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Home » What Happens if You and Your Senior Don’t Like Each Other?
Not every relationship between caregivers and their senior family members is a positive one. There may be old issues that just can’t get resolved and those can seriously hamper your ability to be a caregiver.
Here are some of the solutions you can try.
Practice Detachment
Detachment is a term that describes when you separate yourself from the personal aspects of your emotions around caregiving. For instance, your elderly family member might be extremely critical of your actions and that feels like a personal attack. If you remove the personal aspect, it’s much easier to address your senior’s concerns without the emotional overload. This takes practice and you may not get it right immediately.
Get Past Your Expectations
Very often caregivers have certain expectations around caregiving. Practicing detachment can help you to let go of some of these expectations, but you may still have some floating around. If something hasn’t happened with your elderly family member by now, that situation isn’t likely to change. You can’t hold out for a magical ending that isn’t going to materialize.
Do the Right Thing
The point of being a caregiver is to ensure that your senior family member is safe and is taken care of as well as possible. Even if your elderly family member isn’t making up for some of the stuff that happened in the past, that’s still your job as her caregiver. Ultimately you need to make an effort to do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing to do.
Bring in Elderly Care Providers
One of the best ways you can deal with this situation is to bring in elderly care providers. They can serve as a bit of a buffer between you and your aging adult. On good days, you may be fine handling tasks for your elderly family member on your own. But on those days that aren’t so good, elderly care providers can take over and give you both a better day.
You and your elderly family member don’t have to agree on everything and you don’t really have to like each other. It helps if you can develop some mutual respect for each other, though. If your relationship continues to decline, you can gradually increase the time that elderly care providers spend with your aging adult while decreasing your own time. That can give you a layer of protection while still being her caregiver.