What would be a benefit to you as a caregiver of an abusive parent?
My mom is a sociopath who was very intelligent, so needless to say that I grew up in a single parent home with a person that was narcissistic, mentally, emotionally and at times physically abusive and neglectful to an extreme.
My mother was formerly diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer's Dementia along with Frontal Lobe Dementia in Dec 2012, and by all indications from both the CAT Scan and when we first noticed some real issues with her cognitive abilities she was likely 4 to 5 years into it.
Do to certain circumstances my mother moved from Canada to USA to live with me, my husband and our three children as we believed that perhaps we could help her out...which of course as we quickly discovered we could not.
Unfortunately what was to be a short term situation has ended up being a long term situation, which had we known we never would have agreed too...but alas such is the way of things.
In my efforts to seek out help and understanding I have discovered that there is very little help for those of us that are in this situation, and in fact very little understanding about the difficulties we face as caregivers and how it effects us differently from most people going through the horrors of watching their parents go through this awful set of diseases.
So while I've read a number of accounts from people facing similar situations, I have to say that in some ways it is very isolating and when you have a parent like this you know that talking about it in general is very difficult because as children we were taught not to speak about such things.
I also notice that many people don't realize that their parent actually has a mental illness along side of the Alzheimer's so I think it makes it even more difficult to deal with as an individual and from an emotional point of view.
So I've been thinking that we need to find a way to help each other out, to help each other find answers, learn to cope with our parent/s in a way that works, but more importantly I think we need to find ways to heal ourselves and understand what we are going through from a different angle.
Also, I believe that through this experience that perhaps we can find some healing from our trauma's through the process.
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I'm certainly not at the point where I'd like to abuse my mother...that goes against my personality and while I don't like my mom very much, I do in fact love her and wish she was not going through this and would not stand for abusive care for her no matter how angry I might get at any point.
I am a very strong believer that all humans deserve to be cared for as well as possible...and that being said...I can not give her as good of a life or as good of care as she could get by people that don't know her from the past.
To that end, I have been diligently trying to find and get her funding so that we can in fact get her into a nursing home...but it has not been as easily attainable as I'd like and after 6 months or so of working on it, filling out forms, waiting for responses, being told it was the wrong form etc...we are starting to get somewhere, but it sure isn't very fast.
As far as financing...mom only has an income of $600 a month...so if it's important to you...I supplement the money...not her supplementing me.
Understand that every person has a very different situation and the reasons we care for our parent/s in these situation varies greatly.
I know that if I'd have understood the full extent of what I was trying to do at the time, I never would have done it...but alas here me and my family are dealing with the situation as best as possible.
Still in some ways I'm glad I've done it because I've discovered some things about my mom that I didn't really understand before. The Dementia has brought out aspects that were hidden when she was more in control that have really helped me see clearer about who she is, who she was and it has put to bed any possibility of her changing, which I think secretly most of us hold onto hope for deep down.
I hope that all makes sense...but also I want to address the issue of finding no help or no one that totally understands etc...that is what I'm posing...that is what I'm advocating...that we start advocating for more understanding from the organizations that do help out and maybe search out other sources to assist us in dealing and also in healing.
I was fortunate to have done a lot of healing work prier to the disease, and I had actually a not to bad relationship with my mom for 10 years before it started to happen, but even then I had to have my guard up all the time...etc etc...I had coping skills and manipulation skills and could re direct her at times so the blow outs and direct abuse were minimized and that was nice. It helps that I did do all that work before, but still the dementia's actually enhanced those sociopath qualities, so it came on in spades and re awakened many things, also the past year and half I've had to re establish my guards and coping skills which does not allow me to be very open and happy all the time...I'm paying the price for that now.
Hope this makes some sense.
I'm just putting out ideas because it's hard to find information specifically relating to the issue. Most of the articles that are written about dealing with the special issues of caring for a person with dementia, while often talking about burn out and having issues dealing with certain behaviors, don't take into account some of the very real emotional issues that surround this particular subject.
I'm grateful that there are a lot of people on this forum that have been dealing with this...it will be helpful...but I'm also wondering if it would behoove us to perhaps get with the Alzheimer's association to develop support groups specifically around our unique issues and things like that.
Does that make sense?