"What Is Wrong With Me?"

Excerpted from Chapter 2 of Counselling and Helping Carers, by Mitchell Noon, B.A. (Hons), M.Sc., Psych D.

Copyright © 1999 J. Mitchell Noon. Distributed for the British Psychological Society by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Case Example

Sarah, in her fifties, had been married for three years. It was her second marriage and Alan, her present husband, was several years older than her. Sadly, just 12 months after their marriage, Alan had suffered a serious illness and become severely disabled. As a result, Sarah became his carer. She did not flinch from her responsibilities, but adopted the task of caring as a natural extension of her prior relationship with her husband. Alan needed help with everything: washing, dressing, going to the toilet, eating, drinking: he was entirely dependent on Sarah. Despite coping admirably in many ways with Alan's needs, in time she found herself becoming more and more irritated with him. She shocked herself one day by shouting at him so angrily that she felt ashamed. " I just exploded," she said. Afterwards, she was full of remorse. She asked herself, what had he done to deserve that? How could she be so awful and hurtful to Alan? He could not help being the way he is. He could not answer back.

She began to perceive herself as an "awful woman". She recalled all the occasions she had been irritated in the past. "How dreadful," she thought, "There must be something wrong with me." Her behaviour had contradicted all her beliefs about what is right and how one person should behave towards another in need. It was only as a result of a chance conversation with the district nurse that she discovered that carers often feel frustrated and irritated and at the end of their tether. It was not just her. The district nurse, in her comments, had normalized the experience for Sarah. this provided a context within which Sarah could see her behaviour as understandable, even to be expected.

Many carers feel like this but not all carers know that it is a common experience. The lack of this context can engender feelings of guilt and self-deprecation, leading to a downwards spiral of difficulties in coping. Sarah's experience is typical. Her self-neglect, her frustration, her sense of isolation, her self-deprecation can all be found in one guise or another in the experience of many carers. The consequences of these experiences are various. In some cases, they may represent a transient disruption in the process of caring which can be placed into perspective by the simple comment of another person, such as the nurse. In other cases, they may continue unchecked and develop into more serious problems both for the carer and the person cared for. A knowledge of these characteristics, therefore, will enable potential helpers to identify difficulties early in the process and, by offering help, pre-empt the development of more serious problems.