Caregivers and Older Adults

Facing the final chapters of life, whether yours or a loved one’s, is challenging.

You’re having conversations about health, finances, housing, relationships, and decision-making you never wanted to have – for which you don’t feel ready or equipped.

Time itself can feel like an enemy or a fleeting, precious substance of which there is never enough.

Up close or at a distance, in-home or residential facility, with loving or strained relationships – aging and caregiving can be arduous.

Worst of all is the loneliness and lack of control of your life.

Navigating the uncertainty and anticipation of emergencies, treatments, and death can be relentlessly stressful.

It’s hard to enjoy your time with loved ones when there are logistics to manage and all the complicated emotions about the changes that have happened.

While you try to maintain the highest quality and dignity of life for yourself and your family, you grieve various losses of ability, freedom, and, ultimately, life.

Trust me – I understand.

My experiences as a nursing home visiting companion, hospice volunteer, and daughter and granddaughter to aging and ill family members have given me knowledge, wisdom, and passion for helping older folks and those who care for them.

I do not shy away from hearing and seeing the details of past trauma, present struggles, and future possibilities and certainties.

Therapy can guide you from regret, pain, and frustration to connection, acceptance, and purpose.

Caregivers of aging adults face many challenges.

Your relationship is sometimes loving or strained – and challenging on all occasions.

Distance to an aging or ill parent is part of the problem, but challenges persist regardless of distance.

You may have decided to make caregiving one of many other roles and responsibilities. Alternatively, you may have put your life on hold to be there for them. Whatever the approach, the stress can get to you after a while.

Caregivers gain practical skills and emotional nourishment from therapy.

If you are experiencing burnout or struggling with resentment or guilt, I can help provide the support and care you need to endure and find meaning and purpose in your role as a caregiver.

Together, we can explore and strengthen your ability to set boundaries, manage time and resources more efficiently, advocate for yourself and your loved one, resolve conflicts, delegate care tasks with others, and care more sustainably and satisfactorily.

By processing your feelings and exploring your goals and values in therapy, you will be better able to problem-solve and take action from a place of love rather than fear and obligation.

If you are facing your aging process and death – I want to provide compassionate witnessing of all parts of your life.

You have lived through the milestones of youth, adolescence, and early and middle-aged adult years and now face new challenges.

The issues we can address in therapy are: the physical and mental aspects of aging, retirement goals, sexuality, body image, coping with pain and medical conditions/diseases, death and dying of peers/partners, confronting one’s mortality, spiritual beliefs, relationship repair, and strengthening, changes in home and living situation, existential issues of meaning-making, and unresolved trauma and wounding.

The following chapters of life offer the opportunity to reflect, renew, make memories and changes, and prepare for the ultimate transition of death.

Time is precious; you want to make it count.

Aging and death are processes we rarely discuss in society, leading to more confusion and fear.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Click below for a free 15-minute phone consultation. I look forward to supporting you and providing the care you need and deserve as you care for yourself and your loved ones.