Finding Our Way
Caring for others requires nurturing self
For more on the experiences of people who are in a caretaking role, check out the Finding Our Way series at findingourway.net. This series on coping with end-of-life issues is by Partnership for Caring and Knight Ridder News Service, and consists of 15 story packages plus a guide to helpful resources.
By Beverly Creamer
Advertiser Staff Writer
Many of the people who come to psychologist Rosalie Tatsuguchi are at "burnout." Often, they are caregivers who have given so much for so long that they're becoming sick themselves. They may be plagued with physical ailments, in worse shape than the person they care for and locked into programmed behavior that goes back to childhood.
Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser
Those are the people for whom Tatsuguchi has written her book: "Caring for Loved Ones — And Yourself."
Psychologist Rosalie Tatsuguchi helps caregivers understand and re-evaluate cultural rules ingrained in childhood that may be damaging and cause burnout.
What the book, and her therapy, offer is an understanding of the "cultural rules" under which most of us operate, and how these need continual reassessment and revision to fit new circumstances.
"The rules we've learned are so much a part of us and we're not even aware of it," Tatsuguchi said.
These internalized, unspoken guidelines that govern our lives were ingrained in childhood, gleaned from Mom or Auntie. While these nuances of growing up formed all of us, in many cases they are based on faulty information and may be very damaging, she said.
Tatsuguchi's book offers ways to understand and uncover those individual rules and how to reappraise them for current circumstances. And it helps caregivers understand how to rework them to give themselves permission to look after themselves — without guilt.
"To treat it, you start with 'You're a smart person who's doing dumb things. So there's a family rule that's running things, and that's what we have to change,'" she said.
In Hawai'i those rules are often based, whether we realize it or not, on the Buddhist life philosophy of fulfilling duty, putting oneself last, and giving to others "no matter what" or "die trying." What is often forgotten, said Tatsuguchi, is the equally strong cultural precept Buddhists call busshin: nurturing the Buddha-nature in oneself in order to be a more effective, compassionate caregiver.
Author Rosalie Tatsuguchi's office, 3221 Wai'alae Ave., Suite 378, phone 735-1214 At Tom's Place, 320 Coral St., phone 537-9065 Also at Book Ends in Kailua; Best Sellers of Books and Music downtown; Logos Bookstore in Ward Warehouse; Kaiser Permanente Moanalua Gift Shop; St. Francis Hospital Gift Shop; Rehab Hospital of the Pacific Gift Shop. Website: usagibooks.com "Caring for loved ones — And Yourself" Usagi Books, 12.95
Christianity espouses many of the same principles of selflessness, but these can engender the same guilt or anger in one who has given to the point of being overtired and feeling empty.
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How to find 'Caring for Loved Ones — And Yourself'
"Caregivers are givers," said Tatsuguchi. "They don't know how to take care of themselves. They're not good at it. A lot of people, especially women, may be at an age and time in their life when they can do anything they want, and they don't know what to do because they've spent a lifetime caring for others."
But Tatsuguchi also has always believed in the mind/body connection. Invariably, she said, when people are operating under cultural rules that jelled in childhood, their bodies are beginning to break down under the stress. She can point to her own first marriage as a case study: By the time she was divorced after 13 years, her body was almost immobile from arthritic pain.
"My haole therapist said 'You knew one month after you married this guy it wasn't going to work, so why stay so long? You're not a masochist, you're not stupid and you don't enjoy it, so it must be cultural rules.'"
With that insight, Tatsuguchi went on to apply the same theory to her own patients who were often caregivers, breaking down under self-inflicted burdens. Time and again she saw how the expectations learned in childhood kept them trapped.
But Tatsuguchi does not tell her patients to dump responsibility. Far from it. What she hopes they will achieve is a re-balancing of responsibilities, with self-nurturing part of the new equation.
"Nurturing our self is vital," she writes. "The essential task of nurturing is to balance our spiritual checking account — our busshin. We cannot continue to write spiritual checks to life without making spiritual deposits."
She describes nurturing activities as those which directly benefit the caregiver in order to restore and replenish personal emotional resources. That enables them to go on, but stay healthy themselves.
One of the "reality checks" to see if you're doing this, she said, is to ask yourself:
"Can I take a 'timeout' without feeling guilty?"
Reach Beverly Creamer at bcreamer@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8013.
