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The cost & courage of caring - stories that spark resilience.
Caregivers Podcast Admin (00:00.674)
Welcome everyone. Welcome back to the Caregivers podcast. I'm Dr. Mark, your host, and it's great to have you back. Today's a solo episode. I really wanted to spend some time exploring a couple of the issues which I think have really had a big impact on me. And they're going to sort of flow through the podcast with certain flavors. And I think it'd be really good that we spend some time exploring them to get where I'm coming from and sort of the understanding I have about it. And it may also...
serve you an important sort of step forward, if you will, into the zone and certainly some valuable information that I think we'd all benefit from understanding. certainly in the comments, if there any questions or thoughts that arise, please share them and we'll sort of go from there. So, you know,
This goes, it pulls down to sort of back to square one. We give because we care. And I think every caregiver probably knows what it's like to truly feel exhausted. But here is the hard part.
Caregivers Podcast Admin (01:14.936)
The question that really arises from all of this is that, what if the thing weighing us down the most as caregivers is actually not tiredness? But what actually could it be? Well, what if it's actually the old wounds that we've never really acknowledged or had space or created the space to heal? Wounds that are silently pressing on our heart and just keeping us contained.
almost as though our heart, if it were ourself, is just being compressed from the outside. So today's episode is what I call the silent and hidden epidemic in caregiving, the hidden cost of unhealed trauma.
And here's the truth, until we face these hidden wounds and those residues of past painful experiences that may have been last week, last month, or going back to childhood, no amount of vacations, yoga, classes, or mindfulness apps are really gonna bring lasting relief.
Need to remember that this kind of trauma doesn't always show up as some big dramatic breakdown, but actually more often it's the slow erosion of joy and the hollowing of our own presence in the moment. And eventually the quiet conviction emerges that, well, your needs don't matter. So today I want to take you through a journey about this reality and not to discourage you or anything like that or to create stress, but maybe to give some language and clarity or maybe even a permission for something you already feel.
in your chest or in your neck, but haven't named or tamed. So let's take this to the next level. Why does this matter? Caregiving, as you know, comes in so many forms and it's founded on principles of need, caring, giving oneself, providing empathy. Some of us caregivers are physicians, some are nurses, others are parents, teachers, therapists, social workers, first responders, and adult children looking after aging parents.
Caregivers Podcast Admin (03:17.87)
And the notion of caregiving is just so many things. It's the surgeon rounding at 5 a.m. before a huge busy day in the OR. It's the nurse sitting quietly hours after her patient's cardiac arrest, feeling totally alone. It's the mother who hasn't had a good night's sleep in a full decade. And it's the adult child spoon feeding their frail parent, hoping that they won't choke in any moment.
As a caregiver, you sacrifice, you show up, you give when you're already empty, and somehow we're praised for that selflessness and rewarded for endurance when our own needs risk being overlooked. Taken to the extreme, caregiving can even mean carrying the burden of other people's struggles as if they were your own.
But here's the paradox, that very special empathy that actually makes us good caregivers can also kind of backfire. It can actually be our greatest liability. And more so if your empathy evolved as a tool during your years growing up where you may have never really learned towards turning that empathy towards yourself so that you could learn self-compassion. Because when our empathy's never turned inwards, our needs inevitably make it to the bottom of the list.
and our self-care soon risks falling by the wayside. And this just isn't personal. It's actually systemic in our culture, whether in hospitals, in family structures, schools, communities. It thrives on the silent compliance of caregivers who keep going no matter what the cost. And...
price of this silence isn't only our own health, it's the distance that grows in our relationships, in our marriages, in our friendships, our ability to be truly present with our children.
Caregivers Podcast Admin (05:18.446)
So if we frame this further, let's talk about the hidden cost of unhealed trauma. And let me tell you a story, not about one person, but about all the people who make up caregivers and their stories that I've met across medicine, therapy, parenting, and caregiving. Close your eyes and imagine a caregiver, outwardly competent, respected, even admired. At home, they try to show up for their kids.
their partner, their friends, but over time something happens. They just quietly begin to start feeling hollow and notice that what they used to enjoy, the music, the cooking, the laughter, even time with closest friends, somehow feels distant, now passing by like shadows of the past.
I they're still giving, they're still caring, they're still performing at a high level, but the joy's gone. And at work they perform well, and at home they show up, but quietly they feel empty. The person who once enjoyed is now just that sort of shell of themselves. It's kind of hollow when you tap at it. So that's what unhealed trauma does. It doesn't always explode, as I said. It actually...
More often, quietly, it just erodes you. It steals presence. It steals joy and it makes us strangers to ourselves.
Caregivers Podcast Admin (06:47.032)
So it's not like the dramatic kind of trauma people imagine. It's subtle. It lingers. It lingers in our stories of the past evolving in the present with repeated moments of being dismissed, devalued, overruled or expected to endure more than anybody in this world should. And in the end, becoming desensitized and transactional because that's what the world expects of us. These micro wounds add up and eventually they become a weight so heavy
that even the most committed caregiver begins to collapse inside. You kind of just feel like you're imploding. You're giving, giving, but you're imploding. So here's the dangerous part. Caregivers are often celebrated for just pushing through, for enduring without complaint, to use a popular term for just sucking it up. And the system is really built on our willingness to keep going no matter what the costs. And every time we silence ourselves and silence our own pain, we report.
ourselves and reinforce that belief that our needs don't really matter that much. So slowly and silently, trauma becomes a part of the caregiving identity itself. So let's transition to a bigger theme of self-healing. And that's why I say that self-healing isn't optional. It isn't indulgence. It's not selfish. It's actually our survival and it's the missing piece. Because until we create space to heal what we've carried,
Everything else we try to engage in for our own wellness will be episodic and will only skim the surface. And I think we've all been there. We've all tried little things here and there.
Take a moment and listen to your body. What's it telling you right now, hearing all of this? Does your chest tighten? Do your neck muscles tighten? Are you feeling your shoulders tense up? Do you feel heaviness in your stomach? Well, that's actually your nervous system speaking to you because it remembers the unhealed trauma. Unhealed trauma doesn't vanish. It settles in our bodies and in our relationships and how we make our choices.
Caregivers Podcast Admin (08:55.232)
Unhealed trauma shapes the tone of our voice and when we snap at someone we love, determines how close we dare let others come.
Summing up a lot of stuff I've read, kind of sounds like this. It's like a ghost and it insists on being fed by the energy of the present. So let's expose the core of the episode. Let's start with this. Caregiver, heal thyself. Caregiver, care for thyself. So much is structured on patriarchal systems that have rewarded pushing through while punishing vulnerability.
And that's an underlying theme of Terry Real's book, I Don't Want to Talk About It, and certainly a book that had a big influence on me. In doing so, they fuel the unacknowledged pain that drives destructive patterns and unhealed trauma whispers, tells us that our own needs are dangerous, convinces us not to ask for help. In fact, asking for help is just a sign of weakness. So in caring for others, we just end up wrestling with that.
oldest human question, how much of ourselves must we abandon to prove we are good? That too compiled from lots of writings out there. So I think self-healing is really the missing piece. And we really need to unpack it because caregivers rarely begin without some inner story of our past. Sometimes that story is the script that fuels that little voice in our head that
is the inner critic that some of us know. And we arrive at this role as a caregiver already carrying invisible baggage, the stories, the rules, the wounds passed down through generations, families, cultures. I mean, think about it. Long before we became nurses, physicians, social workers, physiotherapists, teachers, philanthropists, children caring for our frail, ailing parents, we were children ourselves.
Caregivers Podcast Admin (10:56.226)
Children who learned in quiet but powerful ways, what earned love, what kept the peace, what made us valuable. For many of us, that lesson was really simple. You're good when you give and you're selfish when you ask. So maybe you did grow up in a family where your mother survived by tending to everyone else's needs before her own. And silently that teaching to you was that
Love equals exhaustion. Or maybe your father was emotionally distant and you discovered that the way to stay close was to actually perform, to achieve, to never be a burden. Or maybe you watched generations before you deal with war. Survivors of immigration, people who endured depression and poverty, who coped by sacrificing themselves for the next generation.
and survival just became your script. This is what we call generational trauma. It just follows us. It's not evil in nature and it's not meant to hurt, but it's just the history and the pains assumed that pass on to the next generation. And I'm not implying that it was inflicted in some purposeful, callous manner. So it's not just inherited genetics, but it's inherited beliefs, inherited beliefs about worth, self-worth.
And it's often unspoken. It's a rule that sacrifices the currency of belonging. Where you strive to feel most comfortable. So when you step into a caregiving role, you're not just reacting to today's stress, you're actually enacting an ancient contract with yourself that my needs last so that others can live now. We can start to see where this really gets tricky.
These are not bad habits, they're trauma legacies. They're choices almost made on autopilot written long ago in ancient time before you knew you had a choice. And they've just kind of stayed ingrained. What it looks like in practice. How about the physician who skips meals, not just because the ward is busy, but because deep down eating feels indulgent when others are suffering and more can be done in the day.
Caregivers Podcast Admin (13:20.396)
Or the mother who never buys herself anything nice because she learned as a child that parents are givers and they're meant to go without. Or the social worker who listens to trauma all day and never tells her own story because vulnerability was really never modeled as something safe.
So take a breath with me here. Everybody just take a breath in, hold it for four seconds and blow it out completely and notice what stirs in you while you're healing all of this. Do you feel anger? Do you feel sadness rising? Do you feel hurt? Maybe even numb. Whatever surfaces just honored in the moment, it's real. These reactions aren't random. They're your body remembering the past. And we can learn from these.
bodily memories. We can learn to actually let them go and pass through us. And it takes some practice, but it's doable. And I would definitely recommend you read Michael Singer's book, The Untethered Soul, because he goes into such beautiful ways of dealing with these emotions as they arrive and builds that sort of strength that allows you to experience them, give them their place, and then let them go.
I can't tell you enough how much learning that skill has made a difference for me. We can learn to let these feelings in our bodies, these memories, let them go and let them pass through us, but it does take some practice. And if we don't take the time to heal, there is a cost. And when we ignore these histories, we convince ourselves that endurance is virtue, that exhaustion is proof of devotion, but unhealed trauma doesn't stay still. It bleeds into how we parent.
into the tone of our marriages, into the way we respond to colleagues and patients, it fuels resentment we can't name. It even makes joy feel undeserved sometimes, and eventually it just hollows us out. know, healing doesn't mean erasing the past. It's kind of just finally all about acknowledging it. It means saying, this pattern was real, but it doesn't have to define me now, in the moment, today, or in the future.
Caregivers Podcast Admin (15:36.526)
Because without that, all the self-care tips in the world are really just little band-aids, vacations, meditation apps, as I alluded to earlier, gym memberships. They may erase some symptoms temporarily, but they don't get to the root. The missing piece here is healing.
Not just resting, not just coping, but actively untangling the past so healing can occur, so that caregiving can become a choice, not a compulsion. Healing liberates energy that you can re-devote to yourself and actually feel empowered to capture time for yourself.
So as we think about unhealed trauma, it's not only its weight in our daily exhaustion, but its roots in childhood and generational stories and the beliefs we absorbed about what makes us worth it or what's not enough.
It's important that the lingering effects of these past traumas don't just sort of fade away with time. Research actually shows that early experiences, attachment, wounds, betrayal, growing up in families or systems that were rewarded sacrifice over self-care and self-awareness actually shape how we respond later on in life when our moral values become challenged or even violated. And that can perpetuate moral injury and almost accelerate it.
And those injuries come in various forms for the caregiver facing moral injuries that are visibly increasing in our society.
Caregivers Podcast Admin (17:10.338)
and we'll get more into that in some future episodes.
Caregivers Podcast Admin (17:16.044)
So we've walked through the hidden epidemic of unhealed trauma that comes with caregiving. It's there. We've seen how generational wounds, the rules that we learned innocently as children about worth and self-sacrifice and how they quietly shape the way we show up today. And we've seen how those old scripts can just sort of hollow us out, make us strangers to joy, even as we continue to give.
and give and give. And now we've named the missing piece, it's self-healing, not indulgence, not luxury, but just survival. Survival to build and do better. The exercise of healing releases such a great deal of cathartic energy, which I think caregivers can actually choose to direct towards themselves finally, and doing so capturing the time they need to redirect to self-care.
So before I close today, I'd like to just touch on something that deserves its own episode eventually, and look forward to sharing these ideas with guests in the future. But research now shows that when we carry unresolved trauma, especially from childhood adversity or attachment wounds or betrayal, we're more vulnerable to what causes moral injury.
And that's where forced to act or watch others act in ways that betray our own deepest values. Studies of civilians and veterans alike have found that this pattern in those with earlier trauma don't just get morally injured more easily, but they actually feel it more deeply and shame cuts sharper, regret feels heavier. Why? Because those old wounds never healed. They left cracks in the moral self and the moral armor.
And when new injuries arrive, those cracks widen. So here's the connection. Our unhealed past makes the wounds of the present more dangerous, which is why healing matters not only for our daily lives, but also for protecting us from the worst injuries caregiving can bring. I hope today's episode brought up some new ideas to think about, and I encourage you to think about them further and reflect on them. So in closing today, to the caregivers, wherever you are,
Caregivers Podcast Admin (19:39.128)
I'll leave you with this call. What's one small piece of pain that you've carried silently because you thought it didn't matter? But now they've heard our discussion today, one that maybe stands out. Nevertheless, because some of the physical symptoms that you get when you actually think about it in greater detail or when you feel it cropping into your everyday life or into your life as a caregiver, what would it mean to actually sit down and even briefly name it and
choose to try and heal it. Starting first by letting it go.
Self-healing doesn't mean an erasure. It's not getting rid of the past, but it just creates space for something new. A presence for connection and joy in the moment while leaving some things in the past. It's not selfish. It's actually the most courageous gift you could actually give to yourself, to yourself, and actually the people who rely on you, the people you care for, and the people you rely on.
Because in the end, your self-worth was never meant to be measured by how much you could just give, give, and give.
It was always meant to be measured by the simple fact that you're here and you being here is enough.
Caregivers Podcast Admin (21:00.982)
In an upcoming episode, I'd like to take us a little deeper.
take us a little deeper into the idea of moral injury and
what it's all about in a caregiver's life. What is it? Where does it exist? How is it different from burnout? Because we hear about burnout everywhere and all the time, but there's more to it when it comes to moral injury. How can we protect ourselves from it?
what informs it. And I look forward to welcoming several guests in the future who are actually going to help us expand on these ideas so that caregivers can understand where moral injury
comes into the equation and how we might best be able to deal with it. So for now, I'm going to leave you with some parting words. that is, healing from your past is probably the surest way to safeguard
Caregivers Podcast Admin (22:10.87)
a healthy, happy, and courageous life as a caregiver.
And I hope our discussion today and our thoughts.
welcome you to that space where you can start taking those healing steps. I appreciate you being here today. I look forward to welcoming you to future episodes. Please message me, send us comments. We're here to make this the best podcast for caregivers that addresses their needs, that helps them explore areas, that makes us as a collective, no matter what exact type of caregiver we are, but a collective of strength.
Strength in caregiving and strength in self-care. So we want to hear what you have to say. We want to make this something valuable. We're giving it our all, our all will even be better from information from you, the listeners, the subscribers. So until we see you again next time, care well, live well, and care for yourself well.
Before we wrap up, I wanted to remind you of something important. The conversations you hear on this podcast are here to inform, to support, to spark reflection. You're not a substitute for professional medical advice, care, therapy, or crisis services. Listening to this podcast does not create a doctor-patient or caregiver-client relationship between us. If you're facing a medical concern, health challenge, a mental health challenge, or a caregiving situation that needs guidance, I encourage you to reach out to a qualified professional who knows your story. If you're ever in crisis,
Caregivers Podcast Admin (23:47.854)
Please don't wait. Call your local emergency number or recognize Crisis Hotline right away. You deserve real time help and support. The views you hear on this show, whether from me or my guests, are our own. They don't necessarily reflect any organizations we work with, are part of, or have worked with or been part of in the past. This podcast is an independent production. It's not tied to any hospital, university, or healthcare system. Thank you for being here, for listening, and most of all, for taking the time to care for yourself while you continue to care for others. I look forward to hearing from you.