Aging/caretaking

The process of aging is natural, unfortunately our culture often views and portrays it as negative, as a weakness or threat. We are inundated with messages about prevention rather than acceptance. Consequently, the aging or caretaking process can create fear and shame over one’s feelings and emotions about getting older. At some point, any of the following can result:

• Depression
• Fear
• Anxiety
• Insecurity
• Loss of purpose
• Confusion
• Loneliness

Therapy to Process Aging and or Caretaking

Anyone needing help navigating their feelings, emotions, and behaviors toward their own or someone else’s aging process can benefit from a therapeutic approach that emphasizes the power of storytelling. Healthy intentional storytelling includes acceptance, perspective, and identity.

We all have a choice about how we want to frame the story of our lives. I help my clients reflect in a healthy way and create a narrative of their life that is fulfilling, valuable, and hopeful.

Most of us, for a variety of reasons, default to a poor, fearful, resistant relationship to aging. Willingness, intentionality and reframing tell us we can safely “break up” with this damaging so-called relationship and create a new one based on compassion and agency. Therapy supports a limitless, open-ended perspective. Within those perspectives, we can create a meaningful narrative together.

The therapeutic relationship is a place where you can have space to explore what you know and what you don’t know…. yet. This is a critical part of how to process aging and caretaking in a healthy, accepting way. Caretaking and aging requires an openness to the unknown while confronting fear and reframing the need for control. We can’t stop time, but we can build internal resources to improve how we cope with our daily experience of life in this world.