Caregiver Guilt: How to Realize and Get Rid of it

Guilty feeling beyond a limit and reason can disturb a person’s normal life. This is the case with some caregivers especially those who are the only ones to take care of their loving parent or grandparent in their family. These caregivers take full responsibility to take care of their loved ones.

However, some of them have caregiver guilt and feel that they are not able to provide the utmost care for their loved ones even if they really do. When you are caring for your loved ones with great affection why do such guilty feelings or caregiver guilt feelings wander in your minds?

Let us find out the reason and the way to come out of it.

Caregiver Guilt: Why do you feel guilty?

Normally, it is good to have guilty feeling if someone recognizes the fault done by him or her. However, if the guilt arouses as a caregiver without any reason it can overpower you causing mental disturbances and poor health condition. Usually, caregivers feel guilty when others find fault with their way of providing care.

When you are taking care of your loved ones you will want to provide utmost care. If you are not able to provide care to satisfy others expectations it can make you unhappy with your service for your loved one.

This will become a heavy task for you that needs to be done with perfection. If your service does not meet it the guilt starts building in you.

This in turn will lead you to a stressful life. You will start feeling like you just want to run away from this situation for a while until you can take a long fresh breath and relax your mind.

But even if you try doing so your mind keeps wandering to your loved one who wants your support and care. This can make the situation worse with more and more guilty feelings, especially if something goes wrong while you were resting or away from the scene for some other reason. Your guilt can almost touch the sky disturbing your mind terribly.

How to come out of Caregiver Guilt?

You are a human and not a machine. Even caregivers should have rest once in a while from this heavy daily task. If you start feeling guilty beyond a limit you will also be stressed so much that you might not be able to take care of your loved one like before.

This can further worsen the guilty feeling. Do not worry much about it. Take a look at some of the ways given below that can help you in getting rid of guilt from your life.

Divide your work with someone else

You can ask other family members to take care of the elder parent when you need rest. If there is no one else to take care of your loved one in your family you can ask for help from an agency.

This way your loved one will have the chance to get friendly with a new person and get some change in life. Also, you will get some time to take rest and get rid of caregiver guilt as well as stress.

Believe that you are doing your best as a caregiver

Don’t go by what others think of you. If you are doing your best and satisfied yourself as a caregiver for your loved one there is no reason to feel guilty. If you are caring for your loved one with great care, affection, and dedication you should believe that you are doing your best for your loved one and there is no room for guilty feelings.

Understand why you are feeling guilty

If guilt is not leaving you in spite of doing your best then you should try to understand where you are going wrong. You can list down the things that you do for your loved one and see what all you are doing and what you are missing that is important.

This might help you in finding out the cause. You can also do something that interests you to get out from the guilty feeling by watching a good entertaining movie, going for a walk and meet your friends or neighbors, or just meditate for some time which really does your mind and body a lot of good.

The good work of a caregiver can be very rewarding. You should not let your guilt and stress filled life overpower you so much that you start running away from your responsibilities. This will only hurt your loved one and yourself too.

So think and be positive by doing things that can keep you happy as well as your loved one and any caregiver guilt feelings should diminish over time until it’s nothing to worry about.