Dear 21st Century Dad, my wife fell bicycling three years ago and she has a permanent brain injury. We are lucky. A stranger might not even know that she has a dysfunction. She can carry on a conversation and navigate around the house. She’s more or less her normal self, unless she gets stressed. Then her talking slurs, she can’t comprehend logical lineal thinking, she gets flustered, and retreats three years and goes into a silence that can last a couple of days.
Why does she get stressed? Our 16 year old son pushes her buttons. Within a few minutes she is a basket case. I honestly would like to wrap my hands around him and squeeze. Sometimes I know he has just cause for arguing. To her, he’s been a 13 year old for the last three years. He probably will be when he has a family and kids.
I don’t know where to go with this. I love my wife. The whole thing breaks my heart. I wish my son had a little more compassion.
Dear Caregiver, if we are at the point where one of us wishes to strangle the other, even if no physical contact occurs, we are dealing with a diminished capacity to resolve issues.
Initially, we begin to resolve the challenge by focusing attention upon ourselves. We can seek out an anger management course. These courses offer far more than simple strategies with which to contain our wild emotions. We can gain insight into the workings of our personality and learn how we can improve relationships with other people and especially ourselves.
If group processes make us uncomfortable, or the mechanics of getting to a meeting once a week for eight to ten meetings overwhelm our time management, let us consider some of the stress management techniques we can practice by ourselves in our own homes. Depending on our abilities and affinity to follow directions, hundreds of web sites explain simple breathing exercises that promote mental calmness. If we are near an urban centre with a hospital, the Center for Mindfulness (CFM) established in 1995, may offer certified courses. It is outgrowth of the acclaimed Stress Reduction Clinic, founded by Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979, at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. If a physician or a registered health practitioner is teaching the course, our medical plan may subsidize it. Otherwise, thousands of courses are available, both at cost and free.
Commitment to a practice helps immensely. The mindfulness practices incorporate many lessons we might learn in an anger management course. Our son may leave us when he graduates from high school. Hopefully, his mother will live many happy years with us. Ultimately, we wish to attain the ability to appreciate the richness life offers to us every moment, even in the direst situations. How is it that caregivers such as Mother Theresa could not be depressed and annoyed by the immense challenges put before them? And if they were, how did they overcome the challenges?
We can explore pathways that encourage the emotional and spiritual aspects of the heart. How can we be more empathetic? How can we learn to understand some of the difficulties our son may experience? How can we learn to forgive without so much resistance? How can we develop compassion? Why must it be us who has to sacrifice our time, our identity, our livelihood? We can ask these questions to ourselves as a form of inquiry, or seek out prior or entirely new religious affiliations and ask for spiritual direction.
How can we encourage our son to open up and disclose some of the difficulties he has? Children who are not taught to demand respect for themselves can be very mean to other children. They will often use any form of difference in other children as a malicious target. Is our son embarrassed to present his mother to his friends and his peers?
For a sixteen year old whose sole purpose in life is to separate himself from his parents, being treated as a thirteen year old can be a continual putdown. Has the loss of his mother, as he knew her as a thirteen year old, stunted his emotional maturity? His put down responses to his mother indicate he has a lot of growing to do. As well as ourselves, our son is a caretaker, though perhaps a negligent one. How has he educated himself to evolve into both son and caretaker? Male teenagers are usually resistant to discussion groups, group therapy, therapists, counselors and sometimes even mentors. Helpful professionals are often nuisances who ask them difficult questions that seem to have no relation to whatever they don’t wish to talk about. That’s if they can even vocalize their difficulties.
How can we avoid penalizing our boy, setting limits of engagement about how and how not he can respond to his mother? The key to our pursuit must still involve enticing our son to discuss his concerns with either ourselves or an outside mentor with whom he is willing to talk. Ask his school counselor whom he can recommend.
We can agree to present a unified approach to his mother that is educational, loving, and supports and nurture her whole person. We can both be intelligent. We can present a choice to our son. Soften his approach or face a hardening of alternatives.
Google:
1. www.mettainstitute.org
2. www.ccc-ccan.ca/ the Canadian Caregiver Coalition (CCC-CCAN) is the national body representing and promoting the voice, needs and interests of family caregivers with all levels of government, and the community through policy development and leadership, research and education, information, communication and resource development. The mission of the CCC-CCAN is to join with caregivers, service providers, policy makers and other stakeholders to identify and respond to the needs of caregivers in Canada.
3. Today's Caregiver
4. VON Canada
5. www.familycaregiving101.org
6. http://chaplaindanny.blogspot.com.
7. DHO Gathering
8. Spiritual Caregiving: How Many Ways Can You Open Your Heart? -- Part 4
9. mindfulness, and phone friends and find out which organization or teacher might be the most appropriate venue. Many communities offer both secular and religious teachings.
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