Caregiver Burnout + Sandwich Generation Therapy
You’ve gotten very good at being the person people can count on.
You remember what needs to happen, check in on your parents, keep track of the kids, handle work, and somehow know there’s no milk before anyone else opens the refrigerator.
When you’ve been the capable one for a long time, carrying a lot can start to feel normal. I want to know what all of that has been like for you, including the parts that are harder to say out loud.
Caring for people comes with complicated feelings.
You can love someone deeply and feel exhausted by what they need from you. You can want to help your parents and resent how much responsibility has landed on you. You can adore your children and still want an afternoon when nobody asks you for anything.
Caregiving can hold love, responsibility, tenderness, guilt, anger, grief, and resentment surprisingly close together.
We don’t need to clean any of that up before we talk about it.
Jennifer describes many of the women she works with as managing children, careers, aging parents, family responsibilities, and years of being the person everyone else relies on.
There’s the work everyone sees. And then there’s everything else.
Caregiving isn’t only driving someone to an appointment or helping with a physical need. There’s also the remembering, anticipating, worrying, planning, checking, coordinating, and noticing.
You may be keeping track of your parents’ health while thinking about your children, your relationship, your job, the house, and the seventeen things you need to remember tomorrow.
When that mental load has lived with you for years, it can start to feel less like something you’re doing and more like the background noise of your life.
Being in the middle can be a strange place to stand.
The sandwich generation gets its name from caring in both directions, but that description doesn’t quite capture the emotional part of it.
Your children are growing into lives of their own while your parents are changing in ways you may not feel ready for. The people who once knew everything and handled everything may begin relying on you. Old family dynamics can show up right alongside very practical decisions about care.
There can be grief in that long before there has been a loss.
And in the middle of everyone changing, you’re changing too.
What has all of this been doing to you?
Anxiety + constant thinking
There is always something to anticipate, remember, arrange, or worry about, and your mind has gotten used to staying a few steps ahead.
Exhaustion + burnout
You’re functioning, but everything takes more out of you than it used to. Even time off can become time spent catching up.
Guilt
You feel guilty when you help less, guilty when you feel resentful, guilty when you want space, and sometimes guilty for being tired of feeling guilty.
Resentment + irritability
When your own needs keep moving to the bottom of the list, irritation has a way of finding somewhere else to come out.
Grief + aging parents
Watching a parent change can bring sadness, fear, anger, tenderness, old memories, and complicated family history into the present.
Boundaries + family expectations
Knowing what you realistically have capacity for can be very different from feeling comfortable saying it.
Boundaries are different when you actually care about the people involved.
I’m not going to tell you to simply say no to everything and protect your peace.
There are people you love. There are responsibilities that really are yours. There may be cultural expectations, family history, financial realities, siblings with opinions, and relationships you want to preserve.
We can look together at what you genuinely want to give, what you realistically can give, and what you’ve taken responsibility for because that’s the role you learned to play.
The goal isn’t to stop caring. It’s to make sure caring for other people doesn’t require disappearing from your own life.
Your body usually knows when you’ve been carrying too much.
You notice the tension before you notice the thought. Your shoulders are up around your ears. Your sleep changes. Your patience gets shorter. You feel relief when plans are canceled and then immediately feel guilty for being relieved.
I pay attention to those things.
My approach combines evidence-based therapy with mindfulness, nervous-system awareness, and curiosity about what your body has been communicating while your mind has been busy getting everybody through the week.
There’s room for intuition and meaning here too, if those are part of how you understand yourself. Nothing has to be more mystical than it is.
Therapy with me is a place where you don’t have to take care of me.
You don’t need to make your feelings sound reasonable before you tell me about them. You don’t need to soften the resentment because you also love the person. And you don’t have to convince me that you’re grateful before admitting that you’re exhausted.
I’ll ask questions, share what I’m noticing, and help us understand the patterns underneath what’s happening now.
For fifty minutes, I want to know how you’re doing.
I think a lot about what is actually yours to carry.
Not everything can be put down. That’s real.
But there’s often a difference between responsibility and over-responsibility, between caring about someone and managing their feelings, and between helping because you want to and helping because you don’t know how not to.
Part of our work can be learning to recognize those differences and trusting yourself enough to act on them.
That connects closely with Jennifer’s own goal for therapy: helping clients understand their patterns, know what is and isn’t theirs to carry, and trust themselves more.
PRACTICAL DETAILS
Therapy in Los Alamitos + throughout California.
IN PERSON
Los Alamitos, California
ONLINE
Throughout California
SESSIONS
Individual therapy · 50 minutes · $222
Her Turn
You’re allowed to exist inside the life you spend so much time caring for.
We can look at what you’re carrying, what it has cost you, and where you’d like a little more room to be a person instead of the person who handles everything.
