The Caring Caregiver's Guide to Dealing with Guilt

This guidebook is a collection of 10, true, short stories about the undeserved guilt families experience when they turn the care of their loved ones over to someone else. "Caring Caregivers" is written in a down-to-earth style that families will easily identify with but still professional enough for medical management to purchase as a handbook for their employees and libraries. It also contains the stages the family goes through in dealing with the guilt, a question and answer section and a much needed checklist for placement and specific problems and how to overcome them with creative solutions. This book is the first in a 13 book series of "Caring Caregivers" yet to come.

If you have an elderly loved one and are feeling guilty about not caring for them yourself but simply cannot, this book will help you to see you are not alone in dealing with these debilitating emotions and what to do about ridding yourself of the guilt monster once and for all.

If you are not at the point of relinquishing their care yet, Caring Caregivers can give you creative tips on caring for your loved one and make your job at home much easier.

This book will also help medical professionals to better understand the anguish and pain their clients’ families are experiencing so they can better serve them. We have identified 9 types of guilt in this book.

Coping with death, guilt, mental illness, violence, abuse, revenge, victory, tears and love are but a few of the tumultuous feelings and seemingly insurmountable situations in which the real-life people in "The Caring Caregivers Guide to Dealing with Guilt" find themselves in.

"Baby boomers", "the sandwich generation"- you can label this group in a variety of ways, but the facts speak for themselves in regard to the increasing population of adult children of the elderly.

If we take into consideration the fact that people are living longer (according to the Census Bureau, the average age at death in the year 2000 was 85), we can see that there are millions of Americans between the ages of 38 and 67 who out of necessity make decisions about arranging care for their elderly parents or grandparents. Many of these caregivers have children of their own and the responsibilities of caring for them, both in the home and on the job; they want to help their parents, but they are simply overwhelmed. All too often, they suffer from a tremendous burden of guilt that keeps them from making important and sound decisions about their parents’ care until it is too late--and their own health, and their careers or marriages, are sacrificed in the meantime. Caring Caregivers helps them make important decisions much easier.

In addition to the impelling stories, is included a highly beneficial suggestion box with solutions for the reader regarding the type of guilt addressed at the end of each story.

Family caregivers, as well as medical professionals who deal with families everyday, will find the chapters on the stages that the family goes through, and how to handle dementia-specific problems, highly beneficial and easily applicable.