Bouncing Back
This session explores the concept of resilience in caregiving. Topics include why resilience is important and will provide ways to increase a caregiver’s own sense of well-being. Participants create an Atlas CareMap – a visual representation of who is on their support team. The creation of the CareMap can provide insights into your own personal caring networks. You’ll leave this session with a draft of CareMap completed.
Resources
These links are being provided for informational purposes only. The websites are maintained by their respective owners, and the Optimal Aging Center bears no responsibility for the accuracy, legality, or content of these external sites. Contact the external sites for answers to questions regarding their content.
Resilience
Book: When a Family Member Has Dementia: Steps to Becoming a Resilient Caregiver by Susan M. McCurry.
“This book offers caregivers a set of practical and flexible tools to enable them become more resilient in the face of difficulty and change. McCurry teaches caregivers how to take advantage of their own creativity and inner resources to develop strategies that will work in their unique situations. She presents her set of five core principles and then brings them to life through vignettes.”
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Book: The Caregiver’s Guide to the Universe: A Memoir: The Caregiver’s Guide to the Universe: A Memoir by Renee Pirie.
“The Caregiver’s Guide to the Universe is a narrative revealing the humorous and unorthodox methods my father used to care for my mother after she developed early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in her late forties.”
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Book: Before I Forget: Love, Hope, Help, and Acceptance in Our Fight Against Alzheimer’s by B. Smith, Dan Gasby, & Michael Shnayerson.
Crafted in short chapters that interweave their narrative with practical and helpful advice, readers learn about dealing with Alzheimer’s day-to-day challenges: the family realities and tensions, ways of coping, coming research that may tip the scale, as well as lessons learned along the way.”
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Article: Building Inner Strength: What does it mean to be strong?
This article defines the elements of what makes people strong and offers four components to ponder as a person builds their inner strength.
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Assessment: VIA’s Character Strength Survey
The VIA Survey offers a personal and unique profile of strengths. Knowing and applying a person’s highest character strengths is the key to being the best self.
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Gratitude
This article is a great summary on the science showing the benefits of gratitude. It covers a variety of topics which include how gratitude works, the neuroscience, and touches on gratitude and grief, anxiety, and stress among other topics.
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Article on Books: 5+ Best Books on Gratitude + Oliver Sacks’ Gratitude Book
There are so many books out there about gratitude but if you want to hear from the experts this list contains many excellent books about the whys and how of gratitude.
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Positive Experiences
This is a good article exploring the theory behind why remembering your positive experiences works and explores how to use a technique called the Social Broad Minded Affective Coping (BMAC) to expand the memories.
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Article: Happiness & Purpose
Short article on the switching the focus from the negative to the positive.
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Kind Acts
This article explores the feedback loop that exists and the research that examined it when a person does a kind act.
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Website: Random Acts of Kindness Foundation
Everything you wanted to know about random acts of kindness.
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Power of Journaling
This is a long article with many interesting facts but the part that is important to this workshop is in Part I. The Benefits of Journaling.
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TED Talk: A Simple Trick to Improve Positive Thinking
An excellent talk that explains the tendency to look for the negative and suggestions to improve positive thinking.
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Your Support Team
Website: Altas CareMap
This is the website for the Altas CareMap. It contains videoes that may assist in drawing or adjusting your caremap, along with a download for the manual which gives step by step instructions.
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TED Talk: What Makes a Good Life-Lessons from the longest study on happiness
A video on the important of developing and nurturing strong relationships
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