Stages of Caregiving

It is important to identify what stage you are at in your journey of caregiving. Once identified you have the knowledge of what is to come and what you have already been through. Knowledge is powerful and knowing what is going on can give you time to plan. Caregiving involves more than a single person, often two people but it could be more people. Caregiving can include the whole family.

Relationships are key to

Pre caregiving

This is an autonomy relationship. It is important to understand where your relationship started at before the caregiving role happened. Things will not always get harder when relationships role change but often is the case. Identify the starting point in all relationships. Before an illness or disability was introduced to a relationship was it a trusting and caring relationship, where there lies and betrayals, or maybe somewhere in between.

As a caregiver goes through the roles of caregiving things can always improve but the amount of support plays a key factor in improving relationships. Some relationships will get harder no matter the amount of support provided to either party in these stages.

In this stage things are normal in your relationship. Everyone taking care of themselves independent. This doesn’t mean that a wife isn’t doing more for her husband or vice versa but once stages start shifting so will the relationship dynamics. Ask yourself how do we deal with conflict? How do we talk about difficult topics? How much privacy does everyone like?

Ambiguous Helper

At this stage often we don’t know if caregiving is going on or just helping out a little. Sometime there will be a diagnosis of illness or disease by a doctor but sometimes we are only suspicious that something isn’t right with our loved one.

Regardless when a diagnosis happens there is still always a help being given. Should you be taking the car keys away not? This is a time to really start diving into education. Time to get some advice from the professionals. There is no way around getting clear on do’s and don’t. This comes with experience.

I’m Caregiver

Less persuasion and more jumping into helping. Less work arounds situations and more knowing this is an illness or disability and now you will start building experience. Now you are getting into the problem solving.

This is a stage to decide your relationship. Is it to teach others what you think is right to do for others, are you feeling obligated. You might know that your loved one needs more time than you have to give because you could still be working. It’s time to start building your support team. Support isn’t only for your loved one but you also will require to have your own support to turn to. Get real on why you are doing this caregiving role, what is driving me to do this.

Representative

You know you are wearing many hats now. Often you are carrying most of the responsibility of the relationship. You are often holding onto the relationship hard and becoming the advocate for your loved one. Make a pie chart and label out your responsibilities; for example, mother, spouse, nanny, housekeeper, cook and maybe financially responsible for family as well. Sometimes here we also start realizing we are getting closer to the end of the relationship we once had.

This stage can be more quiet than the ones mentioned before. You become something like a lighthouse in a storm. You are grounded and watching sometimes for the next fire you feel the need to be putting out all the time. This stage is a balancing act. You recognize the changes in the life your loved one requires but can feel torn between leaving them to live their own life, make bad decisions or good, and trying to protect them from self harm.

Grieving

In this stage you realize that the relationship you once had is gone. This doesn’t mean the relationship is over, just that things have changed. If you are caring for an acute issue it may not be the end of the relation forever however, anything can happen. Miracles can happen. Hold onto hope.

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