Week 1: What is Validation and How Can it Help Me?
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Thank you, Cecily and Tina, for sharing below.
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I seem to live in a heightened state of being overly stressed now. I have a full time career (65hours a week) and now have become the primary caregiver for my husband who has not been able to work for the last year… all the things we used to do as a team are now being done by myself which causes a great deal of additional stress!
I agree with Cecily! Re-explaining things to my husband constantly will make me get snappy with him. I also get very stressed when he has hallucinations of things that are not happening.. learning to “just go with it” doesn’t always work… As this disease has progressed, I find that I get really stressed when he accuses me of things that are just false.. I feel like I have to prove to him that some of this stuff is false which causes additional stress for me. -
I get stressed a lot when I have to re-explain things to my mom, over and over again. I lose patience with her because I am dealing with my own personal stresses. My stress and lack of patience with Mom is worsened when my level of stress is heightened. At the moment, I am more peaceful so there is not such a struggle.
~ Cecily
Tina – I understand and sympathize with the stress that never seems to go away. It is SO hard to have to do everything & must be especially hard to face it happening with your husband. My latest (typical) communication stress event: Dad just called and said he knows they can get facility group events on their TV because he remembers doing it before (not possible). We argued a bit but having just watched this video I asked what he remembered about these events. By the end of the conversation he agreed that maybe he had done those group events in another room and I explained he would be able to do one tomorrow. It really took effort to figure out what he was remembering and the misconnections he was making in his mind, but he was satisfied by the end of our conversation. Phew! It does not always happen this way and he has been quite angry lately.