Care Partner not Care “Giver”

After experiencing both providing care for senior family members – mother, father and husband – and walking alongside counseling clients who are walking similar walks, it started to feel to me like the word “caregiver” carried a lot of assumptions and, as several clients put it, “baggage.

It can make those of us who have first experience with such a role, that we are supposed to give over our own lives, our own druthers, sadly, even our own health to fulfill some cultural idea of what we “should” do. We experience receiving lots of opinions from other people – generically through popular media, and specifically through our friends, acquaintances and other family members.

I started to think about travels in southeast asia where there was, not that long ago, a tradition called “sati”. Long story short, a widow was placed unto of her deceased husband’s funeral pyre to die with him. Maybe to accompany him in the afterlife…? The point being that the woman was supposed to end her life when her husband’s did.

This practice was legally outlawed by governments in that part of the world. The practice did still continue for some time. But the notion of -whether it’s a wife or husband or life partner or other family member – unhealthy sacrifice for the healthy partner for the dying partner is still something that permeates our culture.

I stopped using the term “caregiver”. Months later I talked about this with a psychologist colleague who had just attended a workshop with renowned Alzheimer’s expert Teepa Snow. My colleague told me that Teepa also refuses to use the term caregiver and prefers the term “care partner”. Ahhh, I said, something relaxing immediately inside me.

Care partner connotes love, attention, walking *together* down our life’s paths and also includes the ill individual taking responsibility for their care as they are able and partnering in this life project together with their support person and support circle.

Partnering includes care for *both* individuals and guides us away from latent smatterings of “sati” vibes and expectations, even in a much lesser way that the extreme practice of widow sacrifice.

So, I am encouraging all of my clients, and my family members, and friends to go ahead and try out using care partners to describe themselves and their situations. If they want to use caregivers still, that’s perfectly fine! But at least now people have more choice. And language makes a difference in how we feel!