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A divorce. A house fire. A serious accident or illness. The death of a family member. Caring for elderly parents. Life events like these are some of the hardest, most emotionally draining challenges we can face. To make things worse, they also require us to deal with finances and make significant, complex money decisions.
How do you manage both?
One tool is to compartmentalize. A client whose spouse died suddenly told me, “I’ve learned that if I have to meet with the attorney or deal with the insurance company, I can set my feelings aside for a while so I can focus.”
In the moment, this is a necessary strategy to help you deal with the immediate concerns. Whether you are dealing with a devastating loss, supporting a loved one through a serious illness, or caring for an elderly parent, the person or situation in front of you requires you to be present. This is not the time to be processing your own emotional stuff.
What is also necessary, sooner or later, is to pick up those painful emotions you set aside.
Rose Zealand, an end-of-life doula and certified financial planner in Colorado, describes this process with a relatable analogy. When it’s essential that you be present and you don’t have the space to process your own emotions, you put them into a box and stash it somewhere. Every unprocessed emotion around every hard task you have to take care of goes into a box.
If you don’t go back later to open these boxes, they get stored. Early on, the boxes fit into a closet or the trunk of the car. Keep going without attending to them, and that space fills up. Then you start filling up the garage, the basement, and the attic. Eventually you’re renting offsite storage units.
That’s what burnout and compassion fatigue look like. You have not stopped caring; you simply have no room left for all the emotions in those stacks of boxes.
The longer the boxes stay sealed, the more they cost. Caregivers who burn out miss work, neglect their own physical and financial health, make impulsive decisions under stress, and sometimes end up needing care themselves far sooner than they should.
