In this episode of Senior Living LIVE!, we discuss emotional endurance and whether we can build it up. From the Fading Memories podcast, Jennifer Fink joins us to give tips for tapping into your emotional endurance, coping with tremendous obstacles, and managing emotions during trying times.
Hello, everyone, and welcome into Senior Living Live. My name is Melissa. Thank you so much for being part of our webcast here today. We are taking this opportunity to discuss emotional endurance.
Our guest, Jennifer Fink, you see there is going to tell you what it is and how to build this up for yourself. Jennifer, so great to have you on today. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me.
Absolutely. Tell our viewers a little bit about yourself and your background.
So I'm gonna reference the previous video that we did so that I can maybe expand on my background, but briefly My mom had Alzheimer's for twenty years. Her mom had vascular dementia for around fifteen, and my my colonel great grandmother also had what they called senile dementia back in the old days. She died before I was born, so I'm not sure they knew what type of dementia's were around back then. I'm not that old, but time has gone by. I'm a retired portrait photographer. We had a family business from nineteen ninety to two thousand five.
And I got to experience what it's like to work with somebody whose memory is getting worse.
And back in, you know, the early aughts.
People didn't talk about memory loss. People weren't as aware of it as we are now, which We still need a lot more education, and so that's kinda what I'm here to help provide today. I hope.
And other than that, I am a golden retriever, owner, lover, whatever, caregiver for dogs.
I like to travel. I live an hour south of Lake Tahoe so, that's a new situation for us. So we're, you know, in later stages of life, we're traveling more and trying to enjoy life before it's a lot harder. Yeah.
You just got a lot of bonus points for the goal to retrieve it apart from a a lot of our viewers. So so excellent stuff there. And, your your previous video was about how to put together a care team. For somebody who has and we're suffering from dementia.
So you'll want to check that video out from Jennifer as well. So today, this is about emotional endurance. So what exactly is that, Jennifer?
Well, you've heard the phrase when the towing going. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. And emotional endurance is simply the ability to keep moving forward despite tremendous obstacles. And as I mentioned in the previous video and frequently on my own show, Most of us end up caregivers because of some medical emergency, some emergency like dad got lost coming home from work that he's been doing for thirty years.
Mom got lost going to the nail salon. It's a mile away from home. Grandma fell. These kind of things.
Nobody plans on doing this, which something we should all probably change because seventy percent of us are gonna need care before we die. And though, we don't have time to get into white you should not assume that you're gonna be part of the thirty percent. That's a whole different topic.
Of course. Yeah. So, when we talk about this, it sounds like something that you, you would be able to build, you know, building up that resiliency within yourself, when things get extremely overwhelming or difficult, in the situation that you just discussed, such as caring for a loved one with a life limiting disease, how can people begin to build this? What are sort of the building blocks? For, emotional endurance.
Well, to back up half a step, we need emotional endurance because, you know, We all go through really challenging times in life, and generally we know that these these times will end. But with a life limiting disease, and it doesn't even have to be a dementia causing disease. You know, it could be somebody that has cancer, but especially somebody whose memory capacities and physical capacities, dig, you know, They lose these capacities slowly over time. We need to be able to tap into this emotional endurance so that we can we can be in there for the long haul because we don't wanna poop out and not be able to take care of the person that we're taking care of or, you know, in my dad's case, my, my dad passed away before my, you know, before my mom.
And I think a lot of it was because he was just physically and emotionally exhausted. So he he really needed to hear this. So this is for all the dads out there that need to hear this. So we need to build up a well, you asked us how to build it But let me say, we need to deal we need to learn how to deal with our emotions so that we don't become so overwhelmed that we can't you know, continue doing all the things that we need to do.
There's a lot of signs that we need to focus on our emotions, but I know our time is short, so I'm gonna skip throws and go right into creating emotional endurance.
And some of the early steps to create emotional endurance is to educate yourself As we mentioned in the previous video, this is something I've also learned from one of my past guests.
I didn't mention her, particularly in the last episode, but she actually voluntarily married her husband knowing he had Parkinson's disease.
And I'm still astounded at Chidoes, but they discussed how to how to manage caregiving together and that was really helpful. And, obviously, the only way they could do that is to educate themselves on what to expect. And, obviously, in their case, it was Parkinson's disease with my case, you know, I needed to learn a lot more about Alzheimer's a lot sooner than I did. The second thing, and it goes right back to the previous video that we did is finding support in early stages of, you know, any dementia causing disease. It's a whole lot easier than the middle or the later stages.
I think we we kinda give ourselves a a good thumbs up pat ourselves on the on the back and say, hey, we got this covered. You know, I'm doing a good job, and you probably are.
But, you know, that bus is around the corner about to run over you with some unpleasant surprise.
You know, there's other ways of doing it. A lot of people find support, obviously, from outside like we discussed in setting care team, but you can set up, you know, journal.
I've had a lot of guests that have turned their journals into books.
And, it's amazing when you read some of these books, journal turned books. You can kinda sometimes see them work through emotions. So I think that that helps. It's not something I ever did.
Sometimes I regret it. You know, I mentioned a minute ago, you know, we we're really good about giving our credit because we're doing a good job for somebody we love. And, you know, nobody asked us to. We just stepped up because, you know, we're such great people, which I'm not criticizing any of those emotions.
They're all important, and I'm fully in in the belief that we should we should find we should find gratitude every day, but we should also find something to be proud of us ourselves every day. Because, you know, we do a lot of good stuff every day, even if even if we're not caregiving. And then so you wanna give yourself credit, you also wanna analyze your beliefs. So I've seen a lot of caregivers who they just get so tired and so exasperated that they start thinking like, I can't do this, and this is never gonna end.
And why is this so off we just we just go down the negative rabbit hole, which I I can be guilty of that, you know, it's dealing with somebody who can't remember that you just answered that question fifteen times in the last ten minutes. That that does that takes a toll on us emotionally and mentally And so, you know, if you've ever felt like, you know, this is never gonna end, I'm I'm always gonna be doing this. You know, you're kinda setting yourself up for a lot more, you know, difficulty because you're just kind of allowing all the negative to come to the surface.
And the some other ways of, you know, creating emotional endurance is to take action. Sometimes, you know, you get a diagnosis like Alzheimer's and like for our family, it was like, holy crap. We've already gone through this with one grandmother. Now we gotta go through with the mother.
Oh my god. And they overlapped for a while. So you know, it it would have been easy to kind of just, like, go into paralysis. Like, I don't wanna deal with this.
Totally no normal emotional state, but you really wanna take some action. You wanna set up a care team. You know, you wanna talk to your loved one before they cannot articulate their desires and their needs and say, you know, like my mom always said, you know, I don't wanna be a burden to you girls and but I wanna live in my home forever Well, those are mutually exclusive, and by the time we got to the point where, you know, I would have wanted to say, well, those are mutually exclusive. How do you suggest you know, what would you do to resolve that problem?
You know, there was no way my mom would understand that question much less have an answer but if we had been able to do that ten years earlier and say, hey, mom, you know, what if dad dies first?
And, you know, you can't live alone? What what options would you want us to And maybe we should go look at memory care places and see, you know, what you think, because maybe they're not as bad as, you know, you're thinking, You know, they have improved. Yes. They're not cheap, but, you know, what how do you want your last few years to happen?
You know, do you want family, breaking their necks, to to take care of you, or, you know, you can at least ask. And then you also know that you you know what they wanted, and you've discussed it, and you're not making the difficult decision, like, I had to do. It was like, nope. We're moving you to memory care.
I don't care what you want. So take action, you wanna plan as much as possible.
Again, ask people, you know, that have been on this journey longer than you, them what the next step is. Ask doctors. What do you think the next phase might look like? What should I expect?
You know, you're kind of building your emotional armor by you know, asking, like, if you know, okay, well, you know, she might be plateaued for a few years, but these are the things you wanna for, because these will be signs of a significant change in her abilities.
And then you can, you know, you're not caught off guard, which nobody wants to be caught off guard. Know, becoming a caregiver does not mean your needs no longer matter, which it's really easy to to make their needs so much more important than ours. You have no idea how long your caregiving journey will last. I love to tell people My mom had Alzheimer's for twenty years.
So this is June of twenty twenty three. Please rub your crystal ball and tell me what June of twenty forty three will look like. When I'll be in my eighties, I think. No.
Seventies.
And, you know, you have no clue. We have no clue what next week looks like. So we think we have a clue, but we don't. So, you know, plan ahead, learn as much as you can.
These are ways that you can kind of protect yourself from those sudden blows that are gonna happen. You also wanna acknowledge your feelings. There's days you're gonna be mad at the world, maybe even mad at your loved one. There's other days when you're like, I just can't deal with this.
You're totally ambivalent.
Anxiety, you probably have all those in one day, and all of these emotions are totally valid. You wanna acknowledge them.
And acknowledge that these feelings, and then you wanna make we're making plans again. You wanna make a plan to deal with them so they don't become a problem. Like, for me, my I would visit my mom on Mondays, and I knew if I pushed it too long.
I always felt guilty because with my schedules still running the business from home. It was really hard to, like, carve out other afternoons to go spend time with her because it was just I come home and I was so mentally exhausted. I couldn't do the simplest of things.
And I had to be careful not to overdo it for her, but also not overdo it for me because I would have times when I'd wake up the next day, and I literally felt like eeyore with the the gray cloud over my head and, you know, it's kinda hard to make beautiful family portraits when you just feel like the world hates you.
Kinda hard to pull those positive family feelings out when that's what you're dealing with. And you also wanna make sure I kinda touched on this just a second ago, that you focus on yourself as well. You know, you wanna try to avoid exhaustion, both mentally and physically, because if you're, you know, like, I knew if I got tired or if I was stressed, poof, my mom would pick that up in a heartbeat, and then she would be cranky, and hard to deal with, so it was never a good thing. You know, if you're cranky, bored, frustrated and you're impatient with your loved one, all you're gonna do is create more headaches and problems for you. They're gonna be unhappy.
The feelings that you're giving them, especially if they're they're in the later stages, is, I don't wanna be around this person. They're like, they're negative. They're they give off bad vibes. I don't wanna be around the bad vibes. And that just makes caregiving that much more difficult.
And I'm not suggesting that balancing your needs and your loved ones' needs is easy, but it's something that you seriously seriously have to, you know, to take into consideration, like, if not daily, Well, if not hourly, then at least daily. You know, one of the things that I've I've seen a lot lately is, you know, I like to work with a to do list. Very good at balancing my days with my to do list.
And there's a lot of people that are like, what's on your to do list that just really doesn't have to get done?
It's like I look at my to do list and go, well, I wish I had some of those things on there. But when you're caregiving, you know, there are probably a lot of things that you just don't have to worry about. You know, like, don't stress yourself out if the tables are getting dusty or, you know, I've had between one and three Goldens for thirty years, so there's always hair on the floor.
And I'm kind of a neat freak, but I'm not gonna vacuum every day. I don't brush the dog every day. Just like, there's certain things that just don't need to happen all the time. So, you know, give yourself some slack, You wanna maintain your outside interests.
This is especially twelts, especially true for everybody, but it's It's really crucial for somebody that's in a sandwich generation.
If you're got a career, you're taking care of children, you're taking care of a parent, That's just a lot. But you wanna make sure that, you know, you're participating in your kids' functions because they're not gonna have those forever. You wanna maintain your career. I recently had a conversation with an attorney who was a single mom of, I think, boys were five and six when she started taking care of her mom, And obviously being an attorney is not exactly just, you know, a slack job that you can just kinda phone it in.
And she actually had changed jobs right before taking care of starting to take care of her mom, and she went back to the old job because she knew the people, the people knew her. They They were familiar with her work ethic and all the things about her. So the change in her family situation wasn't quite as jarring. And it didn't require as much learning curve for the old firm.
And so those are the kind of decisions, you know, sometimes you just have to make, you know, If you're if you're in school, fine. Cut back to part time. If you're going to school part time, maybe take one class. Do what you can to maintain your goals and desires, you know, your hobbies, your friendships, all of these are gonna be important.
I know a lot of caregivers who you know, their lives just get taken over by caring for somebody with a form of dementia, and then that person dies, and then they're they're literally adrift They really don't have close friends anymore. They've lost touch with their hobbies.
Now they're ten or fifteen years older, and they're like, now what am I gonna get to do for work? I mean, they're literally just left floating in the air. All their whole reason for being is gone. And that's that's a really, really hard thing. My mom died right at the start of the pandemic.
We had downsized our home, moved into a rental, while we decided what we were doing and then poof, the whole world shut down. My mom died.
It was a whole lot. And it There was there was times I went into a panic mode trying to figure out what am I gonna do with the rest of my life. And I realized I don't have to decide right now. So I gave myself slack Still trying to figure it out three years later, but that's okay.
You know, we moved I'm I'm figuring it out. It's it's a work in progress, but I wish I had maintained some of the things that I just mentioned beforehand.
The transition would have been better had the pandemic pandemic not happened. There was just too much life happening all at once for me.
Yeah. You know, but it Go ahead. Be kind to yourself. Mhmm.
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Well, you know, we answered a lot there.
You know, I had questions ready for you, but you you got all of them.
And and Sorry. It was a monologue.
Except for this one, and that is any addition literature or places that you can guide your viewers to, whether it's websites, something that maybe a book on Amazon, they can us that sort of follows the same mantra of everything that you have told us today in terms of take care of yourself before you take care of others and, hey, emotional endurance, we can all continue to build that up within ourselves. Well, I'm gonna shout out the book, love, dignity, and Parkinson's, She's the one that talked to her husband who she married after. He had already been diagnosed with Parkinson's on navigating caregiving together.
But my favorite favorite, resource is All's authors. So it's a l z authors dot com. If you need a book on any any kind of dementia, be it a memoir, kind of a how to children's books, they've got it. I think they have over three hundred authors now.
They've been around for eight years.
They are a fantastic resource of all of the founding authors. I there's six of them, I think, six or seven. I've I've interviewed all but one. And I I think she snuck in at the end because I had originally had, interviewed all of them, and they're all fascinating women with all their own stories.
So somebody with within all's authors will have a very similar experience to you. You can read their book.
And get what you need, and they're they're just one of my favorite resources.
Great. And then I I mean, we could consider you resource too. Where can people get in touch with you and listen to your podcasts?
Well, Fading Memory Podcast is available wherever you get your podcast. I do have a YouTube channel as well in case you like to watch these zoom conversations.
I do also post some other short, fun kind of videos on there. Occasionally, you'll see the golden retriever but you can also get a hold of me at hello at fading memories podcast dot com, which is also the website name. And I'm always here to answer whatever questions you have. And if I don't have the answer, I probably have talked to somebody who will.
Absolutely. Yeah. Well, this was, another, of your second, interviews that we've done with you today, another great topic, another great discussion. I think you're gonna going to, enlighten some people, with this broadcast as well as the other one about creating a care team.
Jennifer, thank you so much for being our guest. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. Yeah.
Thank you. And if you enjoyed this video with Jennifer, wanna catch your other one about, putting together a care team for a loved one living with dementia, head on over to our website. You can find all of that there as well as other videos all about senior living at www.SeniorLivingLive.com. As always, we appreciate you taking the time to be a part of our conversation. Have a great day, everybody.