Caregiver Stress and Compassion Fatigue
Caregiver burnout, stress, and compassion fatigue are forms of physical and emotional exhaustion that can build when caring for someone else's needs leaves little room for your own. You took on the appointments, medications, and decisions nobody else wanted to make because someone had to do it. As those responsibilities accumulated, caregiving became an organizing part of your life.
Finding this hard does not mean you love the person any less. Caregiving can bring contradictory feelings: love and resentment, compassion and frustration, tenderness and even disgust. Mixed feelings are a normal part of caring for someone under sustained stress.
Signs of Caregiver Stress: More Than a Scheduling Problem
Caregivers often describe:
Not every caregiver reaches this level of stress. If several of these sound familiar, it may be worth paying attention to your mental health and well-being before the demands of caregiving take an even greater toll.
Anticipatory and Ambiguous Grief and Old Family Roles
Caregiving often involves anticipatory and ambiguous grief. Some losses are gradual, while others are losses you can see coming. You may be contending with declining health, a loved one's loss of independence, changes in connection and communication, or a future you had assumed would be shared.
Caregiving can also reactivate family roles you thought you had left behind. For example, the "good son" or "good daughter" who was always the responsible one may naturally become the caregiver, often without much discussion.
Caring for someone with whom you have a long history of conflict or a complicated relationship can make the caregiving role even harder.
Caregiver Guilt and Boundary Setting
Guilt can make caregiving much harder. You may feel guilty about:
Caring for someone is different from taking unlimited responsibility for everything that happens to them. No one can hold that second position indefinitely without a cost.
I often think of the familiar airline instruction: put your own oxygen mask on before helping someone else. The point is not to care less. It is to recognize that setting boundaries and caring for yourself do not mean you are withholding care. Often, that is what makes continued care possible.
Psychotherapy for Caregivers
My role is not to give advice about time management, medical decisions, or living arrangements. My focus in therapy is your mental health and well-being. Depending on your situation, the work may involve:
We can tailor the work to what you are experiencing. Depending on what is contributing, approaches may include:
What Change Can Look Like
Over time, caregivers may describe:
The goal is not to care less. It is to care without vanishing into it.
Is This Work Right for You?
This work may fit adults providing ongoing care to a parent, spouse, partner, child, or sibling. I do not provide psychotherapy to both the caregiver and the person receiving care. If one becomes my client, the other would need a separate therapist.
I provide individual psychotherapy, not family therapy. I also do not provide medical opinions, case management, or placement coordination.
If you are currently in an acute mental health crisis, need intensive addiction or crisis stabilization services, or are court-ordered to attend therapy, a different setting will serve you better right now.
Getting Started
Caregiver burnout can be addressed in therapy, but you do not have to wait until you are completely burned out to reach out for help.
A first conversation can focus on what caregiving is demanding from you and whether I am a suitable match for your situation. I offer a free phone consultation.
To reach me, Karen Sussan, call 845-202-9774 or use the website contact page.
I see clients in person in Suffern, NY and via telehealth throughout New York State and Florida.
Curious if this feels like the right fit?
I invite you to start with a consultation. There is no pressure, just a conversation to see whether working together makes sense.