Those wishes have new meaning for many caregivers! 

Together we will get there!

In an effort to walk my talk, I have challenged myself to make my own contributions towards a brighter tomorrow.  

I have launched a new program to help caregivers connect with the help they want and need.  I’m working with businesses who want to get back on sound financial footing by reaching out to caregivers.  

I call it The Caregiver Magnet Program. Click here to learn more about this service. 

Are you a caregiver wishing that a business offered a product or service?  

Are you a business trying to attract caregiving customers and clients?   

Please share your thoughts! 

And 9/11 took us by surprise.  So did our current economic reality.  

If only we had a crystal ball to see the future!  Fortune-telling efforts remind us of our human limitations. 

A brief review of history reminds us of our innate human strength.  We have everything it takes to face any challenge that comes our way.  The resilience of the human spirit is a constant.  The ability of Americans to move forward in the face of adversity is indelible.   

As we enter a new decade, I invite you to hang onto a hope for a better tomorrow.  

Together we can make it so.

Wishing you and your family the very best as we begin a new decade. 

Dr. Vicki  

Here’s a tip that will help your aging parents avoid falls.  Wrap grab bars and bed rails with pipe insulation.  Although it’s not pretty, it can be duct-taped in place.  Not only will it help avoid the feel of cold metal, the bars are easier to grip.

Your aging parents tell you they want to stay in the home they love.  You want to honor their wishes, yet you worry about their safety.  The risks of falls are real and the consequences can be deadly. 

Proactive fall prevention keeps your parents safe—and helps you sleep better at night. 

Here are some tips for bathroom safety.  Some of the steps can be weekend projects; others are best left in the hands of professionals.

Install grab bars near the toilet, bathtub, and shower.  This is the quickest and most effective way to prevent falls.  If you have any questions about your home improvement skills, hire a professional. Be sure to test the strength of all installed grab bars before allowing them to be used.

Install a toilet safety frame, commode, or raised toilet seat.  These products give you something secure to hold on to when getting on or off the toilet seat.   Make sure that you have properly installed grab bars.

Make transfer in and out of the tub safer with a shower chair or transfer bench.

Equip bathtubs and showers with non-skid mats, abrasive strips, or surfaces that are not slippery.  Apply textured strips or appliques on the floors of tubs and showers.  Use non-skid mats in the tub and shower, and on the bathroom floor.

Prevent burns and the falls by setting the hot water heater to “Low” or 120 degrees. If you are unfamiliar with the controls of the water heater, ask a qualified person to adjust it for you. If the hot water system is controlled by the landlord, place a request for a safe setting.

Assure adequate lighting.  Install a light switch near the door, replace the existing switch with a “glow switch” and install a nightlight.

Check small electronic appliances.  Install a ground fault circuit interrupter (GFCI) in your bathroom outlet to protect against electric shock.

Eliminate clutter that are often tripping hazards.

Think “medication.”  Medications, often stored in the bathroom, can lead to dizziness.

Choose the right contractor.   You’ve heard enough horror stories to know the value of quality, integrity and value.

How much will this cost?  It depends.  Expect to spend $200 to $500 for bathroom safety accessories.  Modified vanities, extended fixtures and walk-in tubs increase costs into the thousands.

Many remodeling experts suggest that an extensive bathroom overhaul will average somewhere in the $7,000 to $10,000 range.

Yes, this is chunk of change.  However, compared to the personal and economic costs of a fall, bathroom safety makeover is a smart investment.

The Caregiver Club is an online community for caregivers who want to respond effectively to a loved one, build teamwork and manage stress  as they do it.  Dr. Vicki Rackner, the founder, is a former surgeon, former patient and former caregiver.  She left the operating room and now devotes all of her time to speaking, writing and coaching.  Her most recent book is Caregiving without Regrets: 3 Steps to avoid burnout and manage disappointment, guilt and anger.

Consider our Caregiver Magnet Program. It’s a turn-key system designed to get your name in front of the customers who are looking for your products and services. We’ll create content-rich, client-centered articles and videos for you that answer the questions your caregiver clients ask. Then we’ll distribute them to video sites, article sites, social networking sites and blogs. We’ll even capture leads for you! You’ll see results quickly.

Join the growing number of businesses who are building trusting relationships with their clients—and reaping the business rewards of this investment. Call (425) 451-3777 to explore whether The Caregiver Magnet Program is a good match for you and your business needs.

Want to deepen your connection with family and friends? Here are three thought-provoking questions certain to start a lively conversation. Actor Anna Deveare Smith used these questions in the interviews that are the foundation on her efforts to put her finger on the pulse of America.

1. Do you know the circumstances of your birth?

2. Have you ever faced death?

3. Have you ever been falsely accused?

Be prepared for a real treat! This is a great way to get to know your aging parents even better!

Happy holidays.

As I prepared for the talk I thought about my most painful regret.  I decided to skip my grandmother’s 90^th birthday party.   I had just seen her a few months earlier, I argued to myself, and it would be hard to take the time off work. 

On the morning of her birthday, my grandmother died from a massive heart attack.  At her funeral I felt the crushing weight of regret. What could I have been thinking?  What was more important than celebrating the joyous milestone of one of the most important people in my life? 

Regrets hurt. They burn.  Just as you’re wired with nerves in your fingers to avoid being burned by hot objects, so too you’re wired with regrets to avoid being burned by life.  Just as you automatically pull your finger from a hot stove and avoid hot objects, regret helps you steer clear of the thoughts, feeling and actions that keep you from being your best and highest self. 

I offer a hopeful message: you can heal the pain of regrets. 

Regrets are longings to re-write history.  Forgiveness heals the pain of regrets.  You know you’re healed when you can look back and let the past be just as it was without feeling the urge to change it. Then you move forward and make better choices in the moment so you don’t arrive at tomorrow and look back with regrets about today.

The kinds of regrets you experience and your response to regrets are shaped by your temperament.  It includes the time zone you’re temperamentally drawn to: the past, the present or the future.  It’s also shaped by your expectations of yourself, your ideas about how other people should act, and your take on how the world works.

If you’re drawn to living in the past, the kind of regret you most likely experience is guilt.  Guilt is a pain that tells you there’s a mismatch between the person you’d like to be and the person you were in that moment. 

Imagine the thoughts, feelings and actions of your ideal self as one supporting structure of the bridge and your real thoughts, feelings and actions on the other side of a river.  Guilt spans the distance. 

You wouldn’t keep your finger on a hot stove; yet, the some people do the very thing with the burning of guilt. Guilt can become a grudge you hold against yourself. 

You minimize guilt by making different choices in the moment, adjusting your image of the ideal you or both.  My guilt surrounding my grandmother’s death reminds me of the importance of taking time to celebrate; I now plan my schedule differently.  I also edit my embarrassing child-like beliefs about my own powers.  My presence at my grandmother’s party would not have kept my grandmother alive any more than a phobic person’s worries about crashes keep the plane in the air.  Healing guilt means forgiving yourself for being an imperfect human who made a one-time mistake.

If you’re drawn to the present moment, your regret most likely comes in the form of disappointment.  As you look at the bridge, imagine the events of the world outside of yourself as you expect it to be on one side of the river, and the world as you experience it on the other.  Disappointment spans the distance.   I had relatives who were disappointed about my grandmother’s death.  As irrational as it sounds, even adults believed my grandmother would live forever. 

Disappointment and guilt are distant cousins; the difference is that guilt is an inside job. 

Moving beyond disappointment involves adjusting your expectations about how the world works, or shifting your experience.  My grandmother didn’t live forever.  AND she lived much longer than the doctors predicted after her stroke.  Healing disappointment means forgiving another person or the world for life’s  imperfections. 

If you’re drawn to the future, your regret may take the form of sadness about lost dreams.  Imagine a vase filled with flowers. I think of hope as a vase and the dreams as the bouquet.  It’s always sad when the fresh flowers fade; however there’s always something else you can put in the vase.  My grandmother would not be physically be there to meet my yet-unborn son; however, my grandmother’s stories  could be part of my son’s life.  Healing the regret of lost dreams means shifting your attention away from the flowers on their way to the compost bin; instead you welcome the new bouquet.

It sounds so simple. Here’s the catch.  It’s not easy.  Forgiveness, like garbage removeal, is not a one-time event.  The first time you do it, the load may be so heavy the bag breaks and you wind up cleaning up a new mess.  Over time—with experience—it gets easier.  You learn to take out the little loads so it doesn’t pile up.  And you can learn to generate less trash.

Caregiving is like a prism separating white light into a rainbow; the darkness of regrets is part of the spectrum.

Consider giving yourself a holiday gift.  Forgive yourself for one choice that brought you guilt.  Forgive one other person for one action that disappointed you.  Forgive the world for the bolt of unfairness that stood between you and an old dream. 

Then celebrate the richness that you enjoy today.

Happy holidays!

Guilty thoughts bring discomfort if not downright pain. I wish I could offer a surgical procedure for eliminating guilt from your life. I cannot. The next best thing is learning how to manage guilt so it serves you rather than imprisons you.  

Guilt, like the pain of a finger burned on the stove, is there to keep you safe . Guilt tells you that your thoughts or feelings or actions do not measure up to the caregiver you want to be.  

If you long to have super-human caregiver powers, you are not alone. Wouldn’t it be great to just put on a magic cape, and suddenly you could be in two places at the same time, never need to eat or sleep again, and never forget one detail. 

Then there’s reality.  

It’s as if the person you are with the super-caregiver cape stands on one bank of the river, and the person you are in real life stands on the other. The distance between them is bridged with guilt. The further away the two stand, the greater the guilt. The closer you are to the person you want to be, the less you will experience guilt. 

Here are some tips to help loosen the choke of guilt. 

Recognize guilt. Some people experience guilt as a sensation in their bodies while others experience a thought buzzing around like a mosquito. Learn to recognize guilt. Naming it can be like shining the flashlight under the bed to look for the monsters. 

Identify the trigger for guilt. Identify the thought feel or action you regret. Try filling in this blank, “I am a person who normally….., but not this time.” 

Maybe you feel guilty that you harbored so much bitterness towards your mother, and now she’s gone. You believe, “I am a person who normally treats people with respect and does not hold grudges, but not this time.” 

Maybe you were visiting your parents, and got the call saying your daughter is in the ER after a bike accident.  You believe, “If I were there, I could have prevented the accident, but not this time.”  

Maybe you resent the impact of your father’s illness on your family. You believe, ”A loving son does not get angry at his parents, and certainly not about circumstances others cannot control. My dad didn’t WANT to get sick.” 

Decide what needs to change: your image of the ideal you, the actions of the real you or both. Sometimes this means challenging beliefs you established in childhood. Do you really control the weather, other people’s moods or the course of a loved one’s illness? Are you the only person on the whole planet who can keep your child safe? Is it humanly possible to avoid anger?

 Sometimes guilt reminds you that you need to do better next time whether it’s listening to your intuition or reaching out to a friend in need or letting the words ”I love you” pass through your lips.  

Decide what you’ll do differently next time. What if you could turn back the hands of time and replay the scene? What lessons have you learned? 

Here are some guilt-reducing tips: 

·          Avoid judging your feelings or your mood. They are what they are. Just observe them as you would observe the clouds roll by.·          

·         Poke gentle fun at yourself when you act out of a belief that you hold life or death or the weather in your hands.          

·          Remind yourself you cannot protect the people you love from pain or control their moods. ·          

·          Reframe success. Maybe part of being a good parent is helping your kids manage disappointment if things don’t turn out as planned, like the day you missed a game.·          

·          Recommit to walking your talk. What legacy do you want to leave? What values do you hold dear? If you believe it’s important to be accountable when you make mistakes or treat others with more compassion or tell the truth, do it! 

Forgive. Guild can be a grudge you hold against yourself.  You made the best choices you could at the time. Learn what you can and move forward. Some say forgiveness is the ability of the past to be what it was without needing to change it.  Learn from your guilt and move forward.  

Guilt can propel you to be a better caregiver.  Let is serve you.