DM wants the impossible

[Exhaustedpickle]

My DM is in a care home and is very unhappy. She suffers from depression and anxiety (and is on medication for these) so that doesn't help the situation.

But, she constantly says that she wants to go back to "how things were before", told my DSis that she wishes it was 1995 and more recently, when asked by a MH professional how we could make things better, said "the only thing that would help is if things went back to how they were before."

As awful as it is to admit, I dread visiting her as she is an emotional black hole. I feel I pour myself into trying to meet her emotional needs and come away exhausted and upset. The next time I see her, I do it all again. My DSis feels the same and has pretty much reached the end of her tether where our DM is concerned. (There is more to it than just this issue).

I do understand why my DM wishes to turn back time, life was easier and happier then, particularly when my dad was alive as he put her on a pedestal. She would like my DSis and I to fill that role, but we both work and have families and husbands and the menopause so while we want to support her as much as we can, she can't be our princess.

It's hard to see her so unhappy but I'm also frustrated (and exhausted) and feel that her repeatedly saying she wishes she could go back in time is hindering her ability to settle where she is now and accept the realities of her physical decline. It's wishing for something literally impossible - I know people like to say that nothing is impossible but, Marty McFly aside, time travel definitely is!

Sorry for the long post, I suppose my question is, how do I deal with this and help her accept the present and try to make the best of it?

Elderly people can often become extremely selfish, and expect that everyone will run around after them and do everything they wish, despite whatever else they may have going on in their lives.

It must be very draining visiting. I'm assuming the trying to cheer her up and make her feel better doesn't really work, so is there any way you could just stop. Just agree with her, yes life is terrible. Maybe it wouldn't drain you quite so much.

I know it's hard OP. My parents and MIL are now all in their mid to late 80s (FIL died a couple of years ago) and visiting them can be emotionally draining. You can't "fix" this or make her happier. I would just keep visits short and light and try not to let her negative energy affect you.

I have had some similar experience to you OP and I really sympathise .
It is the same for anyone dealing with any loved one who is deeply depressed really - you are powerless to make things better for them, but they can be very hard to love and be around. The illness makes them peculiarly selfish and unappreciative of how hard it is for anyone close to them. I always say depression is a contagious disease. I am currently working with a woman whose sister is severely depressed and she is having to speak to her twice a day on the phone! It is such a strain.

Just interacting with my mother was the main cause of depression in my life (she is dead now and I honestly feel a weight has been lifted). I'm afraid after many years I could be quite blunt with her and if she was talking endlessly negatively on a phone call I would say "if you're going to be like this Mum I'll say goodbye and speak to you when you're feeling a bit brighter".

Visits to the care home were as short as I could make them. I would give her a few hours of my mental support a week and that was my limit. I had been propping her up on and off since I was about 10 years old and just had enough of it by the time she was in her 90s.

I don't know what to advise you. No doubt you don't want to be as hard as me, but I just wanted to say I understand.

Both @LadyDanburysHatand @Exhaustedpickle have got it spot on. My DF us 78 and so negative.
i try to keep it breezy, short visits and do something nice for myself afterwards. DH will give me a big hug and that helps too.
Im finding with my DF that the medication is not that effective - but he also insists on being extremely negative and will not help himself.
Maybe it helps to know that it’s not your job to make her feel better and neither can you. Only she can do that. I’m making an effort to cultivate positive and can do attitude for myself. I’m also taking time for me so that I have reserves to deal with all the issues you talk about.
Try to cultivate some emotional distance. Sympathetic mmmm noises, changing rhe subject.
i find gardening, walking and podcasts really help and listening to music I love.

I think you are probably quite limited in what you can actually do and that may be where you actually have to do the work for you - getting to the point of accepting that you can't fix it for your mum. You can't make her accept how things are now.
It is hard to hear the person you care about talking constantly about how unhappy they are and not be able to fix it but I think it might take away some of your stress if you accept that you can't make her see things differently.

Having said all of that, what about:

Seeing if you could find a counsellor who might be willing to see your mum ( if your mum is willing for this and she can afford it and you can find someone who will work with elderly people) They will have different skills in listening and may be able to help her to see things in a different perspective

Getting a counsellor for yourself that you can offload to and who can help you reduce the stress and deal with the emotional issues around how your mum is.

Developing your own strategy for when you see your mum that lets her feel heard but also isn't a burden to you. Counterintuitively I wonder about leaning into her unhappiness for the first 20 minutes ( or whatever) of your visit. Let her feel heard, acknowledge that things are different and she really wishes they weren't and she feels a lot of grief about this etc. But then have a plan for how you are going to change the focus. Bring something that might engage her ( I don't know how disabled she is or what she likes so it is hard to suggest but maybe a jigsaw, play a card/board game, watch an episode of something engaging on TV and try and share the experience with her, give her a manicure, take her for a walk in the garden or even out for a coffee, get grandchildren to do little video clips of what they are up to, play them and talk about the grandchildren's lives now,) anything to get her mind into the present moment.

I was in a similar place with my DM. She and DF lived in our granny annex (I'm an only child). She was severely disabled with osteoarthritis so when DF died I took over her care. When it was apparent to everyone but her that she could no longer stay at home she moved to a beautiful home and she hated it from day one. When asked what would make her happy she always said the same thing - "to be at home with my kids". i.e. her grandchildren. But what never sank in was that "the kids" were all adults, married and living away. She wanted to go back to the time when the children were in and out all day long.

She had dementia and as the dementia progressed she became more resigned to where she was and visits became more pleasant.

F

I think we all feel like that don’t we? 1995 was a wonderful era for me but obviously I don’t bemoan that to anyone.

Does your mum have dementia and can’t help what she is verbalising or is she just a drain?

My mum is/was both so it’s hard to work out how to deal with her, current technique is to visit in short bursts always with an actively.

It’s really bloody hard! Full sympathy.

Before Mum had full blown dementia I used to constantly change the subject and then leave linking it to her negative behaviour, strangely she never seemed to either correlate this or have the ability to change her behaviour.

Elderly people get miserable because life is miserable for them. I wouldn’t want to live in a care home either. I wouldn’t want to be ing God’s waiting room. Not in my own home, with my things around me. Having to eat what they give me, not necessarily what I fancy, but when they choose to feed me.
I would be miserable too. As I suspect would many.

See things from her perspective. You won’t be able to fully cheer her up.
Do you ever take her out for a day trip anywhere if that was possible ? Can she see the outside even from where she is ?
A memory album or box of the past ? How is the care home? Does it respect her as someone who has lived a life, or are they treating her as if she were three ?
How you speak to someone makes a hell of a difference.
Get her out of there for a day trip would be fantastic for her.

It’s tricky. Mine are very draining. I understand things are hard for them but they are quite self centred and don’t realise other people have challenges too. Mine like to complain about people not visiting (whilst you’re sat there!)

Maybe your mum needs different anti depressants? Or a higher dose of the ones she’s on?

So when i suffered with major depression in my mid 30s it was awful- I tried 2 SSRIs at various doses but they just weren’t effective for me. Then my psychiatrist put me on a high dose of an SNRI (Venlafaxine MR) and after a few months of tweaking the dose; it became very effective.. basically I’m not suicidal anymore, the world never seems bleak, I’m just basically quite a happy person.

I do also suffer with Schizoaffective Disorder so I have had regular mood swings in the last couple of years - I would be very flat for a couple of weeks then very high, until they changed my anti psychotic- but that is nothing to do with the actual depression I used to suffer with.
Yes, I still get ‘down’ days at times and I was very upset by my Mum’s death but the depression is nothing as bad as it was.

The reason I’ve said all this is to give you hope that depression is curable & to say that basically people of all ages suffer with depression- I feel strongly that if someone is elderly they shouldn’t just live with depression; their medication needs to be sorted out properly to allow them to see life in a more positive way.

I think you deal with it by accepting it. This is how she is. You can’t fix it and there is no point trying to talk her out of it. She needs to deal with it herself (unless of course she has dementia, in which case she can’t; but then again neither can you).

If you think about it logically, it isn’t surprising she wants to go back to earlier days, being old and in a care home isn’t a lot of fun. Who wouldn't want to go back to their life 30 years earlier?

But you don’t have to engage with it and get sucked in. Reply something non committal like “yes I understand”. And change the subject. If she won’t talk about anything else, just nod sympathetically and think of happier things.

And accept there really is nothing you can do about it. Once I realised that, I found it very freeing.

Thanks so much to everyone for understanding. Sadly my DM has become very selfish and focused on her own woes above all others.

To answer some of the questions: she doesn't have dementia, it's just the way she is. She has always been an anxious person but developed depression during lockdown so it's been a long-standing thing.

We do take her out, of course. My sister and I have taken her out for lunch/afternoon tea/coffee and brought her to our homes etc. Sometimes we just take her out in her wheelchair to get some fresh air and sunshine. The last time she was at my sister's she spent most of the time crying and telling my niece how unhappy she is so getting her out isn't the magic pill unfortunately. (An interesting aside is that she never unloads on my brother who regularly tells us how chipper our Mum was when he spoke to her).

She has a nice room overlooking the garden in the care home and the staff are respectful. She gets taken to activities (and does enjoy them) and taken out by them on short trips. We have taken in photo albums etc and put pictures up on the wall, her own bedding and cushions and so on. I know nobody wants to live in a care home but I do feel she could try to be a little bit more stoic. She was unhappy when she lived in her own home with carers going in too so I think it's just her default setting.

She has had counselling but since they couldn't turn back the clock she deemed it a failure. The doctor has been tweaking her anti-depressants but nothing seems to change. Can anti-depressants still work if the person doesn't also try to get better? I'll speak to her doctor and see if there are other medications she could try.

Everyone seems to have given the same advice about me needing to accept that I can't really help her and just to make supportive noises and try not to get sucked in. I am going to try really hard to do this. My DM is the greatest source of my unhappiness and stress and that's incredibly sad but also the fact the of the matter.

I would hate to be dependent on everybody for my needs. To not to be able to just get up and go out, even if it is just to the shops. For the 4 walls of your bedroom to be mainly your home.

Even if you live at home, as your mobility decreases, your world can become so small.

The realisation that this is the best its going to be, and in fact it is going to get steadily worse. Not sure I will be stoic if I get to that stage.

My mum was exactly like this and honestly it is the worst time ever. Before mum went into a care home she used to say she didn’t belong and she wanted to go home,all she talked about were her parents and siblings, she said she couldn’t explain to me exactly what she ment by that, so how the heck I was supposed to help goodness knows, but it caused me no end of heartache.
When she went into the care home she had dementia, so seemed to forget about it, but she was still distressed when we told her we had to hand her flat back to the housing association.
She never fully settled in the care home and passed away after six months.
All I can say to you is try not to take it to heart. You’re doing great, try to keep things positive and light hearted when your with her. I’ve heard this so many times it’s very common. Good luck.

My mum is like this too. In a recent rehab stay she even ranted about the cute therapy dog who visited the residents. She also cries to all the women, but not the men. She just doesn't want to be where her life has ended up and we can't change that. Its hard.
Short, like 10mins short, visits might help?

OP it sounds as if she dumps all this on you and your sister because she knows you will 'take it on'. You say she is chipper when speaking to your brother and that is probably because he will not absorb her misery for her.

The only thing you can change in this situation is your own attitude and behaviour. Remember you do have a choice, if you stop soaking it all in or trying to fix things, she is more likely to rein it back.

@sittingonabeach I agree with you. I know that if I lost my mobility and independence I would find life extremely difficult. I hope I wouldn't try to spread my misery around but by the time I'm 85, who knows.

My mum is very similar though compounded by dementia following a stroke. I am grateful i live 6 hours away so don't get to visit regularly which sounds awful but helps me deal with the emotional situation

So don't visit her. It doesn't make her happy and it makes you miserable, OP - what's the point of doing it?

@catofglory thing is you don’t know what you are going to be like and don’t necessarily realise you are like that when you get there!

My DM used to say shoot me if I get like your gran. Told me my DF would hate it if he knew what he was like and what he said when going through the dementia journey.

Guess what she is now a combination of the two of them, but most days she hasn’t got a clue she has turned into them 😔 We have some good days when I can see the lovely mum she used to be, other days are hard

Have you tried visiting at the same time as your brother🤔
My mother was similar, very negative and draining, anxiety and depression all her life and addictions to prescription meds. Tried CBT..........she came out of final session, got in my car and went "well that hasn't cured me".
Mine was different for my brother too🤷💐

@Monty36 I have a relative in a care home and it's nothing like you describe! The food offered is amazing (my relative enjoys it so much they've gained weight). If you don't fancy eating at the meal times (which are between x and y rather than at x) they'll offer food at different times. Loads of activities, trips out, pub lunches, visiting choirs, speakers etc - you just join in with what you want. Film nights are very popular! My relative does way more than they ever did at home! They have dementia and for the first month or so kept telling everyone what a fabulous hotel they were in and hoped their holiday would never end!

OP I have no answers for you. I'm sorry.

I would be livid she can put on a cheerful front for your brother.

Good idea from @Mossstitch to visit with him.

She really after moving in with one of her daughters?