Join us for a heartfelt and insightful conversation with Dr. Delia Chiaramonte, MD, as she shares her personal experiences and professional insights on supporting individuals dealing with ill or ailing parents or relatives. In this episode, Dr. Chiaramonte delves into the challenges of caregiving, the impact of illness on families, and the importance of managing time, emotions, and self-care.

Dr. Chiaramonte discusses the best piece of advice she has received, the role models and mentors who have influenced her, and the lessons learned from her own journey. She provides valuable insights on navigating the medical system, making high-quality medical decisions, and managing strong emotions. Dr. Chiaramonte also emphasizes the importance of filling up one’s own cup as a caregiver and approaching difficult situations with an open heart and mind.

Drawing from her book, Coping Courageously, Dr. Chiaramonte offers practical tools and strategies for caregivers to maintain their well-being while providing compassionate care. This episode is a must-listen for anyone facing the challenges of caregiving and seeking to find balance and resilience in their role.

Tune in to this empowering episode with Dr. Delia Chiaramonte and gain valuable insights on caregiving and self-care. Learn from Dr. Chiaramonte’s experiences and discover practical tools to navigate the challenges of supporting ill relatives. Don’t miss this opportunity to find balance and resilience in your caregiving journey!

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Well, Doc, how you doing today? Good to talk to you.

I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me.

of pleasure having you on. I'm dying to have this conversation with so many people in our world who are dealing with or will be dealing with probably at some point in their life, either ill or ailing parents or relatives. So it's always good to have that. How do we support people as they cope through those difficult navigations of life in our generation? So thank you for being able to come on and give us some insights from your own personal experience.

My pleasure.

I like to ask my guests this question to kind of get to know you a little bit better. What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

I think the best piece of advice that I have ever received, which I have given to my daughters over and over, over the years, is don't judge your insides by other people's outsides. And the reason I say that is that we as human beings generate a lot of our own suffering by comparing our experience to how we think it should be. And so...

Excuse me. And so for some times that is, you know, that person looks like everything's happy in their life and I'm struggling or fighting with my spouse or having troubles at work. When in reality, that other person probably is also fighting with their spouse or having troubles at work or having their own flavor of challenge, because that's just the way life goes. So us comparing our own real complicated life to someone else's perfect shiny life.

generates a lot of suffering that is just unnecessary. There's enough real suffering. Why would we want to generate extra suffering?

someone said tomorrow has enough troubles of its own going and adding more to it so I love that I'm always curious people like yourself who have lived life have people in their lives who come alongside them and been role models and mentors who were some of those people in your journey and tell us what about them made them special

Right? Right?

That's a great question. I think I'll list two people, if that's okay. So it came from a little bit of a challenging childhood, but I had an aunt who I didn't see that often, but I held her out in front as a kind of beacon of the kind of woman that I wanted to be. She had six children, she had five living children at the time.

and she had this beautiful garden and she would make her own pasta sauce from scratch and she would make pasta from scratch and it would be hanging in the kitchen and she would have big family dinners where all the children would sort of bicker but there so clearly was love there and that was not the experience in which I was living and I just thought I want that. And I feel like I did create that and I'm really proud and happy of that and so.

She didn't even know she was that to me. And so for me, that's the interesting part about that story is that she was just living her life, but I saw it and integrated it into my goals, my vision for myself. And it really helped me live a better life as an adult. So that's one. And the other is my father. And I want to tell you a little story to illustrate this. So he is a unique dude. Let me just say.

He's a unique dude. I didn't grow up with him, but I did see him growing up. And he is kind of an introverted, live alone, engineer turned artist kind of interesting guy. And he was working as an engineer. And then in his fifties, he took up sculpting. He took up art and, and he was doing it on the weekends, working full time. And then at some point he decided, you know, I really need more time to work on my art. That's what I want for myself.

So he went to his job and he said, I need to work every other month. So I'll work for a month that I need to be off for a month so I can really focus on art and then I'll come back and work for a month. And of course they said, get out of here. Like, no, are you out of your mind? This is not a thing that people do. And he said, okay, it's been great working for you. Thank you, goodbye. Basically he had decided he was an engineer. He was willing to go work at a pizza place because this is what he needed for his own wellbeing.

And because he was so good at what he did, when they saw he really was gonna leave, they were like, well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. And you cannot believe it, but they let him do it. And so he switched on the full moon. So every full moon, he would either leave work or come back to work. And in the lab where he worked, they ended up calling him the moon man, because he would come and go as the moon changed. And he did this for the last 10 years of his career before he retired.

And the only reason he lived this incredible experience where he could have a month at a time to do art was because he asked and he really needed it. So he was willing to make it happen no matter what. And because of that, the world kind of opened up and gave him what he needed. And I find that very inspiring.

That is so cool that he was so passionate about what he believed in and felt so strongly in it that he was willing to risk what was safety to go and pursue something that he felt really passionate about. That's really a neat story. Thanks.

That's exactly it. And that's what I find so inspiring, that very thing. Because a lot of us, myself included, I struggle with this, but I'm working on it, we are maybe ruled a little bit more by fear. Like, well, but will I make enough? And can I really give up my job as an engineer to work in a pizza place? You know, those kind of, gosh, could I really do that ideas? And he was just like, nah, this is what I need to do. So this is what I'm going to do. And I think that.

We don't have enough of that, and I think it's very inspiring, and I look for ways in my life when I can emulate that.

so neat. So you've given us a little taste of your background but give us your personal story because I think I know your personal story impacted your book so kind of give us your story.

Sure. So I think perhaps what you're referring to in this particular context is my daughter had an accident at one point, which really changed our experience in life. So I have two daughters, and both of them have had medical conditions. But one of them at age 12 fell off.

a horse that had spooked and was racing at top speed and she fell onto her head, dented her helmet, which shows how much of an impact there was. And she really had a tough time. And it was about a three year recovery that included things like excruciating headaches and neck pain that nobody for a long time could figure out the reason for.

It made it in the beginning, you know impossible for her to go to school and so she couldn't go to school and then we would go to doctors and they would say brain rest brain rest brain rest brain rest brain rest were like it's been weeks. It's been more weeks It's been more weeks, you know what she's the girls got to go to school. Like what do we do here and she was sobbing and screaming and unable to sleep and had you know, 12 out of 10 pain 24 7 in addition to a whole bunch of other things and so I

After a while, we tried to send her to school, but she couldn't do anything. And they didn't make her do tests. They didn't make her do any work. She just would try to go to school. And every single day for months by 11 o 'clock, she's in the nurse's office. And the nurse is calling me and saying, you have to come get her. So we did this crazy thing for months. We're like every day, we were like, maybe today it will work. And we'll just take her to school and it's going to be OK. And every day.

She was in excruciating pain, couldn't cope and had to come home. And so she lost not only her experience of herself as a learner, but she lost all her friendships because she was not fun to be around and she couldn't do anything anymore. She was miserable and so other 12 year old girls are not wonderfully supportive of a situation like that. So she lost her whole sense of who she was and eventually we realized, well, this is silly.

to play this game every single day and we pulled her from school and the plan was to homeschool her. So I was working and my boss at the time thankfully was very supportive because I went and said, look, this is our situation. Either I have to quit or I can bring her with me and I can homeschool her while I work. And he said, okay, let's try that. So this was the first time it had been now many, many months that we realized, guess what? She can't read anymore. They didn't know at school because they weren't having her do anything.

But I was having this fantasy, she'll just sit next to me or lay on the ground and do her work and I'll do my work and then we'll send in the work to the school and it will be fine. No, so she couldn't read anymore. She couldn't understand. And she had been a straight A student in a college prep school up until that point. And so that was a big like, my gosh, this is very different. Like she, this isn't just like, well, let's wait a few more weeks and she'll go back to school against, our whole situation had to change.

And so not only was she in this excruciating pain, but she couldn't read. Her swallowing was backwards. Food would come out her nose when she would swallow. She couldn't understand language in the same way anymore. Her personality changed because her brain was damaged. She had tremendous anxiety and depression that she had not had before. And so it really upended.

our whole family, not just her, but me, my husband, and her sister as well. And so the other thing that was challenging for us was that nobody could figure out what to do. And we like it in medicine when we say, you have this problem, and here's the pill that fixes it. But this was a complex situation. Nobody could figure out what to do. The advice we were getting from the medical system really wasn't helpful at all. We'd

I was in integrative medicine at the time, so I took her even to our integrative medicine doctors. That information also alone was not particularly helpful. They said, well, stop eating sugar and clear the mold from your basement and all the pain will go away. And of course, that wasn't true. And so what ultimately happened, speeding towards the end, is she had, led by me, a truly integrative palliative, meaning symptom -based treatment plan, which included a ton of stuff.

So medicines, procedures, injections in her neck, surgery for her neck, meditation, guided imagery, yoga, massage, EMDR, which is for trauma, because of the fear she felt while she thought she was going to die on that horse. Something called behavioral optometry to help her eyes and her brain work well together. Something called neurofeedback to get her brain back online. Plus,

counseling plus physical therapy plus chiropractic. So this kind of all around approach plus an educational approach of a school that was specifically for kids who are struggling with learning but were very bright got her better. It ultimately got her better and she just fairly recently graduated from college with very high marks and I'm so proud of her and happy for her. But also she grew as a person. She did and

Towards the end of it, she was able to see that there really truly were blessings even in this incredibly difficult experience. And so I think that whole experience impacted me as a person for sure, but also as a doctor, really getting what it's like from the other side and really getting how important integrating a fully medical approach plus complimentary modalities to round out the whole.

person and whole family approach to getting better from something complicated.

I'm curious, could you, because you've been on both sides of this coin, as a doctor, you know what the doctors say, but for people out there who are struggling with people who are dealing with illness in their family and their caregivers to people who have a lot of medical issues and require a lot of time.

What would you kind of say for people who don't really understand? I think a lot of people look at that on the outside. They don't understand the frustration, even the pain that the caregivers are going through. And it kind of sometimes dismisses going, it can't be that bad. Or they don't know even how to even step in and say, how can I help? Those people are at the end of their wires. I mean, end of the line sometimes because there's so much blood on them.

Yeah. Yeah.

So maybe kind of speak into that with people who are listening for those in that situation.

Absolutely. So I'm an integrative palliative care physician. And so that means not just end of life, but the care of people with serious illness. And the way I see it is whole person care for families, not just patients, families facing serious illness using all of the tools that work. So that's all the medical tools and the non -medical tools. And what I found as my time as a practicing integrative palliative doctor is that some families,

even with a very difficult diagnosis, were doing okay. They were struggling, of course, because it is so incredibly hard, but the family wasn't falling apart. And then other families, same severity of diagnosis, but these other families were really fracturing and struggling to the point of hanging on by their fingernails as a family, like really not doing well. And I became very interested in what's the difference? What are the people who are...

tired and overwhelmed, but finding meaning in the experience, getting the help that they need, connecting as a family instead of everyone to their own corners. What are they doing? And if we teach that stuff to the other families, can we help those families do better? And of course it turns out you can. And that was why I wrote this book. My book is Coping Courageously, a Heart -Centered Guide for Navigating a Loved One's Illness Without Losing Yourself. And in that book are so many tools.

that the families who were doing well were using that worked. And so from that, I've also kind of tried to figure out, to answer your question, what are the things that people need? Like what helps, aside from reading my book, which I do think helps, but really like kind of in a structural way, what helps? And so I came up with something that I call the courageous caregiving roadmap. And there are five parts to that. And this is what I really think.

people need to do to know to get help with in order to cope with the situation of having a seriously ill loved one. So those five things are, the first one is managing the medical machine. So the medical system is crazy and a mess and does not work as well as we all wish that it would. So I do think that it's important for people to learn.

How do you get the best from your doctor? How do you keep your loved one safe in the hospital? What should you bring when your loved one goes to the hospital? What do you do if they're about to give your loved one a blue pill and you never saw that blue pill before? How do you keep track of all the stuff? How do you get a second opinion? How do you know if you need a second opinion? So how do you manage this craziness? That's the first one. The second one is I do think it's really important.

that people intentionally face the tough stuff. So what I found in some families who are really not doing well is they were just like, la la la la la la, do not tell us a bad diagnosis. We do not wanna hear it. We don't want negative thinking. We're not gonna talk about that, period. And even though that seems like it might make you feel better or make your family feel better, in fact, it makes everybody feel worse because...

refusing to look at it or talk about it doesn't mean it isn't true and it doesn't mean everybody's not scared. It's just like trying to stuff the monster in the basement and you can still hear him growling down there, right? So it doesn't make you feel safe. It just kind of increases the power of this fear because everybody's afraid to talk about it. So I think being open to talk about the tough stuff doesn't mean you have to.

be depressed all the time, but like, okay, let's just hear it, let's just look at it, let's put it on the table, let's everyone talk about what's happening. It takes actually away some of the fear and away some of the power of the difficult stuff. So that's two. So first was manage the medical machine, two was be willing to face the tough stuff and look at it, talk about it. Number three is people need help making high quality medical decisions. Because if someone you love is sick, there's 40 million decisions to make and often,

Caregivers are left to make it all by themselves and they've never had to do this before and they don't know, like, should we take away the car keys from mom? Should we, you know, we're having trouble caring for dad at home. Should we put him in a facility or not? But we said we wouldn't. So should we, you know, how, should we get a new doctor? We don't love our doctors. How do we gonna, how do I make my siblings do the stuff they're supposed to do?

when they're not doing it, like how do I cut them off, do I not? So there's a million decisions. So I think learning some skills and decision making and there are some skills in decision making, that helps, that's three. Four, we need skills to manage our own strong emotions because people are so scared of their own feelings and then they stuff them back in the basement with the other monster and that makes people feel worse and it separates families, right? Like if one person is,

feeling sad about it or saying, you know what, is dad gonna die? And everyone in the family jumps on them and is like, don't you say that? We're not gonna have that kind of talk. Now that shut that person down, now the family's not as close. They don't feel comfortable speaking anymore. And if you yourself are afraid of your feelings, maybe you shut down to your family and you're like, no, I'm fine, everything's fine, everything's fine. When it's not fine, you know? Like it's okay to cry together and we need some skills to manage strong emotions. We...

Feeling emotions will not kill us, but sometimes it feels like that. So that's four. And then number five is, my gosh, caregivers have to fill up their own cup because you cannot pour from an empty cup. You cannot drive the car on an empty gas tank. Caregiving is so hard. And people sometimes feel like, it's not about me. It's about mom. I'm fine. You know, I don't need anything. It's all about mom. But when you do that, you become so depleted that...

Not only do you feel terrible, but your empathy goes down, because that's what happens. And you get maybe even crankier. And like, mom doesn't want a cranky caregiver either. So it's even a gift to your loved one to take care of yourself so that you can show up with your most loving, warm, healing presence, which if you are totally depleted, you simply can't do. So filling up our own cup, taking care of ourselves is really part of caring for somebody else.

I love all five of these. I know for someone who's dealt with some of these things in my own life, in terms of family, number one is one of the hardest ones, is managing the medical machine because there's so many complexities to the medical machine. You got the insurance component, you have just the doctor interaction component. I just had a doctor on my podcast and we were talking about how...

especially like people who don't have the resources that others may have, maybe because of where they live, because of their background, their ethnicity, that sometimes the doctors are very short with them. They come in, they don't have time to discuss things, talk about things, and so you feel like you really don't get enough time to get your questions answered. So how would you...

How do you recommend for a family who's dealing with some of those medical issues, how do you approach a doctor with questions? Because a lot of times, that's the hardest thing. If you can get a doctor to interact with you and have a discussion with you, sometimes it kind of lowers the anxiety in that medical machine you're dealing with.

Yeah, that's such a great question. And there's a lot in there, but let me talk about specifically the one about connecting with the doctor and getting your questions answered. So let's assume that most doctors are trying to do a good job. If you have the occasional really jerk doctor, you should dump that doctor and get a better doctor. But let's assume this is a nice person who's just stressed out as doctors are, feeling rushed.

and doesn't mean to come across like they don't care about you, but kind of it feels that way. We'll assume that. And so here's what sometimes happens. I'm going to tell you this and then I'll explain why you want to do different than this. Sometimes the doctor first comes in and everyone's sort of polite and the doctor says, hi, okay, what can I do for you? Okay. And the doctor is saying, all right, here's my questions. I'm doing an exam. And then they start telling you, all right, this is what we're going to do and change this medicine. We're going to do this thing. And the family or patient is being polite.

in the beginning, letting the doctor do their thing. Then the doctor, in their mind, they're looking at the time, they've got someone else waiting, and they're closing up in their mind. And then what happens is what in medicine we call a door handle question. So the family has been waiting for their turn, but the doctor thinks they're closing the visit, and they're about to move on to the next person who's waiting. And then as you're like, okay, so, you know, I'll see you next time, the family says, well, there's just one thing. That's a door handle question.

But this was the thing they really wanted to talk about. And they want 10 minutes to talk about this thing, but the doctor is done. They spent the minutes that they had for this visit. And so that is so common. And then the doctor's like, well, okay. And they say, blah, blah, blah, something fast. And then they move, they leave. The family feels like, my gosh, this was so important to me. I've been waiting so long to talk about this. And the doctor gave me two minutes. That is so common, but there's a way to not have that happen. And here's what you do instead. You.

write down what you want to talk about first. So you're clear when you go in, you write it down. Because when you go in, sometimes you forget, like you see the doctor, like, I forget what I wanted to say, write it down. I want to talk about, you know, should dad still be allowed to drive? So when the doctor first comes in and says, hi, nice to see you, you say, I want to say, I know we don't have that much time. I want to say right up front, it's really important to me that we have time to talk about should dad still be allowed to drive. I want to say it's the first thing you say.

And now the doctor knows, okay, I gotta manage this time, including this thing that is important to this family. So they may start right with that. They might go, okay, well, let's talk about that first. Let's spend the whole time talking about that. Or they may say, okay, but his blood pressure was a little high, so we do have to talk about blood pressure, but now I'm managing, I'm gonna do blood pressure faster so that I make sure I save seven, eight minutes to talk about this thing that's important to the family.

So if you do that and you say right up front, I just wanna let you know, I know our time is limited, but this thing is really important to me that we talk about today, unless your doctor is a jerk, they will rearrange the visit to make sure that your thing gets covered. If what they say is, well, I don't care what's important to you, we're gonna do what I say, then you get another doctor.

I like that, that's good. Another part that I think is really key too for me, all these are really important, but four is still got to me too is how do you manage your own strong emotions? Because it seems to me like a lot of times, especially when you have multiple people in the family and they're all trying to provide input on care for a loved one, maybe it's a parent or a sibling, that we...

Either we try to bury our feelings or our emotions, or they come out overly aggressive. And that dominates the time. So how do you get people, what kind of skills do you talk about in your book to help people manage those, all the different emotions that are in the room?

Yep. I'm going to give you one underlying idea first, and then I'll talk more about the specific answer to that question. The underlying idea is that we create more suffering for ourselves by beating ourselves up about our emotions than we would if we just felt them, right? We spend so much energy trying to not feel sad, not feel angry, stuff it away, that if we just said, like just acknowledge this is happening, I feel sad today.

I feel sad today. I'm going to set a timer and give myself 15 minutes to just cry and cry and cry. When the timer goes off, I'm going to wash my face, take the dog out and have a snack. Right? Like rather than stuffing it and trying not to feel it, we give ourselves a little time because if you stuff it, what happens is at some point it explodes out on somebody else. And so you go from zero looking like you have no emotion to all of a sudden you're yelling at everybody or you're losing your mind crying and everybody's freaked out.

Whereas if you just give yourself 15 minutes here and there when you need it, it's like a, lets the air valve out, right? It lets the pressure out. So that's one just underlying concept. But then the other thing that I think is important to know is that we all have different personality quirks, right? I use the positive intelligence model. There's a book called Positive Intelligence, and it's not my book, but I recommend it highly to other people. And it talks about the different negative,

Voices in our head and how that makes our emotions worse more challenging. So everybody has a judge saying You're not being a good enough daughter or you're not being a good enough sister or judging somebody else He's not being a good enough brother, you know, he's not helping as much as he should so this judging part Makes everything worse. We judge ourselves. We feel badly. We judge other people We feel angry and resentful and if you start an interaction with another person and you're bringing your judge and you're angry and resentful

boy are they gonna be defensive and all of a sudden everybody's fighting, right? Whereas if you didn't bring that judge, you brought compassion instead, like hey, this is a hard time for all of us, huh? Nobody's fighting. So a big part of this is prevention of unhealthy emotion, like everybody's fighting, by noticing our own stuff. So the judge is one. Another, the language that this book tends to use is called saboteurs, so the negative voices he calls saboteurs.

So other negative voices are the controller, right? Some people are super controlling. So you show up to be helpful and you're cleaning up the house, mom's house. And one of the siblings is like, you're doing it all wrong. What is wrong with you? Why are you even bothering to clean if you're going to do it that way? They're trying to control the situation to make themselves feel safer. But now the person who was helping, now they're annoyed, right? Now all of a sudden there's negative emotions in the house and we're fighting. And so learning about your own stuff so that you can...

see it and calm it and learning skills to calm it. You know, deep breathing skills, mind body skills, noticing, I was just about to judge him, but how about let me not do that. Let me just go in the other room and put water on my face. Take a couple of deep breaths. I'm like, wow, that was my judge, but that is not gonna be helpful. So let me try to lead with empathy instead and say, hey, it looks like you're having a hard time today. Me too, this is a really hard time. You know, we're sad about what's happening tomorrow. And when you lead with that, all of the difficult emotions get smaller.

And if what you're left with is sadness and grief, those are perfectly fine, normal, healthy emotions, and you shouldn't try to make them go away. You should allow them to come. They'll be there for a while, and then allow them to pass, because it's just part of being a human being.

That's so helpful. I was thinking about your last one too. This is the one I think a lot of caregivers struggle most with. That either you develop a martyr complex from this one or you just don't think you deserve anymore and you don't, you feel guilty giving yourself that time to fill your cup. Kind of spend a little bit of time for those who are feeling that way that it's just selfish of me to think I need time for myself because if they don't do like you said, they're going to burn out.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

and it's not going to go well. So maybe kind of give them a word of, a permission maybe to take care of themselves.

Exactly right. Yeah, I think almost every caregiver feels this way. So if you're a caregiver and you feel like, it would be selfish of me to think about myself because it's really all about mom or dad or my spouse or my sister or brother or my friend, you are in good company because almost everybody feels that way. However, it is not helpful. And this is the way that I think it's most helpful to talk about it, is that.

It's not just, you deserve it, you should take care of yourself, which is true, you do deserve it and you should take care of yourself, but people have trouble receiving that sometimes. But the truth is, you will be a lousier caregiver if you allow yourself to get depleted. And if you truly care about your loved one, you wanna show up as the kind of caregiver that they deserve. And if you wear yourself to the bone,

I don't care how wonderful a person you are, you will not be as good a caregiver. You will be more short with them. You'll be cranky sometimes. You'll be more perfunctory, you know, like you're doing the things you need to do, but in your mind, you're somewhere else. You're not bringing your wholehearted loving self to every moment. And that is not the kind of caregiver that your loved one deserves. They deserve someone who is filled up as a human.

physically, emotionally, spiritually, who is truly present, bringing their loving energy because they have enough energy because they took care of themselves and they filled themselves back up again. That's the kind of caregiver I would want, you would probably want, everybody listening would want for themselves, right? So if you turn it around and you think, let's say you're the person needing care, would you rather have a caregiver who...

who never takes care of themselves, who doesn't ever get a break, who doesn't sleep enough, who doesn't move and exercise, who doesn't eat healthy food, who feels exhausted, think about how that person's gonna show up. Would you rather have that caregiver or would you rather have the caregiver who gets great sleep, who hires you some help to take care of you so that they can have a break, who exercises every day, who meditates or prays, who when they walk in you just feel their warm energy that they're able to share with you?

That's the kind of caregiver everybody wants, but you literally cannot be that caregiver if you allow yourself to get depleted. So I do think it's helpful for some people to think about the fact that they are filling up their own cup as a gift to their loved one, not just a gift to themselves.

That's awesome. So how's your book being received?

It's great, actually. It's so reinforcing and it fills my heart, really, when people reach out to me and say, my gosh, thank God for this book. It helped me at four in the morning when I was so worried about what was happening. It helped me figure out how to work with my siblings. It helped me give myself permission. It helped me understand what was going on and make a plan. And so I really, I feel filled up.

about it and that's why I'm excited to talk about it and I'd love for more people to read it who need it and I think it touches on parts of caring for somebody who's ill that we don't always talk about. You know, the deeper human parts and because of that I share some of my own stories in there and there are plenty of patient stories. Every chapter starts with a story so it's not a dry read, it's more, you know,

We're all in this together and here's some examples of people who have gone through things and how they handled it. And here are some things that I have gone through and here are the things you're going through that might, here are some things that might help you with what you're going through. So I feel like it's a humanizing book. We're all on this journey together and hopefully it lifts some people up.

So I'd love to ask my guests this question. What are you excited about in this season of your life?

So in this season of my life, I made a big decision. I am excited about elevating the way serious illness care happens. You know, I could have stayed in a little practice, but I decided to take a leap and further this field of integrative palliative care, which is not a fully developed field, but I wanted to be because I think that this whole person approach.

to caring for families, not just patients, but families with serious illness using all the tools that work. So medicine type tools and acupuncture, massage, guided imagery type tools, teaching that to families, but then also teaching that to physicians and other clinicians. That's how to change the world, how to change the culture. And that is what I'm dedicating this next part of my life to.

It's so funny, I can see in your vision for what you're doing now, the two role models that influenced your life and your decision.

how interesting. I never thought about that. Tell me what you mean.

Well, the coat, the, your aunt who showed you kind of what it's like to live in a, in a system where you were loved and cared for is what you're trying to develop for families. And taking that leap, it's what your dad did. Going outside of what, you know, the norm is and do something that's outside the box. That's maybe something you never thought about. It hasn't been done before, but you're, you're using those two influences to kind of shape what you're doing.

Yeah.

Well, you might make me cry. Thank you so much for that insight. I never thought of that before, but I see it 100 % now that you've shone a light on it. Thank you for that.

You

Yeah, no, you're welcome. I just, I just, so I always ask those questions. I can often see the decisions people make by the role models they were impacted by. So you kind of see that being driven through the decisions they make for the future.

Wow.

That is so interesting. What a great interviewer you are. That is so interesting. Thank you for that.

No, it's my pleasure. It's just funny to kind of see it developing your life that way and just the different things you did to just kind of, you can see your dad taking the chance with you staying home. I mean, that was another thing I could see when you said, okay, my dad did this one month off on work at home and you did the same thing with your daughter. It's like, I got to find a way to put her first in a situation, which means it may be risking.

what I'm used to doing with my job to take on this new role as a mom for our family. So it's just fun to kind of watch how those influences kind of impact your life, whether you see them or not.

Yep.

Absolutely, I love it. I love that you could see that. I couldn't see it for myself, but you could see it. I love that.

So this is my other favorite question for my guests. What do you want your legacy to be?

my legacy to be.

I mean, on the one hand, it's the same thing, because I think I'm working on my legacy, but really at a deeper level, I want to have been somebody who put good into the world and who helped, this is what I like, who helped people see their tough situation in a different way so that they could grow from it in some way.

whether they grew personally or they grew as a family or they learned something or they saw their own strength. And now that I say it out loud, I hadn't really thought about it before. I think that part of that is that I had a little bit of a difficult start as well, but I feel like I have been so blessed to create a wonderful life for myself. And...

that idea of just because you're facing something difficult doesn't mean that your life has to be bad or doesn't mean that you've lost control or that there's nothing you can do about it. There's always something you can do about it. Even if you can't fix the thing, you can look for, I hope this is okay to say, but I say this to patients all the time, look for the flowers in the poop. Life gives us a fair amount of poop. That's the tough part, but there's always flowers and it doesn't mean the poop's not there. We're not saying, it's all good, it's all great.

Right.

But even if you lost someone dear to you, you know, maybe you were impressed with your own strength or maybe you met some amazing people or maybe people showed up for you in a way you didn't even think they were going to, or maybe you developed a new interest. And so no matter what the poop is, there's always flowers we can find. And I think inspiring people to see that and learn that so that people going through hard things can grow.

That's what I hope to spread a little bit in my little corner of the world.

I love that. As we wrap up today, what do you want the key takeaways for the audience to go away from our conversation?

I think the key takeaway is to approach hard things with open eyes and an open heart. And so that means don't stuff the hard things, be willing to see them, but don't get sucked into the hard things either. Bring your lightness, your love, your laughter, your caring. You can do both of those things at the same time. And that I think is a theme to what I teach in general is,

hold space for two, what might seem like opposing things at the same time. So you can be, you can be angry and loving at the same time. You can be tired of caregiving and still love your person deeply. You can be afraid and also hopeful. You know, you can look at things honestly and still bring your whole loving self to it. So making space for all the stuff. It's basically the poop and the flowers, you know, making space for the hard stuff.

and also making space for the hopeful and light stuff at the same time. I think if we approach walking through the world that way, it just works better for us and for the people around us.

Where can people find your book, Coping Courageously, a heart -centered guide for navigating a loved one's illness without losing yourself?

Indeed, they can find it on Amazon. They can get to it through my website, copingcourageously .com. And they can reach out to me too through the website, which you can get to integrativepalliative .com or copingcourageously, maybe is easier, .com. You can reach out to me through email there. And if anybody wants to chat about anything or share their experience or...

you know, learn from me or connect or give me guidance about how best to help people. I would love to hear from people.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time and for writing this book because like I said, we're all going to be dealing with some part of this, some part in our life most likely. So you've given us five really helpful skills and courageously caregiving roadmap to kind of walk through that journey with ourselves and our family so that we can be the kind of caregiver that our loved one needs in those moments where they're the most vulnerable. So thank you for what you do and blessings on the work you're doing.

Thank you so much and thank you for having me and for this really inspiring conversation.

Well, thank you.