Emotions might be an integral part of being human, but they’re not always welcome. Negative emotions are often far too overwhelming and have the ability to make any bad situation feel so much worse.
Caregivers will know this one all too well. The caregiving role is, after all, never an easy one. Sometimes it can feel like the walls are closing in and that you’re missing out on many of the things that you hoped for in life.
Over time, the negative emotions can get worse, perhaps leading to issues like resentment and anger, isolation, or depression.
Changing the situation somewhat can be helpful. This could include finding ways to decrease your stress, getting other people to step in and help, and taking care of your own needs.
Even then, emotions can be unruly.
And, let’s be honest, self-care might be a critical part of caregiving but it is very hard to achieve in practice. This is especially true if you’re caring for someone with cognitive challenges or who physically cannot meet all of their basic needs. For example, incontinence is a common challenge for dementia patients, one that often involves on-the-fly support from caregivers.
That’s why we’re not talking about self-care in this post or how you can change your situation.
Instead, we’re looking at emotional management – the idea that you can be a master of your emotions. This doesn’t mean that you can control everything that you feel. But, it is possible to stop your emotions from controlling you.
Emotions Aren’t ‘Real’
Emotions are interesting.
What you feel often seems like an accurate assessment of what is going on around you. If you’re angry at another person, for example, you may be certain that you were wronged and that the other person needs to change.
And yet, we often have different emotional responses to the same event. Something could make us angry at one point in time and not matter at all at a different moment.
This means that your emotions aren’t ever truly determined by what is happening.
It’s entirely possible to be happy in an objectively bad situation, or miserable in an objectively good one. Work on resilience in caregiving has reinforced this idea, showing that caregivers can adapt to the same circumstances in very different ways.
Much of the way that you personally adapt is within your control.
Think of it this way. Your emotions and reactions, your pain and struggles. These aren’t just linked to what is happening right now. They’re more strongly related to how you perceive your reality.
This is one reason that acceptance is so important for caregivers. The caregivers who struggle the most are often the ones that strongly hold onto expectations about their life. These caregivers see all the things that they are missing in clear focus. They mourn the life that they’re not able to live.
When this is where your focus is – caregiving can be devastating.
The same is true for most situations where your focus is on what you don’t have.
The change comes from looking at what you do have.
Because, here’s the thing. Contentment and happiness can be a choice. These states of mind aren’t solely linked to your circumstances. Making this choice isn’t fake or wrong either, as in any given moment, any situation, there is good and bad.
Always. No situation is entirely one or the other. Even the best day or your life will have some less-than-perfect moments and the worst day will have some positive aspects. Other days will contain a more even balance of the two.
If we’re honest, good and bad are subjective anyway. Both areas are strongly influenced by expectations, including what we expect and what is ‘normal’ in our culture.
Actually Changing Your Emotions
One important way to shift from the negative to the positive is simply to make the choice. Decide that you’re not going to focus on the bad things. That you’re going to look for the good instead.
This approach won’t fix things overnight. It’s basically a first step.
From there, you need to look for ways to practically change the way that you think and how you view the world. There are countless techniques out there.
Gratitude journals, mantras, or quotes that you scatter around the house are all common approaches. Meditation or mindfulness practices can be helpful too.
Self-compassion is also relevant, as this helps you to accept what you feel without judgment. Many of us feel guilty because some of our emotions seem wrong.
A common one for caregivers is to briefly entertain the wish that their loved one would die. It’s easy to feel guilty for thoughts like this, but the human mind simply behaves in this way. Everyone has some thoughts that they feel embarrassed about.
In the end, the measure of who you are isn’t the random thoughts that sometimes pop into your head. The way that you act and the balance of your thoughts overall is much much more relevant.
Another idea is to find something good in every day, something that you can speak out, either to someone else or just to the hair. Like ‘I loved…’ or ‘Thank you for…’. Some people do this in the form of prayer or perhaps in a journal.
You’ve probably heard of other techniques too. There are many out there. Different things work better for different people, so it’s a matter of experimenting and finding the best fit for you.
Dealing With Overwhelming Emotions
When emotions are very strong or the situation is overwhelming, ideas like ‘look for the positive’ can feel like useless advice. You may even find that you are already aware of the positive, but that doesn’t shift the emotions.
I’ve found this one many times myself.
Some people say that it isn’t possible to be grateful and sad at the same time. I disagree (as do others). I’ve had many cases where I have felt both simultaneously. There have also been situations where I’ve felt apparently contradictory emotions at the same time. One is often stronger than the other, but not always.
There have even been times where I was happy, grateful, and near-suicidal all in the same moment, which was frankly quite strange.
This pattern means that at sometimes common techniques may not work at all.
If your emotions are depressive in nature, then it’s important to talk to a doctor. Find one that is interested in therapeutic angles, rather than one that only focuses on medication.
If your emotions are intense in other ways, you may well be able to shift them yourself.
There are various techniques here too, but they all tend to start with the emotions themselves.
Learning and Understanding
Learning more about the emotions you feel can be hugely important. This is even a key advantage of therapy, even if you don’t have mental health challenges, as therapy helps you to tap into the things that underlie your emotions and behavior.
There are also many self-help books and videos that can help you work out many things for yourself.
Sometimes just understanding what you are really feeling is enough to shift some of the emotions you feel. In other cases, the understanding may give an idea about what to do next.
One example from my own life comes from when I was a caregiver.
The issue was around housework, which honestly has never been a huge priority for me. I’ll go through bouts of cleanliness and I don’t like too much mess, but I’m more than happy to leave the dishes until the next day if I run out of energy or to vacuum every two weeks.
We lived with my partner’s mother at the time, who ended up regularly being angry and resentful, as she felt that I expected her to do the housework. She could have helped, true, and that would have been amazing.
But, I never expected her to, especially as she struggled even walking around the house some of the time. Much of her reactivity dissipated when we finally talked about it and she realized that I wasn’t looking for anything from her.
The same idea applies in many other situations too.
In fact, you’re reacting to another person, learning more about their side of the story is an important step. You’ll often find that their behavior means something entirely different than what you expected.
Difficult problems often have very easy solutions once everyone sits down and talks.
Letting Go and Redirecting
There’s also a two-step process that you can use to combat unruly emotions.
This is particularly useful when you know that your emotions aren’t useful or reasonable, or where there’s no way to resolve things with the other party.
The first step takes some courage – as you need to step back from what you feel and dis-identify with your emotions. This means letting go of the sense that what you feel is inherently real or true. Letting go of the idea that you have the right to feel sad, upset, angry, resentful, or whatever else it is that you’re feeling.
Perhaps you have that right. Perhaps not.
But, holding onto emotions tightly causes more pain than whatever is actually happening.
Besides, as we talked about before, human emotions are all over the place. What you feel in a moment could be based on many things, including how you day has gone, your childhood, your energy levels, your assumptions, and the list goes on. The events that are actually happening are just one item in that list.
The exact method of stepping back will vary. For me, it starts with a decision to not buy into my emotions. Sometimes I’ll close my eyes and just be still, until I feel calm. The emotions may still be there and they’ll often still be strong, but there is a sense of distance, as if the emotions simply aren’t so urgent anymore.
Holding emotions at a distance like this takes energy, so it might not be effective for long.
That’s why there’s a second step – redirection. This involves replacing the difficult emotion with something more positive.
The process can take some trial and error. It certainly has for me. I’ve found that sometimes it’s very easy to switch from the negative to the positive. Other times I have to keep repeating the entire process, as it just doesn’t stick.
I’ve found that it’s important to carefully choose the emotion that you are redirecting to. Picking the contradictory emotion often works well, which is another reason for learning about what underlies what you are feeling.
For example, if you’re often angry because your family member is difficult to deal with, compassion could be a good alternative perspective. It’s pretty hard to be angry at someone and feel compassionate for them at the same time.
Or, if you find that you’re embarrassed by something your family member does in public, look for things to be proud of instead. This might take some creative thinking, but once you’ve found something, it’s easy to go back to it in the future.
Final Thoughts
The approaches we’re talking about in this article won’t work all the time and they might not help everyone. Even so, they’re powerful ideas that can help to make life easier.
These approaches also get easier as you go. You can start to find the things that work for you and the things that don’t.
One final thing to mention is that emotions are just emotions. They’re part of the human experience and that includes the ‘bad’ ones. The idea here isn’t to push negative emotions aside or to bury them, simply to reduce how much you suffer them.
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