling Anxieties
Looking after our parents, or feeling that we’re unable to do this anymore can result in a lot of emotional guilt, and as such, the various components associated with emotional stress will rear their heads. Stress is one of those things that can threaten to overwhelm us, and when it comes to someone that we love so dearly, anxiety, coupled with guilt, can make us feel that we are a horrible person. And it’s a very swift combination of learning how to cope with the anxiety symptoms, but also giving yourself a break. Ultimately, you’ve done your best to look after someone, and it’s just a logical progression that you need professional help. A lot of us feel that we should look after our parents 24/7, but is this a realistic prospect? Or are we doing it to bypass any form of guilt? And it’s these things you need to ask yourself.
Coping with any form of guilt can eat away at us, but when it comes to someone that we love, and someone that raised us, we feel that we need to repay the debt. But it’s not debt; it’s about providing the best possible care for them so they can be happier, regardless of their capacity. Some of us feel that we have to take on the burden because they are our parents, this can only serve to magnify the guilt when we are unable to cope anymore. But asking for help is never a sign of weakness.