Steps to walk yourself through grief-related guilt

by Kim Vargas, LCSW

Name the feeling. Do not allow yourself to just call it guilt without really digging deep to determine whether you believe you actually have something legitimate that you feel you did wrong. Talk to someone you trust about these feelings.

Acknowledge cumulative grief if applicable. Ask yourself whether some of the grief/guilt might be related to a previous loss. If so, be mindful of the cumulative effect of the grief.  Naming and assigning the grief to its separate roots can be helpful.

Address any legitimate guilt. If you do determine that you have done something wrong, try to find ways to make amends or plan to behave differently in the future. Remind yourself that you cannot change the past, but you can take control of the future.

Accept the sadness. Once you have acknowledged grief as the primary emotion, allow yourself to feel the sadness. Sometimes it is better to sit in the pain than to try to banish it without examination. It can be especially helpful to process these feelings with a trusted individual.

Practice self care and self compassion. Grief takes a tremendous toll on people. In order to keep functioning, it is vital to take care of yourself. In addition, having compassion for oneself makes the process easier. There may be times when the grief is crushing, and other times when it feels more manageable. Giving yourself grace during the hardest times will encourage healing.

Empower yourself. Given that part of the guilt may be a dysfunctional way to feel more in control, it is useful to find healthy ways to empower yourself. This may or may not be related to the grief itself. In some cases, finding empowerment in any realm of one’s life can be incredibly beneficial. This may mean a major life shift, but more often takes the form of something in the moment. Accomplishing a task, cleaning your house, or going out for a run are small examples that may have a large impact.

Wellness for Caregiver’s Stress - Release Relax, Rejuvenate

by Tracey A. Smith, M.Ed. CTRS

What do you do for you? How do you keep your vitality, balance and wellbeing while caregiving?  How do you balance your home, work, relationships and play? How do we deepen our sense of wellbeing and resiliency under an accumulation of stress? In a fast paced society, self-care is often not supported.

Caregivers have the responsibility of caring for another person’s wellbeing. This includes parents, teachers, therapists, clergy, medical professionals, and middle-aged children caring for elderly parents. As caregivers, it is essential to take the characteristics of Care and Giving and use it for our own self-care, for the role of caregiver includes some level of exposure to stress, compassionate fatigue, and traumatic experience on a daily basis.

Compassion fatigue is a process of cumulative exhaustion and the gradual erosion of our ability to care, brought about by the intense demands of caregiving without adequate balance and self-care. Stress affects the mind, body, and spirit. Every person’s stress and levels of burden are unique. How one copes with the symptoms of stress may vary.

Current and ongoing societal stressors can compound the life stress of the caregiver. These stressors can include experiences with racial and gender discrimination, stories of homelessness and violence, natural disasters, and widespread political unrest. Unaddressed, mounting stress can give way to feelings of hopelessness and decreased self-esteem, even leading to withdrawal from friends and family and those communities that help buffer us from burnout.

Dean Solon’s poem Here and Now speaks to the climate of stress during our current times. Encouraged by his perspective, here is an excerpt that I found particularly helpful.

be open to be allowing yourself to be encountering and engaging with these interesting times

be with attention and intention to be living with clarity and loving kindness

it is not time to be shutting down

this is the time to be opening to all that is

with mindfulness and heart fullness

There is hope. Wellness is a choice with the personal responsibility to address our stress. We can make a choice to practice loving kindness with ourselves. Healing and transforming stress and maintaining fitness of the mind, body and spirit involves lifelong learning. The better we take care of ourselves, the better we can care for others. How can we do this?

·      Reconnecting to ourselves and give attention to our well-being.

·      Increasing self-esteem with mindful self-care.

·      Recognizing that attention to self-care is not selfish.

·      Engaging in awareness of the present moment.

The three “R’s for caregiver stress are Release, Relax and Rejuvenate.

RELEASE feelings of guilt, fear and shame. Sometimes we think that we are the only provider of care for a person and may be unable to recognize the resources that are available, reluctant to use existing supports, or in need of new support systems. We may believe, “No one else can do it like me.” And maybe they can’t. But it is still essential that we step away to care for ourselves.  We can learn to allow another caregiver or professional to cover our duties or client while we caring for ourselves. We can begin to learn to combat these fears with our own spiritual fortitude and resilience. Healing Hints - Spend time doing enjoyable leisure and cultural activities, meditating, and participating in the expressive arts.

RELAX and begin to experience the art of doing nothing. Taking the time to learn mindful techniques to quiet mental chatter. It has been said that Mother Theresa took time off from caregiving for 4-5 years in-between service assignements to relax and allow time for healing.

Healing Hints – Create self-made retreats, practice affirmations, spend time with friends who make you laugh, play and have fun.

REJUVENATE movement, exercise, mind, body, spirit energy work can increase our vitality and well-being. Stress and compassionate fatigue have a way of settling in our body and cells. It is imperative to make time for fitness of our bodies.

Healing Hints - walking, pilates, reiki, dancing, sport activity.

Tracey A. Smith, M.Ed., CTRS, Owner Wellness W.R.K.S. LLC (well-being, recreation, knowledge, spirituality), is a Wellness Lifestyle Management Educator, Trainer, Certified Recreational Therapist. What I love about my life practice is the opportunity to serve a variety of populations and participants in an enjoyable fashion.  I provide workshops, trainings, and professional staff development. I create an atmosphere where participants can feel safe to explore their own issues of self-care and lifestyle management, while learning alternative ways of healing. I use Wellness Education and Recreational Therapy balanced with Restorative Practices to promote emotional, physical, mental, spiritual health and wellbeing. I am committed to promoting peaceable communities. To learn more and to schedule a program for your group, visit Tracey’s website [Insert link to: www.wellnesswrksllc.com], Facebook page [Insert link to contact Tracey at https://www.facebook.com/WellnessWRKSLLC/ ] or call her at 215-605-3221.

Deepening Self-Care

by Jennifer Perry, MSEd, MA, LPC

We all know that self-care is important. Perhaps you’ve heard the metaphor about the oxygen mask and putting your own on first. Or the saying that you just can’t pour from an empty cup. For caregivers and everyone else, it is imperative that we make our self-care a non-negotiable. 

Why? 

Because we matter. For those of us who are focused on caring for others, hearing that we matter may not be incentive enough to prioritize self-care. Or it may feel at odds with our caretaking of others. But how we show up for others makes a difference. And prioritizing our own self-care helps us show up with love and energy.

Consider a parenting challenge faced daily in many homes: Bedtime. If you are grouchy because you haven’t eaten, are dehydrated, haven’t slept well, or are still carrying significant stress from your day, it may be very difficult to bring the same patience and care to your child’s nighttime protests. If, on the other hand, you are in a good mood and feel at ease, you are much more likely to bring humor and creativity to any conflicts that arise. Or at least to move through the challenge with greater calm and perspective.

Strong self-care allows us to live fully engaged, vibrant, resilient lives in the face of whatever ups and downs life is throwing our way. 

In my work as a counselor and parenting coach and in my own healing work, I have come to appreciate three dimensions of self-care. While most of us are familiar with the first, examining all three may be the most helpful in deepening our thinking and expanding our practice of caring for ourselves. 

The first dimension includes common self-care practices. These include exercise, diet, meditation, drinking water, spending time on hobbies, spending time with loved ones, giving yourself a treat, etc. Unfortunately, this list can sometimes feel like a weighty list of “shoulds” against which we measure ourselves, defeating the purpose and becoming a source of stress instead of a sanctuary.

The second dimension is less about specific activities and much more about the way we approach every task and moment in our lives and less about what we are doing. Can we be present while doing any mundane life task (including any from the list above) in a way that acknowledges we are a living, human being whose energy matters. We are not machines to be judged by what we accomplish everyday. Instead, our everyday tasks are our lives, not something to power through so we can live in some distant future moment when everything is done and we’ve been productive enough. Some examples include listening to favorite music while doing the dishes, calling friends to talk while commuting, picking up fresh flowers weekly for your office, lighting a candle before you work or pay bills, cooking dinner as a family. The possibilities are endless and can be as individual as your fingerprint. If we are doing the tasks in the first category but rushing through them or simply checking a box to say “done,” we may find ourselves just as depleted as if we were not engaging in self-care practices at all. The how matters.

The third dimension is all about our self-talk. In my individual work with clients and in my mindfulness and self-compassion group, we look very carefully at our inner dialogue. Are we talking to ourselves with kindness and support? Or is our inner world full of sarcasm, self-judgment, and self-deprecation? Is our inner world a safe, caring place to dwell? Our patterns of self-talk are mental habits that can be examined and, over time, shifted towards greater kindness and generosity. With empathy and self-compassion practices, we can learn to soften the harsh, critical voice in our head and turn our inner world into a self-care haven.

Painful experiences in the past may have instilled challenges to all three dimensions of self-care, making it hard to recognize that we are worthy of care, setting up patterns of rushing or avoidance that make mindful attention to the present moment difficult, and creating recorded critical messages that are all-too-easy to play in a loop internally. As a trauma-informed therapist, I understand the impact of these painful experiences and partner with individuals, couples, and groups to help them unburden the weight of the past so that they can experience greater freedom and care for themselves well. You deserve to enjoy your life. I’d love to explore with you ways you can do just that.

Jennifer Perry is a Licensed Professional Counselor, Peaceful Parent Educator and Coach. She is passionate about mindfulness and loves her work helping people relate more compassionately to themselves and to others while learning how to thrive and build lives that they love. She can be reached at 215-292-5056 or jen@heartfulnessconsulting.com www.heartfulnessconsulting.com 

Listening to the Body

By Dana Barron

The human body has the innate capacity to heal, given the proper conditions. While outside interventions may facilitate healing, the body is doing the actual healing work. The more we can tap into and enable that innate capacity, the healthier and more resilient we will be. The first step is to learn to pay attention to and respect the body’s messages. Symptoms are signals, guides. They indicate that our system is out of balance, that we need to take action to return to equilibrium. Pain is a message to stop. Fatigue is a message to rest.

This all may seem obvious, but it is not what we are conditioned to do. We are more likely to fight our symptoms than to heed their signals. We live according to clocks and calendars, not the rhythms of the body. And so we learn to “power through” discomfort. We treat symptoms as nuisances to be overcome or quieted. We respond to pain with medications, fatigue with food or caffeine, and use antacids and gas pills for indigestion. And medicine – with its focus on procedures and pharmaceuticals -- is based more on fighting symptoms than on asking why they are there in the first place. Quelling symptoms may allow us to continue to function, but over time the cost of ignoring what the body is telling us can be very serious.

As a health coach, I start with helping clients reorient their understanding of the body’s messages. We look closely at symptoms, physical sensations, and emotional reactions. We enlist them as clues in the search for root causes. This is the first step in creating an environment where healing can happen. We start discovering correlations and patterns, many of which point to easy solutions. Often we find that removing something can be more powerful than doing something or taking something.

Listening to your body is also of way of regaining power and control over your health. Many people see their bodies as a “black box,” a machine that requires an expert to repair.  There are certainly times when medical intervention is essential and miraculous. When symptoms get strong or persistent, it’s wise to seek expert guidance. View it as a partnership – bring your knowledge and wisdom into the exam room. Enlist health professionals as allies in your search for the reasons behind symptoms. Be cautious about interventions that just mask symptoms.

If something is bothering you, give this strategy a try. Track your symptoms along with your diet and your daily activities. Try pausing when a symptom arises, and think creatively about what your options are. Can you rest briefly rather than reach for something to perk you up or relieve an ache? Try a dietary or lifestyle change and see if it helps you feel better. Over time you will cultivate your intuition and wisdom and the benefits will multiply.