The way you treat one another during this very difficult time, and that how you, how you talk with one another, how you make choices together, um, how you respect one another’s ideas, that that is gonna affect your relationship forever after. And because people remember exactly what was said and how it was said. Are you caring for others while working and trying to live your own life? Wondering how to find the time for your own health and happiness? Well, you’re in the right place. The Happy Healthy Caregiver podcast, which is part of the whole Care Network, is the show where real family caregivers share how to be happy and healthy while caring for others.

Hello and welcome. I’m your host, Elizabeth Miller. I’m a fellow family caregiver, a care advocate, a professional. Speaker, author, certified caregiving consultant, and certified senior advisor. If this is your first time listening, thank you for being here. This is a show produced biweekly to help family caregivers integrate self-care and caregiving into their lives. Each episode has an accompanying show notes page. If you’d like more detail about the topics, products, and resources we speak about, or you want to see any of the related photos, you’ll find the show notes by going to the website Happy.

Healthy Caregiver. com and underneath the podcast menu, click the image or episode number for today’s show. The link for the show notes will also be in your podcast platform’s episode description. Now, let’s get to it. Let’s jump into this episode. Before we get into this Caregiver Spotlight episode with Barry Jacobs, I first have a couple of segments and announcements of my own. The first one is, I want to encourage you if you’re not already on the Happy Healthy caregiver email. to do so. It’s free. It comes out every week and I share something happy, healthy, and caregiving related in each newsletter edition.

All you gotta do is share your email address and I promise I’m not going to share it with anybody because I also hate junk mail. Check it out at bit. lee HHC news. I want to take a moment to thank our episode sponsor for today, Rare Patient Voice. Did you know that you can earn cash in exchange for sharing your opinion? Rare. Patiento or RPV helps connect researchers with patients and family caregivers for over 700 diseases and conditions. RPV provides the opportunity to voice your opinions to improve medical products and services while earning cash rewards.

If you’re interested, join the RPV panel at rarepatientVoice. com/happyhealthy caregiver. We’re gonna talk about a couple of the books in this segment um with Barry, but I also want to share a fiction read that I Completed recently. It’s called The Frozen River and it’s a novel by Ariel Lahon. This was a Good Morning America book pick, a Goodreads Choice Award nominee and historical fiction for 2024, but it is also good to note that this is not a biography. It is a gripping historical fiction mystery inspired by the life and diary of Martha Ballard, a renowned 18th century midwife who defied the legal system and wrote herself.

Into American history. The story takes place in Maine in 1789. It’s about an unsung hero on a quest for justice at a time when women were meant to be seen and not heard. I also think a supporting star of the show would be Martha’s Journal, which she took notes in about the medical events and the happenings. I found the stories to be interesting along with learning about medicinal and judicial systems of early America. This however, be triggering content for some as there are some crimes against women within the pages of this book.

I gave it 4 out of 5 stars on my Goodreads review and I’m going to link to it so you can check it out if you’d like to learn more. My favorite thing that I want to share, I feel like it’s really appropriate since we talked with Barry about therapy and he’s a psychologist along with his wife. I have general anxiety and for years, especially in my intense sandwich generation caregiving years, I took medication to help me. And then a few years back, I decided I wanted to try weaning myself off of them because life had really started to simplify a bit.

My kids were older, my caregiving responsibilities weren’t as intense, and I started to work for myself as a full-time entrepreneur, although I’m not sure that was less stressful or is less stressful, but the 100% flexibility that I have is a game changer. My stress and anxiety feel more situational now. Some stress and anxiety is good. We talk about that in the show. For example, when I want to do a good job speaking to groups of caregivers, or recently I had an opportunity to do a satellite media tour, which was very intense and nerve-wracking to have lots of eyeballs on you on live TV and radio and right within the room, trying to memorize key talking points and smile and to bring the energy for what ended up being 253 TV and radio interviews.

It was, it was a lot about digital and online safety though. Um, and how sandwich generation caregivers are impacted. I say all that to say, it was stressful and I deal with generalized anxiety. So it was something that I’m grateful that I got the experience to do through a partner of mine, Cox Mobile. Box breathing was critical during that day and it’s been critical for me at various moments. It’s frankly my go to strategy and my One of my favorite tools, which is why I’m putting it here in my favorite things segment.

It’s 100% accessible. We couldn’t ask for anything better than that. It’s free. You just have to be aware that your stress level is rising up and then you implement this breathing practice. Basically, what it is is you’re doing in a box, you are gonna breathe in for a count of 4 through your nose, you’re gonna to hold it for 4, you’re gonna exhale for 4 through your mouth, and then you’re gonna hold it at 4 when your breath stays flat, and then you’re gonna repeat this maybe 4 more times. So, I’m gonna try to demonstrate it and then I’m gonna share a video of another expert explaining it and visualizing it for you there too.

So I’ll link to that YouTube video. But So now that we’re all feeling a little bit calmer, we’re gonna head into today’s show and meet our caregiver in the spotlight. Our guest is Barry Jacobs. He’s a clinical psychologist and author based just outside of Philly, who has a real heart for supporting family caregivers. And that passion is personal. Barry’s caregiving journey started young when he was just 14. His dad was diagnosed with brain cancer and sadly passed away the following year. That experience shaped the direction of his life and career.

Later, from 2010 to 2017, Barry stepped into the caregiving role again, this time for his stepfather who had Alzheimer’s and his mom, who was living with vascular dementia. He truly understands the emotional roller coaster that comes with caregiving and has spent his career helping others navigate it with more support and less guilt. In this episode, we discussed two of his books, co-written with his wife, one on love and relationships. after 93 and one focused on addressing common family caregiving questions. We delve deeper into the topics of guilt, family dynamics, and self-care.

Barry has much personal and professional wisdom to share, especially when it comes to self-kindness, using more honey and less vinegar, balancing me time and we time and spreading you got this confidence throughout. The caregiving community. I hope you enjoy the show. Hi, Barry, welcome to the Happy Healthy Caregiver podcast. Hi Elizabeth, thank you so much for having me here. It’s wonderful to be here. Yes, you’ve been on my wish list. I have my podcast guest wish list, so you’ve been on it, and it’s beyond time that we made it happen.

So Barry, I always start the Happy Healthy caregiver podcast with on the right note. I like to start things out on a positive. No. So this was a jar I created for my sister and I replicated it for myself. It it’s just things that have spoken to me. I know you’re a words person. So today’s inspiration says, I hope you get a sense of humor for this one. It says, say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. At this point, I should be able to bench press a Buick.

That’s actually pretty funny. I like that. I may even steal that. Thank you. Maybe, I think it maybe we need to modernize it, say like a Tesla or some big truck escapade or something. Yes, exactly. But we’ve we’ve lived through some seasons of caregiving and I know we’re gonna, we’re gonna talk about that very. I’d love for you to just give the audience, give everybody a little introduction into your, what your family caregiving experience has been like for you personally with your parents and your stepdad. Sure.

So I’ll go back even further than that. I grew up in a family where my dad had brain cancer while I was a teenager. Oh wow. And he died when I was 15, uh, but prior to that it had enormous impact on me and my family, as you might imagine. But I learned very early on that illness does not happen to an individual. Illness happens to families. And so my family went through a very tough time both during his illness and then immediately afterwards. My mom had to go and literally work two jobs to try to make up for the lost.

Income and it didn’t exactly kind of set, you know, make me decide right then and there I was going to become a psychologist who focused on family caregiving, but it sort of put me on this path and eventually in graduate school I found myself working with family members of loved ones who had had neurological problems. It was all very kind of personally familiar to me and, you know, hit a lot of personal chords. And I started doing this work as a psychologist working with caregivers, and then, uh, as it happens to all of us at some point in my 50s, uh, my, my mother and stepfather were living in Florida, living the good life in a gated golf community.

My stepfather developed Alzheimer’s dementia and, uh, my mother, who was physically frail, was taking care of him and really having a hard time. And so my wife and I. Moved them from Florida in 2010 up to an apartment a mile from our house in suburban Pennsylvania, suburban Philadelphia, and then we got very involved in caring for them for the next 7 years. So my stepfather’s Alzheimer’s disease was quite advanced by the time he came up and he wound up in a nursing home within 2 years and eventually died. And then my mother unfortunately developed vascular dementia during that 7 year period and So my wife and I were very involved in both supporting her initially caring for my stepfather, but then very involved in caring for her.

And that was, you know, I had been a psychologist for a long time. I had worked with a million caregivers. I had already written a self-help book on family caregiving in 2006, but I, I, I mean, what I learned is that, um, doing it firsthand like this, much more so than I had as a teenager, really uh informed. What I know about caregiving today and a lot of things I thought I knew I didn’t really know. Now I know. And um it was a long, it was 7 years of a long stretch, not as long as some caregivers, uh, go through, as you know, but it was long enough to for me to realize just how, how really difficult it was.

My mother was not an easy care receiver. She, she basically fought me tooth and nail, and, uh, she was a very proud woman who didn’t want to receive help and that made everything twice as hard. Even, even toward the end when she was falling a lot and was not really safe to be alone, she didn’t want home health aides coming into the house and she, so it became extremely difficult and I, I, I mean, I, in retrospect, my mom and I had a lot of conflict during the time I was providing care for her and, you know, here it is 8 years later, and I, I have a lot of regrets about that.

I wish I had been able to understand her situation better and been more patient, but, um, she did make it hard for me, so. Well, we, you know, I am not a psychologist. Let me just say that right now, Barry, and you’ve got the expertise in the, in the caregiving thing, but we, we do that. We beat ourselves up about some of these things, and one of the things that has helped me is to say that we make the best decisions, we make the We share the best information, you know, based on what we know at that time, and it’s like the would have should have could have could come back to, to haunt us by giving ourselves a lot of grace there and you’ve, you’ve clearly had a lot of experience both professionally and personally and working with a lot of family caregivers.

And I know that you’ve also had to financially care for yourself as well during that time. What was, what was that like to juggle work and caregiving for you? I mean, it was hard. I mean, in many respects for the reasons that it’s hard for everybody else. When I was at work, I was worrying about my mom. And when I was with my mom, I was worrying about work, right? It was very hard to compartmentalize it too. At the same time, um, you know, my wife and I were, were raising two teenage children at that time, and I felt very torn between my parenting duties, my duties as a spouse and my duties as a son and a lot of, I went a long time feeling like I wasn’t doing a good job at any of that.

My work, I worked as a psychologist, as a faculty member in a family medicine residency program in a primary care office, which was literally a mile from my mother’s apartment, and that was both good and bad because, you know, my mother would call me during the day while I was at work and she would say my, you know, my stepfather had fallen on the floor. They didn’t want to call the fire department again. And so could I come over and pick him up? And I would kind of check my watch and if I had the time, I would dash out the door, jump in the car, drive over there, go up the elevator to the 8.53th floor, pick him up from the floor, put him on the couch, and then rush back to work.

It was, it was pretty crazy and unfortunately I had a, a wonderfully supportive. Boss and um it was a healthcare facility. People understood what caregiving is, and it made it much easier. But if I had had a boss that was less understanding, it would have, I would have felt even more conflicted than I already did. Yeah, thank goodness for the bosses that have the empathy and the understanding and aware of it and like being close by to our loved ones, like you said, it, it’s, it, it, it’s a good and a bad thing sometimes.

Like sometimes those geographical boundaries can be to our advantage, I think when we’re as a caregiver, and yet we want to be there and we want to keep helping them. But you’ve mentioned, you mentioned your mom was, you know, didn’t always see things the way that you’d see them. I, my mom was. That’s very politely. Yeah. Everybody’s different to care for. My mom was a very sweet woman. However, she would have like victim mentality, I would say. Like she had like her greatest hits album, I call it, and it’s like I can see the tracks coming.

It was the same playlist of over and over again. And you know, what are some ways that you mitigate. that energy from her, that resistance, like what worked for you? A number of strategies. The most successful one was I could ask my mom something and she would say no, but if I said to my wife, could you ask my mom for this? she would ask it, she would say yes to my wife. So I mean, she didn’t, she had no qualms about saying no to me or at times being Quite critical of me, and she didn’t, she was on her best behavior with my wife.

And so that was always, that was better. But I, I mean, what I really learned, uh, in dealing with her directly is that I, I couldn’t rush her. I mean, when I, you know, we, she might have an 11 o’clock doctor’s appointment that we absolutely had to make, but if it was 10:15 and she still wasn’t ready, and the more I rushed her, the more flustered she became, the more fluster she became, the slower she got. It was, it just didn’t pay, and it was gonna be what it was gonna be, and I, I had to kind of lower some of my expectations.

And then I, there were times when I really had to give her choices as much as possible when she had choices and felt like she had greater control of the situation, she was much more likely to be cooperative. When I tried to get into a into a power struggle, I said, you need a home health aid. I’m I’m bringing one in on Saturdays for you when you’re here alone, and my mother would dig her heels and then say, absolutely not, I won’t stand for it. I’ll fire them.

You know, that I had to find another way of soft selling it to her. I appreciate you saying that because you, you clearly have kind of what I call built like a closet of different tools and you try them on, like you try your clothes on and it’s like sometimes they fit, they look a little better than others, but you kind of keep that in the thing and you try something else and so much of caregiving, I feel like is trial and error and it’s a lot.

What were some of the resources like during some of these intense times in your life, Barry? Like, where were some of the places that you were going for help and support? I mean, first and foremost, my wife, my wife is also a psychologist. We met in graduate school. I always say the best thing I got out of graduate school was meeting her. But how many years have you been married? We just celebrated our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, 3 weeks ago. Uh congrats. Thank you. So I, I mean, I could come home and I could talk with her and I can bellyache about my mom, but she could also, by the same token, say to me, you’re, you’re out of line.

You are, you need to you need to soften your approach, and I mean. It’s that old expression, you get more bees with honey than vinegar, and that was certainly true with my mom. My mom and I had had had a long history, long before she ever developed dementia of, of really employing a lot of vinegar in our relationships. So my wife understood that too, and so she was able to, you know, to soften me, to get me to step back a little bit more and not be so intense about it.

That was a very, that was the main strategy. I mean, I was, I was also at an age at that point. I was in my 50s and Many of my friends were, were going through similar things with their parents. It, it just was the age, and so we could talk with one another. I mean, I also found, I mean, just as everyone else does, that the physical exercise was essential, the really Taking time away from caregiving and not, not sort of doing it every day was, was really important.

So long as I would put the right supports in place for my mom and stepfather, I, I could rest easy that they were gonna be at least relatively well cared for. But initially when they first moved up from Florida, it was very hard for me. I wanted to be There all the time. I wanted to do everything, gaining that distance, having that respite, doing the things that we all do for self-care, including talking with people who understand us that work for me. Yeah, I think a lot of us, and I know that was my situation as well, like we, we go all in at first, like after my dad passed away, it was like all in with my mom and There comes a point where you’re like, you can only put the things on the back burner, the other things for so long, including your own health and happiness, and it’s going to come back and and bite you.

so clear to me that it wasn’t sustainable. It sounds like it got, you got to that point where like, OK, I can’t keep doing this at this level. This is, this is my life. Did you feel guilty? Did you feel guilty? About doing some of the things for yourself. Uh, very much so. I mean, I, and I think that just again comes with the territory, but you know, my kids, they were accustomed to having me around. I mean, they weren’t, they were teenagers. They didn’t exactly want me intimately involved in their lives, but they wanted to be available to them to drive them to places and to do things for them when they wanted me.

And suddenly I’m not, I’m no longer as available, so I had tremendous guilt about that. My mother was very unhappy. I mean, she didn’t, not only did she not like living in an apartment after she had lived in a, in a much bigger place, and not not only did she not like having to care for her husband who had dementia, she didn’t like getting older, she didn’t like having difficulty walking, she didn’t like having pain all the time. She was really miserable a lot, and I felt guilty about that too, because I, even though I didn’t have the power necessarily to make her happy.

I still felt that somehow or other, I, I was supposed to alleviate her misery to some degree, and, and oftentimes I couldn’t. It took me a while to just come to accept that. Not that I wanted her to be miserable, but there was only so much that I could do. Yeah, there’s, I mean, I think there’s lots of big lessons in caregiving that I have learned in like acceptance, learning how to let go, like, you sound like similar to me as I wanted to kind of steer.

steer the boat and get everybody to the places and make it all happen. And but you’re working with people who have got complex and with cognitive issues with mobility, with history, you know, they’re just their DNA is different. Like it’s a lot. So I appreciate you being vulnerable and sharing some of those things because yeah, it’s, we’ve all got some similar, even though our stories are somewhat different, we all have some similar things that are happening. I know one of the caregiving tips that you shared with me, and you called it paradoxical, I can, I can’t even say the word, but you said even a tired and burned out family caregiver should devote time to mentoring newer caregivers.

What’s your thoughts behind that? Sounds like you, maybe you’ve got some caregiving thoughts into that, but also from your professional life, it sounds like there’s, it informs that as well. So I mean, I’ve never found it very easy to tell a caregiver, you need to kind of cut back, you need to, you know, go out to lunch with friends. Most folks, they’ll look at you and they’ll think that you just don’t get it. I mean, why, why would I listen to the word you’re saying? You don’t really understand all the things that I have to do.

And so over time, I, I learned to really go in the opposite direction, not just necessarily tell them that you need to do more caregiving, you need to be here more. But to, to say, you know, you, you have learned an enormous amount in the time that you’ve been doing this. I know other people who were just coming into this phase of their lives and and are now learning how to be caregivers. Would you be interested in speaking with them? And then so there was always a choice for them, but uh invariably they would, they would do it, and they, they did it because it was #1, a way of helping, and these were folks that were inherently helpers and they wanted to help, but two, because it made some positive meaning of their own experiences as a caregiver.

Um, I mean, I think that’s, that’s why I do what I do. I mean, because of my own caregiving experience, that’s probably why you do what you do, Elizabeth. I mean, we, we have personal experiences, we want to do good with them in the world, and, um, to give a caregiver that opportunity to to mentor another caregiver is, is very gratifying for most of them. Is it more time and energy that they have to spend? Yeah, but most of them get back more than they give out in that.

Yes, there is something about why so many of us live through a caregiving experience or are already in a caregiving experience. I mean, certainly, I’m sure you started things. I’ve started projects and things where we’ve been in the midst of caregiving and it’s like, what are we doing? I had thought, you know, so many times about quitting what I was doing and just let me just focus on my day job and my family and why am I doing this. But I do think it is, um, it does inform.

What you went through, to your point, Barry, like if you can pull somebody up who’s a little bit further back and kind of skip them a couple of steps or give them a shortcut or a smurf trail, a way to get to something else, like we get, you know, we want to do that because it’s like, if we can save somebody that energy and make it a little bit easier for them. And they’re usually very grateful and and their expression of gratitude are really empowering for us and to know that we know.

You know, we learn things, we know things. We want to make good with those things. And so, I mean, I, so I do, I do ask caregivers to actually do even a little bit more than what they’re already doing. Yeah, and it comes back and they feel good about it, I’m sure. Well, you have authored, I know you’re a big writer and writing has been very healing for me on my caregiving journey and you’re the author of 3 self-help books on family caregiving and one on relationships for those of us who are over 50.

Um, in, in this bucket. And while I’m going to link to all the, all of your books in the show notes, I wanted to kind of focus our conversations because of the time that we have today on two books that I recently read, those are these books that you shared with me. One is called Love and Meaning After 50, 8.53 Challenges to Great Relationships, How to Overcome Them. And the other one is your latest one, the AARP caregiver answer book that you and you actually co-wrote give kudos here with Julia, your wife, so who’s a fellow psychologist.

What’s it like to be married to a fellow psychologist and be married and caregiving? Are you all just kind of unpacking things all the time over your dinners, or is it, is it just like everybody? Else’s life, so curious. I mean, my wife has the ability to understand me and I have the ability to understand her and we can talk about things and that’s great. But no, we’re, you know, a lot of times we’re off duty. We’re not, we’re not talking about psychological things and we’re talking about who’s taking the garbage out tonight, that kind of thing. Yeah.

But I mean, she’s been my best friend forever and been my wife for 35 years and so thank God for And, and the way we came to write books together is she, she had been a playwright and then a novelist, and I was a journalist before I became a psychologist, so we both had very strong interest in writing, which is one of the things that drew us together initially. Both of our kids went away to college and, uh, we were empty nesters and we were kind of looking at one another saying now.

You know, now what do we do? Cause like a lot of us, we were very, a very child-focused family, really devoted to what our kids wanted and needed. And so we decided to, to write together. People always say, well, how do you do that? I mean, don’t you argue? And we don’t. I mean, we, we managed to divvy up what we do and then we’re very kind editors to one another and, um, you know, there’s certain things that she does well, she’s more emotional. I mean, I’m not emotional, but she’s, she’s a little bit better with the emotions I should say than I am.

And I’m, I tend to be a little bit more in my head, and, and so I, I’m good with the research and some of the point making. She’s good with creating the stories that help people relate to, to what’s going on, whether we’re talking about marriage or we’re talking about caregiving. Yeah, it’s a good effective partnership. And you know, I appreciate it, just kind of diving into this book first, that the 10 most common challenges, so just to rattle them off in case people are like, what are they?

The empty nest, extended family, finances, infidelity, retirement, downsizing and relocation, sex, health concerns, caregiving, and loss of a loved one. So, I know I checked a couple of these off. I’ve been married, um. 29 years. Yep, married my prom date. I was gonna say you must, you must have gotten married at age 241 or so. I was 267 years old. Yeah, he was 260. We were, we were young. I think like my kids are now 225 and 29, and I’m like, you know, we were getting married, but we really, we kind of felt like we were just at that point.

We dated for, you know, 28.5 or 103 years on and off through through college. So, you know, I, I certainly identified with the empty nest as you talked about and The finances, I think, is definitely one as we kind of more approach our retirement years, and both my husband and I are in a different position now where we’re both full-time entrepreneurs, so our financial picture is very different than what it looked like when we were, you know, raising kids and had kind of more of some protective things in place and insurance and all that.

And we’ve experienced the loss of the loved ones. We certainly have had our caregiving seasons. And so, did you have Barry, a favorite It kind of seems weird to put those words together, but a favorite challenge, or was there one of the 210 challenges that was more challenging for you to write about? I mean, I think they’re all challenging in various, sort of at various times. I mean, certainly the empty nest was a really big deal. I I I I kind of mourned our children leaving, um, and, and you know, initially we, we just sort of filled the vacuum of time that we would have spent with them with working harder and That that really wasn’t wasn’t what either of us wanted to do.

And then we had to figure out other ways of living and we had to figure out, we had to kind of think about what the next phase of our lives was and be very intentional about it. And some of that meant, do we want to continue living where we’re living and the answer is thus far is yes. Did we want to continue working as hard as we’ve been working and we’ve made some changes over the. But there’s also just what is most important to us, what are, are our values.

I mean, is, is, do we, do we want to travel? Do we want to be close to family when what, what is the most important. So, to actually sit down and have those conversations, because I think prior to that, like most of us, we just kind of caught up in family life and kind of rolling right along. And so, the empty nest is just kind of full stop time where, yes, you still gotta pay the rent and and mow the lawn, but you also have to really think about what do we want to do the next 210 years, 2300 years?

I mean, where do we want to spend the last part of our lives? Not that we’ve come up with definitive answers and all those things, but the conversations on the table and we can come back to it. So that, that took a little, a little pivot to, to think in those terms. I mean, I, we, my kids, my son’s been out of college. He’s the youngest a year, so we are full blown MD nesters now. And I, you know, it’s, it has been such an interesting thing where it’s like you’re, you’re grateful they’re off your payroll.

That’s amazing. Like I’m like, we felt like we got a raise. I don’t miss the question, you know, what’s for dinner? It’s much easier for my husband and I to decide like what it is for I miss them in my daily, you know, in our daily lives, but I also feel really grateful that we’ve, we’ve got kids that are living on their own successfully, and it’s like, OK, well, I don’t know exactly what we did, but we, we got lucky and maybe we did a couple of things right.

So that’s, that’s exciting. But I do think, you know, we had to kind of go through some conscious changes too. It’s like the work situation you’re talking about. I know we’ve talked about where to live. At one point, we put a bid on a place right before COVID to downsize and that kind of didn’t happen, and maybe in retrospect that was a good thing at that time. Uh, and you know, sometimes I have these conversations with my husband and he’s like, yeah, I’m thinking maybe we go down and live at the battery, which is where the Braves play and And I said, where are dogs gonna go to the bathroom?

And it sounds like it’s gonna be really loud, like we’re, you know, having, we’re not on the same page on some of these things. I’m like, I got all my friends and my book club and And then finding things that we wanted, you know, could do together, I think was a big intention. Like when you say we had to be intentional about it, so we have, we joined a pickleball league together with other couples. We’ve made other friends there. He talked me into doing a cornhole league, like throwing bags this summer, which I think I got 2 in the whole time.

I mean, I’m not good. Yes. You’re getting better. Yeah, and we do our separate things too. It’s like, but I, I think we, we can tend to be like, he’s working hard. We’re both kind of grinders when it comes to work and so he’s working hard. I’m working hard and, and so we have these times where we know we can kind of come back together, which I think is, is key. I really appreciate, Barry, how you all, you and your wife laid out the book where You know, you talk, because I don’t want to just hear about the problems, right?

Like, OK, yeah, this is a challenge. No, you’ve given really actionable ways that people can have dialogue around these topics. They can take self-assessments individually for each of the topics, you give tips and follow-up exercises. So, it’s one of those books I think where people can look and say, well, I’m struggling on this and, and go back and do it, you know, in full honesty, I was prepping for this, but I’m going to take some more time on some of these chapters with my husband and like, let’s, let’s put some of these things because to your point, like, we’re going, like full speed ahead.

So what kind of feedback are you getting from this book? So this book came out in 2020. We’ve gotten generally good feedback. I mean, I will tell you that it hasn’t been, um, as, as we haven’t gotten as much feedback on this as we have with caregiving. I mean, caregiving is very salient. A lot of times people don’t think about marriage in this way. They don’t think about, OK, I’m entering this new phase. Caregiving is a crisis that suddenly lands on their door and they have to think about it.

But it’s a good point. There is a caregiving chapter, we’ll say that. Yes, there is, but there are, I mean, the feedback we’ve gotten from folks has been very, very positive that it, it really just reminded them, as you say, that they, they have to think about. Kind of who we are and who are we together as a couple and how are we going to divve our time up between the we time and me time and, and just what does life mean for us now? Where, where do we want to go?

And then in the context of, of the greater family dealing with caregiving issues, dealing with loss of loved ones, um, so it, it, it helps people reflect on this part of their lives. A lot of times people don’t like to reflect on the idea that they’re getting older, and what I mean by getting older is that, you know, over 50 is not. Old in this day and age, but, um, people don’t really like to think about themselves as getting older in any, in any respect, at any time, and yet it, it really is a time of life where we should be a little bit more self-reflective.

Yeah, and then I think the more proactive we can be about some of these conversations, like, you know, we understand what the options are, we’re making sure we’re aligned on the same page, we’re using our time wisely, you know, the, the the 2nd, 2nd act. Type of thing. So, so interesting. So I, I’m definitely going to put this one in the show notes. And then the second one that I checked out was the AARP caregiver answer book that you co-wrote again with your wife. You know, what was the process of getting the questions for this?

How did that happen? So, Julie and I have been feeling these types of questions from clients, you know, both of us have psychotherapy clients that are caregivers, many of them, hundreds of them. Mhm. And in addition to that, because people know that we’re, you know, quote unquote caregiving experts, our neighbors knock on our door, our friends ask us, colleagues ask us, and so we’ve had a million conversations in which she and I have both noticed that the same questions come up again and again and again and the questions fit into different categories.

Some of them have to do with self-care, some of them have to do with family dynamics, some have to do with finances. Questions that are in this book, and there are nearly 150 of them are questions that we’ve, we’ve answered. Many times. We didn’t have to generate new questions. The questions were there. The answers that we have in the book really reflect the answers that we’ve we’ve developed over the years for some of these questions. So I think, I mean, basically for me, this is, this is kind of the culmination of over 103 years of thinking about these things and trying to, to come up with the most concise, most helpful answers that I could and putting them in the book so that some of what I’ve learned will have some legacy in the world.

But, you know, we, uh, We, we both found that we, you know, we would not always have the same answer to the same questions, and then we would have to have conversations about how we should shape this particular answer to cover different possibilities. I think the benefit of having two people co-write this book, Barry, you and your wife and you mentioned how you’re different is that there’s not always sometimes one answer to these questions. Like, you do, you have to try on, it’s situational. Well, you could say this, or you could say that, and so you give examples in there of the different verbiage that people could actually use and try on, you know, depending on the situation, like, well, if you say this, it might go this way.

And it’s super well organized. If you talk about different types of caregivers, whether they’re a partner or parent or a person with cognitive impairment, if they’re living from a distance and You know, living in a, in a senior community or they’re at home caregivers. So different situations kind of require that context, I think, which you cover and then around the emotions around it, and even the high costs of caregiving. So, you know, there were a couple of sections I thought maybe we could dive into if you’re open to it.

OK, so I love, I’m a happy healthy caregiver. I’m not, but that’s what I’m I’m that we’re going to is happy healthy caregiving. So taking care of yourself too was very interested in, in what I had to say there. And so you talk about the fear of judgment. I love this part, uh, and in my book, it’s on page 39, but you know, the question was, I think my family members will view me as a bad caregiver if I take time for myself. Is this all in my head or are they really judging me?

And I appreciated how you weren’t like, oh yeah, no, they’re not judging you. You’re like, no, they probably are judging you. Like, you know, it’s, it’s very it. They’re judging you. They’re judging people are judging you and they’re but they’re not in your shoes and at some point, like again, it’s like get to this, you didn’t say, you know, they’re not going to judge you. You write it and you say, you know, you talk then about the biggest, the three biggest barriers to self-care, our time, guilt and fear of judgment.

And you know, just taking the. One of them, and I think we did talk about this a little bit, but like, the guilt is something that I think no matter what your caregiving situation, you’re going to feel guilty about this. So, how do we combat the feelings of guilt? Like, what are some of these things that we could potentially try on there? So what are we, one of the things we talk about in the book is using some methods from cognitive behavioral therapy to, to combat guilt.

So what it, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy is, is a type of psychotherapy. It’s the most common, uh, type. Basically the whole thesis. it is, if, you know, we talk to ourselves in our heads all the time. Sometimes we’re conscious of what we’re saying to ourselves about ourselves, and sometimes we’re not. So it’s like we have this kind of running monologue like, oh, he’s reaching, he’s reaching for the fork, a little bit more, a little bit more profound than that, but it’s sort of like, you shouldn’t do that.

But you know, if you do that, they’re gonna get upset with you. And so there there’s this constant dialogue, monologue, uh, and a lot of the things that we say to ourselves about ourselves. are not true. And a lot of times guilt is based on these kind of distorted thoughts that we have, holistic thoughts that we have. So the whole basis of cognitive behavioral therapy is if we can kind of get some of those subconscious thoughts on the table, we can really examine them better and see, is it really true that they, they think I’m gonna be a terrible caregiver if I, if I take a night, you know, a night a week to go to a movie?

I mean, is that gonna be, it mean that they’re gonna, uh, you know, think I’m a horrible person and and I I should go to hell and all that. No, the fact is that if we go to that person and we talk with them, we may find out that in fact, they think it’s a wonderful thing that that we’re doing this because we’re replenishing ourselves and they have a very positive judgment about what we’re doing rather than negative one. But it’s, it’s through dispelling some of those unrealistic ideas that we have that we then assuage some of the guilt that we have.

The other thing is This idea that somehow, you know, here, here’s an idea that I always like to dispel with caregivers, and that is, how could you, how could you stop being guilty? And I say, I always say to them, I’m not gonna help you stop being guilty because you’re not gonna stop being guilty, right? So, as you pointed out earlier, a lot of it is acceptance. I mean, you’re always gonna want to do a better job and maybe you’re doing at a time at a at a given time or maybe you’re capable of doing.

You’re always gonna wanna save your loved one from whatever pain they’re having, whatever unhappiness they’re experiencing. And if you can’t do that, you, you’re gonna have feelings about it because you’re a feeling human being and that and that’s gonna induce guilt, and that’s just the way it is. The idea here is we want to minimize the guilt and not not not allowed to dominate the way you feel about yourself or the choices that you’re making. Yeah, not let it happen where you’re like that’s setting you down on this road of burnout, which is then going to ripple into so many other bigger things.

Yeah, well said, I always say like, yeah, in my presentations, there’s nothing I can say that’s not going to make you feel guilty because it is, it’s just a core thing and not all guilt is bad, you know, it is like sometimes we feel it because it’s our inner conscious wanting us to do the right thing in certain certain situations. But I think the acceptance, I think, is a big part of that where, you know, looking in the mirror at night, there’s there’s, we’re not humanly possible to do all of the things that are being asked us to do.

So it’s like if you can look in the mirror at night and say, gosh darn it, I gave it my all today and I checked off these couple of things and, and give yourself more grace. So I love to kind of do the flip of the guilt with the grace. The other part of the book that I leaned into is, I’m currently a support caregiver for my brother Tom. He’s neurodivergent, he’s um He’s a little older than me. He lives on the autism spectrum, and he’s got an intellectual and developmental disability.

So with both of our parents deceased, in my family, I’m one of 6 kids. Tom needs care, and then there’s me, so coordinating and collaborating with my siblings and my other relatives is a must when it comes to my brother Tom. And so that’s been, it’s been very timely for me and appreciated, you know, a lot of the verbiage. And and things in here and in this particular section, you had a uh say this not that to siblings about caregiving, which was so good. It was like certain things like, say this, I understand you’re busy.

What would be possible for you to do for mom given your schedule, or in my case, Tom, given your schedule? Don’t say or not that. I’m doing everything. You need to step up and be here every week. So a lot of these phrases I think were like putting people on the defensive. Like nobody can take away the way that we feel is kind of how I’ve interpreted. Like my feelings are valid, my feelings are valid if I put it in the I language versus the, you’re doing this type of thing.

Another thing it says it’s not just about helping Tom, it’s about your relationship with me. So saying that instead of, I don’t care if you and Tom never get along, or things like that. Another one is, please help me understand your thoughts about helping mom. Tell me, tell me more, helping Tom. How dare you skirt your responsibilities to your mother? So we can clearly kind of hear them, I think, but, but catching ourselves. And I think one of the things, Barry, that like right now for us is we’re entertaining my brother living in a community of people living with disabilities, so that he has a good schedule, friends, social things.

But we’re not necessarily on all the same page. And we don’t always necessarily present it in the same way with him. And when you’re dealing with a team of caregivers, like it is, it’s interesting to kind of everybody kind of coming out together. And I appreciate it in that chapter, how you talk about the family meeting. I know that has been things where like certain things are are are off the table when it comes to texting. Like, nope, we’re gonna get on the phone and talk about this because so much has been contrived, I think.

in a negative way through, through the, the written words and attacks versus like, let’s just get on the call and kind of all hash this out. Something really big and important, like where my brother’s gonna live potentially for the rest of his life. Like, we got to kind of, you know, get the questions narrowed down and figure out who’s doing what. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about family dynamics in your years as a, uh, as a, as a psychologist, a big topic. Anything you want to add to this?

So in addition to being a psychologist, my family therapist, and I, I mean, I, to me, the family dynamics are endlessly fascinating, endlessly complicated, and not always reconcilable. I mean, there’s, there’s oftentimes where as hard as you try, you’re not gonna have a closer relationship with your siblings at, at, at the point at which caregiving is over. What I would say to folks is, is that the way you treat one another during this very difficult time, and that how you, how you talk with one another, how you make choices together.

Um, how you respect one another’s ideas, that that is gonna affect your relationship forever after. And cause people remember exactly what was said and how it was said. And so it’s all again, it’s all about using ho honey nut vinegar. It’s all about being respectful of, of the fact that some of your siblings are are adults and very smart people and have expertise. In their own right, even if it’s different than yours, and they had a way to help family be more, more cohesive at the end of the day rather than less cohesive.

I mean, going back to to my earliest family caregiving experience when my dad had brain cancer, I mean, one of the other lessons I learned was Just how illness and the way caregiving is handled can, can just tear families apart. My mother and my father’s mother fought like crazy through my father’s illness, and then after he died, they didn’t, they then did not speak again for 19 years until the day of my wedding when they, they saw each other in my, my, my, my wedding ceremony. That was, that was very painful for me, you know, because I loved my mother and I, you know, as difficult as she could be, and I love my grandmother as difficult as she could be, but it made, it made the loss of my dad.

all, all the more difficult to, to see family members not talking with one another afterwards. I don’t want other family members to go through that. I, you know, as much as possible, and I say this to them, you know, I want you to have, even if you’d never, if you agree to disagree, that’s so much better than than ripping into one another and then, you know, saying, I’m never gonna to deal with and talk with you again, which unfortunately, in my, in my work, I hear people say all the time, I heard people say that last week, I’m not ever going to have a relationship with my brother again after all this is over.

I mean, that to me is, is tragic, and I don’t want that for anyone. Yeah, yeah. What a, what an interesting, yeah, uh, wedding experience you had to bring, bring your family together and uh similar thing with my husband and I actually, where his mother-in-law, my mother-in-law and her, her mother, that was the first time they had come together and it was a big deal. So, um I probably have shared this on the show before, but it I was raised Catholic. My husband was raised in a Jewish household.

It was a big deal for us to kind of get married with those different religions and for his grandmother to come to that event and she ended up having a ball, by the way, so, and, and passed away not soon after that. So it was, it can be very powerful to kind of to see that changes. But you talk about in the book, the values, the family history, the current circumstances, like how all that kind of plays into things. And then You know, the, the part that I sometimes struggle with with folks too is, you know, as a coach in the, in the little bit of coaching that I do is that, what do you say to the solo caregiver, and they’re like, oh, it must be nice.

You’ve got all this help with your family, and it sounds like you have this great feeling. I almost feel like I need to apologize for having like a nice family. What, what, you know, I have the things that I share with the solo caregiver, but somebody who feels like they’re doing it all alone, like what is, what is your answer for that situation? Well, I, I say. There are advantages and disadvantages to every uh type of caregiving. So for the solo caregiver, the, the advantages, you’re not fighting with your siblings, you’re not, you get to be the primary caregiver, you get to be the prime decision maker.

Obviously, the, the downside is you don’t have the helping hands to to pitch in, and so you have to, you really have to be very resourceful and, and, and use what other resources exist within the community or from professional resources or or church, church. congregants or neighbors or but you have to, you’ve got to cobble together a caregiving team, even if they’re not blood relations. Exactly. Your family, your community, your neighbors. It really, you know, honestly, Barry, like I’m going to keep this book close by so that when I start to stumble over some of these questions that I get, I’m like, oh my gosh, what do I tell this person?

Like what, what can I advice other than like you should go talk to Barry Jacobs. Do you guys still practice, you and your wife? Are you still practicing or merely writing full time? Uh, no, we, we are still writing and we are both still practicing or we have both in-person practice in suburban Philadelphia and virtual practices. OK. For any state or just mostly Pennsylvania? No, with our psychology licenses, we can practice, I think, in 41 states. So, yeah, it’s great y’all would be lucky to get on Barry’s calendar for sure.

Um, we’re gonna link to both of these books. I’m gonna put them on my, I have an Amazon shop for happy healthy caregiver on my bookshelf. We’ll get them on there so people get, get those resources, and I wanna kind of switch to self-care. Like, what, what is your self-care look like today? Like what, what are you doing to just keep yourself happy, keep yourself healthy, mentally, physically, all of it. Uh, I mean, so. I’m 67 now and I can’t, I mean, I played basketball until I was age 60.

And, uh, you know, at that point, I was, I was like the broken down old man on the basketball court, and the 25 year old guys were picking me up all the time. I figured it was probably time to stop this. Athletics it was always my self-care, uh, main methodology, but I, I do other things physically. And, and then honestly, writing has been one of the great joys of my life. I mean, I love the process of sitting down and getting completely immersed in crafting sentences and paragraphs, and so that’s very important.

And then I’m a big nature lover, you know, I’m, you know, to be out, whether I’m birding or whether I’m, uh, you know, tree doing tree identification, it makes a huge difference, and we live in a In a lovely college town called Swarthmore, where Swarthmore College is two blocks away and the campus is in Arboretum, and I mean we have just, just walking and noticing and watching the seasons go by, it makes a huge difference for us. Nice. Do you and your wife do some things together, both of you?

I mean, we do a lot of walking together and we do writing together. She has her activities. She has her book club writing group. and other things and I have mine. But no, we had that again. We had that me time and we time and the we time is, is makes a huge difference to both of us. I love the way that me time and we, when you said that, they reminded me of like ask my husband for golf clubs for my birthday, and his face was like, wait a second, are you infringing on my stuff now, my me time stuff?

And I was like, oh no, you can still do your friend thing, but like maybe we just play 9 holes with a couple. You know, every, every now and then, so, so interesting. Well, I want to ask you a couple of questions from my journal. It’s called the Just For You Daily Self-care Journal. There are no wrong answers in this, in this, so have fun with it. What is your most meaningful, what is most meaningful to you now? That’s the question. What’s most meaningful to you now? I would say more so than ever family, uh, our first grandchild, uh, granddaughter was born 8.5 weeks ago.

And 8.5 weeks ago. So she is, she is tiny and she’s amazing and she’s waking up to the world and it’s just, it’s just incredible to see, seeing, you know, seeing our adult children out in the world doing good things, having good relationships, and then this whole, I think that’s probably what’s most meaningful to me now. And then in terms of work, I mean, I, you know, Caregiving has been a sense of mission that I’ve had stemming from my, you know, my adolescence, and I mean, I still get very choked up sitting with caregivers, listening to their stories, and you know, feeling like I’m accompanying them through one of the most important life passages that they choked up, Barry.

I leak every podcast episode, I think, and I’m Am I OK? Is this OK? But I think it just means we’re empathetic people, right? Like I don’t need to worry too much about it. I’m not worried about you, Elizabeth, that’s what you’re concerned about. But you know, this is really this is really important work. This is the world needs more folks caring for others and it needs more folks caring for the caregivers. Well said, well said. Do you have any secret truths about happiness? What is your secret truth about happiness?

I, I mean, this is not, um, this is not a secret. Most of us are, are our own worst enemies. We’re way too hard on one another. I shouldn’t say one another, we should wait too hard on ourselves. OK. And we are, I mean, just practicing self-kindness it sounds it sounds so simple and yet it’s so really is very challenging. I mean, we, we’re always raised to strive for, for more to to. accomplish more. We’re we’re incredibly aware of the things that we’re not getting done, and the procrastinating that we’re doing, that the ways we’re coming are short.

We have to really just pat ourselves on the back much more than we do. And that to me is the key to to to my happiness anyway. Yeah. Do you think, I mean, you you’ve had a practice, you know, before social media and after social media and all of that. You know, I’m kind of with my kids, we’ve talked about it like they remember life without phones, and then life with phones and it’s Interesting to hear their perspective about how they think they’re going to limit stuff with their kids when they get older and the downsides of, like, I mean, we’re not getting rid of it.

We got to figure out how to manage it. But do you, do you put some boundaries on yourself when it comes to news and social media, especially as a journal like a journalist, I studied journalism. I know I had to do that at one point in my life where it was just too heavy. And these are times when it’s very easy to get saturated. There’s so much news and there’s so many different news outlets and it’s sometimes it’s hard to avoid it. Yes. I think all of us should keep informed, but not uh listen uh 10 hours a day to to news.

I don’t think we should do anything 10 hours a day, it’s just too much. So, and there’s so much research coming out now about how Of the time that we, time and attention we, we spend in social media or just technology is, is, is time apart from uh our relationships with other people in person relationships and our, our time with ourselves, and I don’t think it’s those are positive developments, and I, I think this really now the pendulum is beginning to swing back. And people are realizing, you know, we, we went really far down this path and maybe we need to step it back a little bit and really reprioritize not being on our phones and not being in communication with people thousands of miles away, but really turn turn toward the people in our own lives here and now.

Yeah, I agree with you. I do think that pendulum switching. OK, fun question so we can leave on here is that, when was the last time you couldn’t sleep because you were so excited about something? I would, and I, and I would say, and excited and also nervous about the birth of our granddaughter who was about a week late, um, so every day was sort of like, you know, like, you know, up in the middle of the night, she’s kind of leaning, leaning in anticipation of like her birth and that uh I mean, and then getting to meet her for the first time.

I mean, I, you know, I don’t think I was, I was up the night before at all. I, I, I was, I was up the entire night before because there’s this new being, what a, what a an opportunity to meet this a new fresh eyed being coming into the world, uh, and seeing the world through her eyes one day. I, uh, that, that’s as exciting as I could, I can possibly get. Yeah, I can imagine as a grandparent, like it’s gonna be. Hopefully I get to experience that.

Mine aren’t even seriously dating anybody yet, but in no rush. Like I want them to live their life and do their thing and you know it’ll unfold as it’s supposed to. Anything that you want to add, Barry, any parting words of wisdom for caregivers, anything you wish that we talked about, we didn’t get to talk about. I would just repeat that most caregivers have that deer in the headlights look at the beginning, and they just have to put themselves on the path for Learn and there’s lots of outlets including this wonderful podcast for learning and hearing other people’s perspectives and to know that they’re going to get good at this.

I mean, they may not think that they’re good at it, but they’re gonna get good. There’s not anyone who’s going to be better at it than them and to really respect what they’re accomplishing. And when people at the end of the day can, you know, pat themselves on the back and say, you know, this. Really hard and it was sometimes I wish I didn’t have to do it, but I’m really glad I did do it and I’m really glad that I made a difference for somebody else who I care about.

I mean, it doesn’t get any better than that, and that’s what I hope everybody experiences. Yeah, I like the you’ve got this mentality. It’s like we learn a lot about ourselves through this process. I mean, we gain a lot of really positive learnings and insights and Even, even if it’s really rocky, there’s a lot of gold that can be mined there for sure. I would go so far as I say, especially if it’s really rocky. If it’s really rocky and we have to overcome a lot and we have to really kind of dig deep to kind of stick with it, then we learn even more.

Yeah, good, good stuff. How do people stay in? with you, Barry. Where’s the best place to check you out and stay connected? So we have a website. It’s www.caegiveranswerbook.com. Um, it’s a way of communicating through the portal there. Um, I’m, I’m, I’m on social media, you know, I’m just telling you not to be on social media, but I’m on social media. You got to be on social media. I know your favorite, uh, medium is on Instagram. Mine is on LinkedIn. But people, people can always find me on LinkedIn.

I’m around. Yeah, no, we got to. I mean, we got to make a living, we got to stay connected and yeah, it’s, you know, in in in balance. Well, we’ll link to your LinkedIn, your extra Facebook and the caregiver answer book and the show notes, and I just want to say it’s been a delight to talk with you today, Barry. Thank you so much for The work that you do, that you continue to do, that you’ve put it on, put it on paper, your grandkids are going to be able to benefit from this someday.

So, you know, leaving a legacy for caregivers and your own family as well. So thank you so much and thank you to Julia, who sounds like she’s the right kind of woman who can check you and then there’s the ones that we, we all, we all need someone in our marriage who’s going to help us there. No, she’s the best and thank you for this conversation. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Hello, podcast listener. If you’re caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s or dementia, you don’t want to miss all’s Authors podcasts, Untangling Alzheimer’s and dementia.

I’m your host, Mary Anne Schuko, a registered nurse, author, and dementia daughter. In each episode, I interview one of our 300+ authors about their personal dementia story and why they chose to write about it, sharing intimate details and painfully. Obtained knowledge to help you on your own journey. We share a variety of stories across all diagnoses and from a range of caregiving experiences. You can find us on your favorite podcast platform in the Whole Care Network. Remember, you are not alone. One can sing a lonely song, but we chose to form a choir and create harmony.

Find us at allsauthors.com. See you soon. Thanks for listening to the Happy Healthy caregiver podcast on the Whole Care Network. I hope this episode provided encouragement and practical tips to infuse into your life. You’ll find the show notes and all the resources mentioned at Hahealthy Caregiver.com. I also invite you to check out previous episodes of the podcast that you may have missed. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Ratings and reviews also help others discover the podcast, and sharing with a fellow caregiver is a great way to spread support.

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