Episode #6: Protecting reputation from crises

Welcome! You are listening to share-giving secrets with Deborah Greenhut. If you are a family caregiver or expect to be one and you want to maintain your well-being while caring, then you are in the right place. I am your host, Deborah Greenhut, speaker, author, and rational caregiver advocate. I'm a family-caregiving veteran bringing you survival secrets and experiences from experts who share the goal of doing less by managing more. We need to invent and reinvent family care, and together we're going to do it. My big idea is rational caregiving and my motto is, "Let your brain lead your heart." Please share yours in the comments. Share-giving secrets, because friends don't let friends be caregivers alone. Let's do this! Hello everyone and welcome back to the share-giving secret. Today my guest is Kim Lackey and she has a variety of interesting topics to share with us, and it's based on her experience. So caregivers get ready because there's some really important information that's coming here for you. So welcome, Kim. It's a pleasure to have you here. Thank you and it's wonderful to meet you, even though it's virtual, and I look forward to having a conversation with you. Well, it's kind of hands across the water given where we're back. Yeah, so it's great. So let's start by finding out how you became interested in or began to specialize in your specialty. I won't reveal it for the audience. I'll let you open the door for us. Thank you. Yes. Yeah, so to start off, I had been in a place where I have a 26-year career and law enforcement, and during that career, I had triplets. And I was later in life, so I was around the age of 40, having been in a very high-stress job, and now taking on a caregiving role of looking after three young babies. And back then, we didn't have a lot of podcasts. We're talking, my kids are going to be 20 this year. And lots of change, and we have lots of resources now. YouTube for one, and having channels like yourself to be able to talk about the situations that we find ourselves in as caregivers, whether it's for young children, elderly parents, you know, special friends that don't have anybody else that we need to care for. And really finding community to be able to have these conversations because we can learn a lot from other people's experiences, especially when they're challenging ones. They get very emotional. And if we don't know where to turn, or we just don't have the capacity to even think about where to even ask the questions, no, coming on podcasts like this is one way of being able to just listen and take in some of the information. So some of the things that I like to help my clients with is just taking the pause for yourself to really, you know, we talk about self-care, but what does that mean when you're doing so many things for people that really count on you? And it's really taking time out of your day to sit with yourself in a quiet room. I remember, Erica's once telling me in my midst of dealing with all that I was to take at least 20 minutes. And I'm like, are you serious? 20 minutes? I can get it to quite a few things done in 20 minutes, but just to be able to have a bubble bath or a good shower that I'm not rushing. And being able to ask for that, we have a society that doesn't really want to ask for help, but just being able to ask somebody to say, are you willing to come over, you know, once a week to be able to give me half an hour of your time that I can go and actually go for a walk on my own or that I can go have that bubble bath. There's nothing wrong with asking. And to be able to repeatedly ask, and if somebody says no, but you know what's going on saying, well, is there another time that might be more beneficial? But I think really taking time out to disengage because the brain can be so much in the to do less than the needing things to do that to be able to shut down our nervous system because we can be very reactionary. And I think that's what my problem was. And I ended up finding out that there is a huge mind-body connection. And so what my body was doing over those years of not taking that time out to find my passions, to do things that were important for me, I was starting to get physical pain, physical stiff neck, sore back. I injured my hips and so the pain stayed with me for much, much longer than the healing. And so your body is going to naturally start to adapt to the stress that you're under. And if you're not giving it an inter-release, it is going to start to show up in other ways. And so as a caregiver, I would highly, highly recommend that you start taking the five minutes that it takes to maybe, if you have to go to the bathroom, maybe take the extra five minutes to just stay in the bathroom and just, you know, just get some trait on your breathing. One of that was one of the other things was just to, we talk about box breathing. And I don't know if you know what that is, but it's like breathing out for four seconds, holding for four seconds, breathing in for four seconds, and holding for four seconds. And if you can do that four times, we teach this as law enforcement in the policing world to be able to calm the nerves so that you can start to regulate at least a little bit. So then just some tips, but I really do suggest that for caregivers, we need to be able to take that time away for ourselves because giving, giving, giving is going to show up. We're going to, the cost is going to come at some point. Yeah, unfortunately, the cost is visible to everyone else and not always to ourselves because we are so busy and unwilling to survive a lot. We're trying to survive. We're trying, we've got these threats that, you know, threats as a term, but it's these things that we need to do that nobody, you know, we've taken on ourselves and we want to be able to provide, to be able to help. However, there's going to be, there has to be some boundaries. So what that looks like. And sometimes we need to put those boundaries up to let the person know that we're caregiving that we're not always going to be at their back and call that yes, we are one person, but maybe they have to start bringing in some other help because you need to step back for a little bit. Right. They can't always rely on you. And so seeking those out, you can't think with that oxygen to the brain. So if you don't stop and breathe, your thoughts are not going to be helpful to you. So I know that for sure. And it's interesting that you have told us about your law enforcement pre-career before becoming a caregiver for the triplets. I wonder is it helpful to have been a law enforcement officer to take care of so many children at once? Does that give you a sense? Well, and the kind of law enforcement is we do take care of communities. And so, you know, one of the things that we're taught is to decompress. And we do that through exercise. We're getting better at providing therapy. I did do a lot of talk therapy. I found that it was helpful to a point. Same as medication is helpful to a point. But it really my transformation for myself really came from the internal work that I was doing to say, I can seek out all these external ways to help me try and manage whatever it was I was going through. But it really came down to me to say, I am not willing to sacrifice myself for the betterment of somebody else. So what does that look like for me to start having some inner authority of where those boundaries are going to be? Yeah, I can go and help, but I can only do so much. And so it really took me time to be able to realize that. And we take time for ourselves. We can start out to being these small little moments that we can pull. And as we build some of our capacity back to manage some of the challenges, what I found was really helpful for me was to start to get out in nature, to start to stop all the noise. So stopped watching the news because it would trigger me based on what's happening in the world. And these are things I can't change. Things that I could change was my environment. Just by getting outside and walking my dog and a park, I started to feel differently. I actually started to track. There's an app. I can't find it really quick. It's um, tracking your feelings. I can't find it right now. Maybe I'll give it to you in the show. But it's it tracks like how I was feeling. It's got a range of emotions. Sometimes when we talk about emotions, we're not getting into the full deepness of what that emotion is. So if we can name it and then how it's feeling in our body. So for me, I was feeling a lot of my tension in my neck and my back and my you know, it was hard to move my head. Those kind of things were start to show up because the tension was so bad. And once I could start releasing some of that, I did some sound healing. I listened to some music. I would go out in nature. I would do the breathwork that I mentioned. These are some of the things to start to get the nervous system to disengage from a Friday flight mode because we will find that we're being pushed to our limits. We need to kind of fill that cup up again. And what does that balance look like? You can expend energy, but how are you replacing it? And whether you're replacing it with, you can't do alcohol and I've done that. It doesn't work. You can do medication, you can do therapy, but what are you doing internally to fill that cup for yourself? Because nobody's asking you to sacrifice your life so that somebody else can have a better life. I'm so glad you tied those two things together because we like to say you can't pour from an empty cup. And the word sacrifice comes up frequently. And when I first started talking about caregiving a lot of people objected to my harsh language about it. And they said, "Oh, it's a labor of love." And people want to do this. And those are two true things. But there's another side. And if we are not going to take the time to think and be rational about it and recognize, "What are my limits?" I want to do everything for this person. But if I make myself sick, then there's no one taking care of this person. And we're both in worst shape than before. In fact, many caregivers and themselves in poorer health than the people they're caring for. I'm not getting treatment for it. So if the audience wants to make a change, I think what you're suggesting is the kind of incremental approach that you don't have to take a whole hour and say everybody else, go away. No, because you don't have the capacity. You're trying, you're beginning so much. Yeah. The small changes are doable. It has to be something that you can fit into your life now. That's going to be something that starts this process. And as you be able to build some capacity or some space for yourself, then you can start to say, "Okay, I've been able to do this for long. What's the next thing I can do? What's the next thing I can do?" Because we, what we are, and this is where we get into the work that I do about the unconscious mind, we have a lot of patterns that we've built up since we were young on how to survive in this life. And these patterns, as we get older, don't necessarily serve us very well. So if you're a people pleaser, when you're triggered, what do you do? You go in people please. So we've got to build in the new pattern. So it's taking a pause and say, "How am I going to react to this?" Really, being aware of what blood is that's triggering you to go and actually do something for somebody. Is this going to help them? Is this going to help me? How much energy is it going to take me to go and do this one thing? Maybe I can phone somebody and have them deliver the groceries as opposed to me going to get the groceries. How much work is that going to take? So looking at it from a different lens of like, how much energy am I going to have to put into this door or whatever? To how much energy am I going to have to replace? Was it going to take me to replace that? And so we're building in new, what we call neural pathways in the brain. It's a new pattern of behavior, a new way of looking at things because we are a system of trying to do things on an efficient basis the safest way because we want to keep our whole body safe. Every cell in our body is meant to keep us safe. And if we are trying to push that envelope all the time, your body is going to start to react with pains, with aches, with not sleeping well. And so how do we take that back and say, "Okay, I can't live this way anymore because it's taking too much out of me. How do I start to build some boundaries of like looking at it as energy exchange?" Yeah, and that's probably a less emotionally fraught way to look at it than the guilt that comes here. We're doing it all with love. Yeah, but we only have a capacity for doing so much. We can only make so many decisions in a day. We can have decision fatigue. So if you are making too many decisions in one day, you shouldn't be going out for a run because you're exhausted, but there's maybe going for a walk or maybe sitting and doing suyoga and really stretching out. You know, these are different ways that society has told us that we should give, give, give, and the labor of love you were talking about. It is labor. The labor stops at some point. Yeah, labor can birth to a child. It does stop at some point. And then you're exotty and need time to recoup. Caregivings the same thing. You can't keep pouring into something that's not. You're not giving yourself anything back. Right. This self-love would be important there instead of just generating it for other people. So one of the things I found really difficult as a caregiver was learning to ask other people for help because I was always the go-to person. Are there some thoughts you have about how to retrain yourself, how to break that pattern of doing everything by yourself? Yeah, so when my mom got really sick, I was looking after her, she broke her ankle. She's 86. It was really hard for her to get around. It was going to be a long recovery. I wasn't there to help her do her things. I was help her to get systems in place, people in place for her to be able to manage because me moving across the country wasn't feasible. So it was reaching out to seniors, communities. It was even asking the social workers at the hospital. But being very, you have to ask, you can always be told, no, sorry, we can't do that. But it's by asking and in asking other people that are doing things, whether that's getting on a chat room or getting on calls like this, like if somebody's listening to this, you've got messages in the bottom on YouTube. Could something out there? I feel like I need help figuring out facts. You know, people are willing to help if they've got the answers. Just you have to be able to ask the question. So I was able to get, there was a lady at the checkout at a local grocery store. And she saw that we were getting groceries and she goes, do you have somebody to help your mom get her groceries? And I said, well, no, we were actually looking for somebody and she goes well right over there. And she pointed across the way. There was a volunteer group that that's what they do. They take phone calls from seniors to get their groceries together and they deliver them once a week. And there's a small fee. That's what my mom has now. I didn't even have to go searching for it. It just right. Having a conversation with the cashier at the cashier, you know, they know maybe, you know, you don't always have to go to a senior group or something. But just asking the questions, say, do you know of anything? Blah. You know, even asking the pharmacist if they know because they're in that world of helping seniors. Yeah, sometimes doctors have an idea or a service they're aware of. And I've in the last couple of years, Fenneth, that my county has tons of services available. And websites that you can use all sorts of assists for caregivers that I knew nothing about until A.I. is free too. If you're in, if you're looking at artificial intelligence, whether it's chat, ebt or whatever, it says, you know, just giving your parameters. I'm looking for alternative ways to help support senior living. Yeah. That's in my local area and give it some parameters and do the search that way. And I think often people are afraid that it's going to cost too much. And yet, there are assists available or other ways of doing things and so on that might be important. My mother suffered from an emphysema and she thought when she was on oxygen and put on oxygen 24 hours a day that she would never be able to go anywhere anymore. So I said, mom, let me make a few phone calls and she, oh, I don't want to bother you. And she resisted for a while because she couldn't think of the place to call. And she was getting older, I think, and just the resources had deserted for. And she was taking care of my dad too, by the way. So there was that. But she couldn't think of it. So I, you know, we had still at yellow pages then. So I then thumbed my way through the yellow pages. And I found a number of services. And when I called her back, she wanted to go back at least once more to her house on a lake in Vermont. And this was a dream. And she thought she could never have it. So I coordinated with the service to get pick up her oxygen tanks in New York with two that would go back to Vermont eventually and make the trade for her. So she didn't have to do anything except answer the door to get these. Wow. And the tears, you know, of relief and joy that, and I thought I didn't need to be such a big hero. You know, all I have to do is ask somebody will, you know, somebody should be able to help you. You might have to ask a few people, but something shouldn't have to realize. I just felt so bad that it took her so long to get to that acceptance point. So if any of you are out there listening caregivers, keep bugging your parents. So keep bugging your parents. Yeah. The local churches too. You know, you may not be of their denomination or their beliefs, but there's certainly have some some ways to actually provide service or where you can find those services. Yeah, and they're senior centers. And I know some seniors don't want to be known as a senior and all that, but there's a point when you may need some help. And there's no harm in going to the places that are designed. And then we're not talking about a lifestyle thing. You know, maybe it's a short term injury like my mom with her ankle, you know, and all the sudden you're in this situation and you just need to be able to heal without having all this weight of responsibility. Absolutely. This has been a really great conversation. And I hope we got to to some of the things that are most important to you, Kim. So I'm going to, you certainly did for me. I'm going to ask Do you have a, are you going to put into our show and a gift or some product that people should be looking for that you'd like to share? - Yeah, so this is more along the lines of the work that I do about unconscious patterning and how we can start to just the awareness of what those are for you, can start to this path of what I call a sovereign path. So self-leadership, I'm making decisions based from how it best suits you. And not this old programming that society is saying that curative is the labor of love that we just have to endure. So this, the work that I'm doing, it can reach out into many different aspects of life. So it's called the path forward, talks about unconscious patterning, gives some journal prompts if to really start to have an internal dialogue with yourself and what that looks like for you. And then, and certainly at the end of it if it meant something to you, I would love to get some feedback on it. - But that's something I'd like to provide your audience and let them know that there is another way of looking after others and yourself. - That's fabulous. And I know many people will take advantage of that and learning some more about themselves. And I would love to have you back on in another episode so we can talk specifically about what you are working on in that area and see how far it's developed. - So, look too. - Thank you, Deborah. - Well, I thank you for another great episode. And as I said, I hope that you'll come back and do a reprise at some point. And I really appreciate that you were so personal and warm about what you were able to tell us. If you can talk about your own experience in this, I think people really can appreciate the ideas that you have and bring forward. And we're all gonna have to be about sharegiving 'cause we're all gonna be caregivers at some point. - Yes. - So thank you, Deborah. - Have a great day. - Bye, bye. - My pleasure. (soft music) - Thank you for joining me today on the sharegiving secret. I love sharing insights and stories to empower you on your caregiving journey. If you like what you hear, you can dive deeper by picking up a copy of my pamphlet, non-negotiables for caregivers. Go to my website, devwaregreenhut.com, and click on the link for non-negotiables for caregivers. Until next time, keep sharing, keep caring, and remember, you're not alone on this journey. Thank you for listening. (soft music)