Caring for an Anxious Elderly Mother? Caregiver Expert Strategies and Tips
Are you dealing with an anxious elderly mother who is consuming your life? Over the years, as a care manager for older adults and as a power of attorney agent and guardian, I was responsible for the care of many older adults who had what my staff and I referred to as “high needs.”
For us, a high need client meant an older adult who, because of health or emotional issues, needed and wanted a lot of time and attention. Some of these clients would call my office five to ten times a day to speak with my staff, who listened to their concerns and worries.
If you are a caregiver, you may have a mom or dad who calls you at work or home multiple times a day, worrying about something or needing something that you don’t have the time to address in the moment. These calls can be distracting and frustrating.
Learning to respond positively to anxiety for an elderly mother who does not have dementia is a skill that anyone can learn. Dealing with anxiety related to dementia care is a separate topic, addressed in
Module 6 of my online caregiver program.Caregiver Expert Strategies and Tips to Deal with an Anxious Elderly Mother
If dealing with an anxious elderly mother feels like a struggle, consider the expert information, tips, and strategies provided below. You’ll learn:
1 The signs that an elderly mother or father has high care or attention needs,
2 How these needs affect their interactions with other people, including you, and
3 Ways to consider responding to an anxious elderly mother whose needs are consuming your energy and your life.
Self-Care, Self-Love, and Setting Boundaries
To add context to strategies for caring for an anxious elderly mother, let’s examine the
importance of self-care, self-love, and setting boundaries. It takes a lot of self-love to set boundaries with difficult people in life.
As a caregiver, you must care enough about yourself to care for others in a thoughtful manner. While people not involved in caring for your anxious elderly mother may tell you differently, there’s nothing wrong with prioritizing your well-being.
You can choose to prioritize acting in ways that are thoughtful, clear, and powerful to create a life filled with joy, happiness, and positivity, rather than living a life filled with struggles and a lack of happiness.
Adult Child – Parent Relationships
If your parents were not good parents, you may have to give yourself the love and acceptance that your parents or other people may not have given you. You choose to love and respect yourself regardless of the behaviors exhibited by an anxious elderly mother or father, siblings, or other people in your life.
Family culture and generational beliefs can be a challenge if you want to lead a life that differs from the beliefs, expectations, and limitations accepted by elderly parents or other family members. You may hear comments like, “We don’t do that in our family,” or “You can’t do that.”
Well, why not? Are you allowing the beliefs of others to limit your life possibilities?
If you have family members or friends telling you to stick it out as a caregiver for a high-needs elderly parent, silence these voices. You get to be the voice in your life who decides what you do and how you do it – with empathy, compassion, and kindness.
Sometimes, the most empathetic, compassionate, and kind thing you can do is to set boundaries with a parent whose behaviors are emotionally and physically draining by saying, “I can’t be the solution to this problem. We have to look at other options.”
It’s okay to protect and prioritize your well-being. It’s okay to love yourself first so that you can love other people.
1 Signs that an elderly mother or father has high care or attention needs,
Your answers to these questions may indicate whether you have an anxious elderly mother or father with high needs.
- Does your parent have an anxious or worrisome personality?
- Has Mom or Dad been a worrier all of their life?
- Has an elderly parent been negative all of their life?
- Is blaming others for the bad things that happened in their life common?
- Does an elderly mother spend her days worrying about everyone else as a distraction instead of dealing with her own issues?
- Does Mom or Dad expect you to change your plans to show up every time they need something?
- Do they constantly complain about or worry about health problems that they don’t seem to want to do anything about? Instead, they want attention or sympathy?
- Do they worry about issues happening in the world or in the news?
- Does an elderly anxious mother experience panic attacks, or have fear that something will happen again, like a fall, especially if she has fallen before?
How to Recognize Anxious Behaviors and Identify Life-Long Patterns
If you answered yes to any of these questions and these issues repeat and repeat, you might have a high-need Mom or Dad who is anxious and depressed. If this isn’t working out well, look at how you are responding to your anxious elderly mother or father. Are you showing up to fulfill their every need, hoping for appreciation or acknowledgement?
If so, you are training Mom or Dad that their behaviors are perfectly acceptable.
If you want to change the situation, what do you want this relationship to look like? If you don’t know what you want, it’s impossible to change the situation.
How to Deal With an Anxious Elderly Mother Who is Consuming Your Life
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Watch More Videos About Caregiving, Aging, and Health on
Pamela’s YouTube Channel2 How does anxiety, worry, criticism, negativity, and helplessness affect an anxious elderly mother’s ability to care for herself and interact with other people?
If you are a caregiver for an elderly parent with these behaviors, take care so that you do not take on these behaviors as a result of spending time with Mom or Dad. There is a tendency to become like the people one spends the most time with.
Caregivers can sabotage their lives by
taking on the self-destructive behaviors of an elderly parent. Taking care of an elderly mom with anxiety can be challenging.
Let’s add other conditions like a depressive disorder, a narcissistic personality, five or more medical conditions like heart disease, circulatory problems, diabetes, arthritis, breathing problems, physical pain that affects brain functioning, and the experience of negative life events.
Anxious Elderly Mother’s Dependent Behaviors
The combination of anxiety with the health problems of an elderly mother who has relied on other people, like a spouse, her entire life to hold things together, can feel like an impossible situation.
An elderly mother who never learned to cope, be responsible, self-sufficient, or solve her own problems, can mean that you, as the caregiver, have more responsibility than you can handle.
By this time in your mom’s life, it’s going to be difficult for her to identify these as problems because they were solved by someone else. It’s also unlikely that Mom may want to work on changing these behaviors, as she has had other people take care of her her whole life.
Why would Mom be motivated to change when she has been taught that other people solve her problems?
The only way to change the situation is for the caregiver to change. Change your responses, the way you react, and your behaviors. You can do it if you want. Making these changes may take practice.
Anxiety and Denial
Anxiety and health problems may show up in mom’s life due to a lack of coping and problem-solving skills. As a result, mom may neglect self-care routines, lack motivation to help herself, have a lot of doctor appointments, obsess about medical conditions, and refuse to follow the doctor’s orders.
How do these behaviors affect relationships with others? Many times, an anxious elderly mother who wants constant attention has little or no recognition that these behaviors wear down adult children and eventually chase away friends.
When the subject of anxiety or depression is mentioned, an elderly mother or father may choose to deny the conditions. They say, “You’re making stuff up. There’s nothing wrong with me; I’m not as bad as my sister or someone else.”
A parent may be in denial about their needs or circumstances.
Mom refuses to take medications or accept treatment because she believes she can manage on her own. If she could, she wouldn’t need you. Mom may have a fear of the stigma of having a mental health or anxiety diagnosis.
If you wrap behaviors and health conditions together, an elderly mother or father can be very difficult to deal with. You may be the only person in their life who continues to show up.
Mom or dad may have driven away your other siblings, friends, and other people in their life because they can’t see the damage their behaviors cause in relationships with other people. It’s always somebody else doing something wrong.
3 Caregiver expert strategies and tips to care for an anxious elderly mother
What are some caregiver tips and strategies for caring for an anxious elderly mother? The best way to deal with an anxious, all-consuming Mom or Dad is to be direct and honest.
For example, Mom or Dad, ”I’m doing the best, and I can’t do any more for you. I’ve done X, Y, and Z. I have a life outside of caring for you. This is what I can help you with, and this is what I need you to help yourself with. Can and will you help yourself?”
If mom or dad has a diagnosis in their medical chart for anxiety or depression, and they are refusing to take medications, you can go so far as to say, “You can help yourself, but you are not. Your doctor has offered medication. You refuse. If you take medication, it might help you, make it easier for me to help you, and make your relationships with other people go a little smoother.”
If there is no diagnosis, suggest that they schedule an appointment to discuss the matter with the doctor.
Every time they call, your response can be, “Try to do that yourself, and if you can’t, I’ll see when I can get there, or you seem anxious, are you taking your medications?”
Complaining
If your anxious elderly mother is a complainer. You can say something like this:
“I can see that you feel anxious or worried, or describe whatever condition your parent is experiencing. I’m not a counselor; I don’t have those skills. I also don’t want to listen to you complain. I’ve done that and don’t want you to think that listening to you complain is something I enjoy doing.
It’s time you learn how to manage anxiety, worry, or whatever behavior is causing you stress. I’m not the person who can help you with that. I’m willing to help with X, Y, Z. Call your doctor’s office for a referral to a counselor or call Medicare or your insurance company and find someone to help you with your anxiety.”
Spending Money Can Result from Feeling Anxious
Anxiety and depression can relate to other behaviors such as hoarding, excessive spending, or triangulation, which means talking badly about people when they are not present to defend themselves.
In all areas, set firm boundaries, especially if you are the agent under the power of attorney. For example, if a parent becomes anxious and spends too much money on things they don’t need, let them know that this is a problem, or put other measures in place.
I once had a client who became anxious. To feel better, she wrote $1.00 checks to 20 or 30 charities. What happened? Those charities began sending her more letters, asking for contributions. Then she was added to the mailing list of similar charities that also sent her letters requesting financial donations.
Her mailbox was filled with charitable requests. We agreed that I had to take the checkbook away because the anxiety attacks and check writing meant she could not pay her electric or heating bills or buy groceries.
Similar to responses to anxiety, reactions to stress can include overeating or overindulging in substances that are not good for caregivers. As caregivers learn to adjust their responses to an anxious elderly parent, they can also learn to manage stressors in their own lives.
Triangulation
Triangulation is a behavior that can result from anxiety or be a learned behavior that parents pass down to their children or that is learned in the workplace.
For example, Mom talks to your sister about you, or talks to you about your sister. She never says anything positive. The communication is always critical.
You can stop the behavior. For example, say, “If you want to talk about X, then let’s get X on the phone so that you can say these things to them. I find it disrespectful to discuss other people when they are not present, as they can’t defend themselves.”
Triangulation is a behavior that seeks to divide people against each other, and it works unless the people involved see through the behavior and agree to stop it.
Being Empathetic Yet Firm
To create effective strategies for managing an anxious elderly parent, do your best to understand the underlying reasons for their behavior. It may be that your father, through his responses to your mother, taught her that these behaviors were acceptable.
The problem is that Dad is no longer with us. You, as the caregiver, are left to deal with mom’s behaviors that he reinforced.
Be empathetic yet firm. For example, “I can see that Dad taught you that these behaviors were acceptable. For me, they’re not. So we need to agree to communicate and work together differently if you want me to help. And even then, we may have to pay or hire someone else to help you, because I’m not Dad, I can’t be Dad, and I don’t want to be Dad.”
Or if the issue was not created by your father, you can say, “I’m not the solution to this problem; we have to find other solutions because I want to go on with my life. I love you and I can’t imagine how difficult this might be for you, but I have to take care of myself too, and I can’t do that while I am caring for you.”
Setting boundaries with an anxious elderly mother means prioritizing self-love and self-care
over and above your parent’s expectations. If others in your family continue to pressure you to remain involved, you can say, “If you really believe what you are saying, then step in and take over because I am making a different choice.”
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