Therapy for Caregivers
Caring for an aging parent is one of the most demanding things a person can take on — and one of the least talked about. It arrives gradually, often before you feel ready, and it asks you to hold a great deal at once: love and exhaustion, duty and resentment, grief for the parent you knew and the reality of who they are becoming.
Many of the adults I work with are in exactly this position. They are managing their own lives — their work, their relationships, their health — while also coordinating medical appointments, navigating family disagreements about care, watching a parent decline, and quietly setting aside their own needs day after day. It is a particular kind of stress, and it tends to be invisible to the people around you.
If you are caring for an aging parent, or anticipating that role, you deserve support too.
What Caregivers Often Experience
The emotional weight of caregiving shows up in many ways:
Chronic exhaustion that sleep doesn't seem to fix
Anxiety about making the right decisions for your parent's care
Grief — for your parent's losses, and for your own
Guilt, even when you are doing everything you can
Resentment, followed by guilt about the resentment
Feeling isolated, as though no one around you truly understands
Difficulty attending to your own needs, health, or relationships
A growing sense that you have lost yourself in the role
These feelings are not signs of weakness or failure. They are the natural result of carrying too much for too long without enough support.
Managing Aging Parents: When Family Dynamics Complicate Things
Caregiving rarely happens in a vacuum. Often it surfaces old family patterns — questions of who does more, old sibling conflicts, disagreements about what a parent needs or wants. Sometimes there is a parent who resists help, making an already hard situation harder. Sometimes you are the only one willing to step in, and the loneliness of that is its own kind of grief. Sometimes it is complicated by a history of poor relationships with parents.
Therapy provides a space to sort through all of it — the practical, the emotional, and the relational — without judgment.
How I Work with Caregivers
After decades of working with adults through some of life's most difficult passages, I understand how much is asked of caregivers and how rarely they ask for help themselves. In our work together, I begin by helping you identify what you are actually feeling beneath the surface — and making room for all of it, including the parts that feel hard to admit.
From there, we work on building tools that help you manage the stress of caregiving without losing yourself in the process. This includes practical strategies for setting limits, managing the decisions that feel impossible, and maintaining your own health and relationships. It also means looking at the deeper belief systems that may be making it harder to ask for help or put yourself first — beliefs that tell you that your needs don't matter, or that you have to do this alone.
You cannot pour from an empty cup. Taking care of yourself is not a luxury when you are a caregiver — it is a necessity.
I offer therapy for caregivers via secure video to adults throughout Oregon, including Portland, Salem, and Eugene. Major insurance plans are accepted. I hope to have the opportunity to work with you.