Family provides us with wonderful relational connections throughout our lives, but sometimes personalities butt heads and tempers flare. It can be hard to let go of hurtful incidents, even from many years ago. These types of family dynamics can make tasks like helping secure senior care assistance more complicated, especially if a degenerative disease like Alzheimer’s is involved. It may not be easy, but you don’t have to give up hope of finding solutions!
AARP offers the following tips to help family members overcome difficult dynamics and provide the best senior care for a loved one:
- Learn from the past. Fully letting go of past hurts may be too lofty of a goal to achieve, but it is possible to gain insight and a renewed perspective when viewing through the lens of lessons learned.
- Focus on positives. If your strained relationships are like most, they’re comprised of both difficult and pleasant memories. Draw from the positives and try to place your focus more fully on those.
- Rely on your values. Rather than refusing to participate in caring for a loved one because of a hurt that person inflicted upon you, fall back on your core values, such as the importance of helping others and treating them the way you’d like to be treated.
A professional home care agency, like Home Matters, can also help tremendously by providing an objective third party caregiver who can offer expert, personalized care at home. Our home care services reach throughout. Let us take care of the day to day tasks and be there when you can’t. An aging loved one’s senior care needs don’t have to be cause for hurt and frustration in your family; we’re just a phone call away!