What makes accepting help easier is to have it defined as help. “I can help you with that” is a world away from “let me do that,” and the first step here is listening. Asking if it’s awkward to get in and out of the shower, difficult to wash your back (a task that everybody has a hard time with!), put on your socks – to a client this sounds so different than saying “I’ll do that for you.”
We talk so much about caring for our beloved elders, our extremely young family members, and our loved ones who have special needs, that sometimes we forget about one of the most common variations of family caregiver: those who are caring for our partners. I like to think of this kind of care as a different dialect within the language of love.
In this second part we’ll look at the In-Between stage. For caregivers it is the space between what was and what will be. Suzanne Braun Levine calls this space the Fertile Void and describes it as, “the long, slow, deep breath -the gathering in of strength – that precedes a daring leap into the unknown.”
There are three stages of transitions: Letting Go of the Old Way, the In-Between, and Accepting the New Way. These stages are not linear and logical. We move back and forth, they overlap, are fluid and sometimes we have several transitions going on at one time.
