I am so exhausted with caring for my husband who is both mentally and physically ill. The biggest issue is his unpleasant behavior. I care deeply for him but as he ages, he has gotten more self-indulgent and unpleasant. I have tried several ways to address this with him, but the bottom line is that he just doesn't care. I am learning to detach emotionally, and this helps but can lead to drama.
So burned out.
I've suffered a lot of hardships with my own husband over the past 3 years that I've stood behind him on and have been his caregiver for. But, he's always treated me with the utmost of love and respect. If he starts treating me in an unpleasant way and becomes self-indulgent and too difficult to live with, in ADDITION to having all these health issues, then I will seriously have to consider separating from him. I matter too. My life is just as important as his. At 65, my goal in life is not to babysit a difficult man who treats me like garbage or to isolate myself from him by living in a different part of the house. We either share our lives together as a team or we go our own separate ways. Life is too short to devote ourselves to caregiving a mentally ill, physically ill self-indulgent and unpleasant oaf. Period. If you're not even 'allowed' to detach emotionally from him w/o it leading to drama, how DO you find relief from such an untenable situation otherwise??
Wishing you the best of luck with a difficult situation.
You may have to also hire some outside help to come in and give you a break. You MUST remember that you matter too, and it's not all about your husband. He may want you to believe it is, but trust me it's not.
You may also want to check if you have any caregiver support groups in your area, as my support group saved my life.
I wonder if your husband may have some dementia, as becoming narcissistic is very common with folks with any of the dementias. My husband who had vascular dementia became that way several years before he passed. It can be trying for sure.
But the most important thing I learned in my caregiving journey was that I mattered too and needed to make sure that I was taking care of myself if I was going to survive the journey.
And I did survive it and am now a better person because of it. So stay strong, and please take care of yourself.
Blessings.
I HAVE detached emotionally a great deal. I feel very cheated after 46 years, but I am not leaving him and this is the way my therapist and I came up with how to live with him. He's not a bad person, just cannot handle a crisis w/o disengaging emotionally.
He's better, and he's also NOT better. He can be a real jerk, but the difference is in the way I handle him. If he's 'in a mood' I simply shut his office door and ignore him. And go about my day. He semi-retired this year and is working PT. We also downsized to a retirement home (which was more for me than him, I don't have a huge yard to care for and the house is basically a huge one story and I don't even go downstairs for a week if I don't want to). It's taken him 8 months to be able to say 'we made the right decision'.
A good geriatric psychiatric workup is in order if he hasn't had one.