Codependent Doctor
Podcast focusing on codependency. Learning how to create healthier relationships, healthier self and healthier lives.
Codependent Doctor
Bonus: All the People in Me Are Tired: Caregiver Burnout, Energy Leaks, and Real Resilience
Jenn Fredericks, Personal Resilience Practitioner and founder of The Carewell Circle, joins us to talk about Prosilience, a proactive approach to resilience, and why managing your energy (not just your time) is the key to staying afloat. Jenn shares powerful stories from her own journey as both a two-time kidney transplant recipient and a caregiver for her daughter with a brain tumor, and offers practical strategies to help you pause, refill, and reconnect with yourself.
Connect with Jenn on Instagram, Facebook or her website. She also invites you to join the Carewell Circle for 2 weeks.
This episode includes a paid partnership with BetterHelp. Click this link, betterhelp.com/drdowney, to get 10% off your first month.
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🎵 Music: Touching The Air by Graceful Movement
If you've ever felt like you're carrying the weight of your family, your work, your health, and somehow still expected to smile through it all, this episode is for you. Today we're talking about what burnout really feels like when you're a caregiver and still trying to be human. My guest, Jen Fredericks, brings a deeply personal and incredibly insightful take on resilience. Not the push harder kind, but the kind that begins with something radical, a pause. We're getting into how to manage your energy and not just your time, how to stop leaking your energy everywhere, and why it's okay not to be everything to everyone. Welcome to the Codependent Doctor, a podcast where we unpack the messy, beautiful journey of healing from codependency. If you're burned out from people pleasing, stuck in unhealthy patterns, or just tired of putting yourself last, you're in the right place. I'm Dr. Angela Downey, a family doctor and fellow codependent, and I'm here to help you reconnect to your authentic self. One honest conversation at a time. Here we go. Hello to all my wonderful podcast listeners. I'm Dr. Angela Downey and you're listening to Codependent Doctor. Today's episode is a little bit different. As some of you may know, I have a second podcast called Paging Dr. Mom. I've just interviewed a guest that I loved, and I think that her message would be great for Codependent Doctor podcasts. So I'm going to be sharing it here as well. You might hear me refer to mothers and women a lot. That's just because my other podcast is geared towards female physicians. However, please know that everything that we share today is good for everyone, whether you're male, female, mother, father. And I really think that her message is great and that you're going to benefit from it. So please forgive me for that. And I do mention Paging Dr. Mom in the episode, but I think that you're going to really benefit as well. So I hope you enjoy. I'm going to introduce you to today's guest. Jen Fredericks is a personal resilience practitioner and prosilience coach who helps family caregivers move from burnout to balance. She's a two-time kidney transplant recipient and a longtime caregiver for her daughter with a brain tumor. Jen brings a rare dual perspective to the table, a patient and a caregiver. She's the founder of the CareWell Circle and teaches a proactive resilience method called prosilience, designed for those feeling overwhelmed, depleted, or stuck. And her message, that real resilience starts with a pause, not pushing harder. I am so excited to have Jen on the show today. She's someone who truly gets the invisible labor that so many of us are carrying, not just because she works in this space professionally, but because she's lived it. She has this incredible way of combining real life experience with practical, research-backed tools, and she's gonna leave you with insights that are actually useful, not just inspirational. And I'm really grateful that she's here with us today. Hi Jen, it's so great to have you on Paging Doctor Mom today. How are you doing?
SPEAKER_01:I'm really well. Thanks for having me today, Dr. Angela.
SPEAKER_00:I'm really glad that we're finally getting to connect. This is great. So maybe we can start by having you introduce yourself and tell us about your journey to becoming a prosilience coach.
SPEAKER_01:Sure. I mean, I think it was decades in the making, actually. Um so as you mentioned, I'm a presilience coach. I'm also a personal resilience practitioner, and I primarily support family caregivers who are caring for those with chronic illness or other difficult illnesses. Um, I also have worked in corporate marketing for 16 years before I started coaching. And so when I heard the description of your podcast and listened to episodes, I'm like, okay, yeah, this all resonates with me very, very much. I think I really started to learn about resilience, which is part of pro-resilience, which we'll talk about, when I received my first kidney transplant in 1993 when I was 16 years old. And it just grew from there. I then adopted a daughter with my husband in 2008. And in 2015, she was diagnosed with a low-grade brain tumor. And at that point, I was working at Harley Davidson, a motor company in their marketing department. I was managing my own health. Uh, I had at that point had my second kidney transplant in 2012. My first one from my dad just kind of went, uh, and I'm done. And so learning to manage and do it without apologizing for the ambition that I wanted to reach while I was still managing my own chronic illness, while I was in my career, while I was also caring for my daughter who was just diagnosed with the brain tumor, really started to weigh on me. But also, I didn't want to give up all of those dreams I held and the goals I had for myself because of circumstances that were outside of my control. And so I did, I think what most women do who are high achievers and wanting to reach many different goals in different parts of their lives, I kept pushing. I kept pushing. And I pushed so hard until my body said, You haven't been listening to my subtle cues. So here we go. And my um anxiety around not being able to support my daughter the way that I wanted to, through some emotional and mental behavior changes after her diagnosis. Um, my body said, Yeah, um, we're not gonna eat without feeling sick afterwards. Um, we're not going to be able to stay up and watch TV with our husband because you're so exhausted and drained from everything that you push through during the day. And I dropped down to a hundred pounds because I couldn't eat without getting sick. And I finally was like, wait a minute. All of these people are telling me that I'm resilient, but do they not see? What does that mean? I don't understand how I can feel this badly physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, but everyone else is saying that I'm doing such a good job.
SPEAKER_00:Or saying, I don't know how you do it. I don't know. You're like, yeah, I'm not. You're melting on the inside. You're like, I don't feel like I'm handling it all. Like, what are you seeing that I can't see?
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. So that led me on a whim, decided maybe I'll try this coaching thing. And it was a lifeline. I was doing it for my career, but I was really doing it for me. And I I healed some and I started looking into well, what do they mean I'm resilient? And I started researching compassion, fatigue, and you know, uh compassion, resilience, and compassion. And I ran across prosilience, which I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit later, which actually really helped me heal and not only helped me in the chaos of the mess that I was in, but helped me find relief in that mess. But it also was strengthening my resilience for this ongoing marathon of my kidney disease, of my daughter's brain tumor journey, and also of me then becoming an entrepreneur and helping others who are in the same place that I was.
SPEAKER_00:What is the difference between resilience and prosilience?
SPEAKER_01:They're very closely related. Uh I the reframe I like is because a lot of people think about resilience as um falling down and then pulling yourself back up or bouncing back. And my thought is why do we need to work so hard to pull ourselves back up if we don't need to fall at all, or if we don't need to fall so far?
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_01:And that's where presilience has helped me, those the proactive resilience piece. So it's taking the time to be present and intentional with different parts of our resilience. And there are four building blocks of pro-resilience that I work on with people. Let's strengthen those by finding relief in the moment and also preparing ourselves to be more sustainable in the future.
SPEAKER_00:So pro-resilience is really just steps that you can take to make yourself well enough so that when you fall, you don't fall as hard and it's a little bit easier for you to get back up after.
SPEAKER_01:Right. So when I start working with clients, um, we usually take a look at where they're at in their baseline resilience and we get them back up to that baseline, help find some stability, some homeostasis. And then from there, we start building other pieces of our building blocks and strengthening them so that the next crisis that comes, the next change that comes, the next uncertainty that we're facing, because we know that that's guaranteed in life, we can catch ourselves and we have a strategic plan of how to move through and meet that challenge and that uncertainty.
SPEAKER_00:I know for myself, when I was starting to feel really burnt out and I just kept pushing through, I started getting sicker and sicker and sicker. And I'm like, I can just power through this. And then I would just get sicker again. And I just, it like it never ended. And there was all these signs in my body telling me, you need to change something, right? Something needs to change. You're not well and you can't just keep pushing through this. And I see so many of my colleagues being nervous about calling in sick. Yeah. Um, even though they can like hardly drag themselves out of bed because they feel either guilty for their patients or guilty that they're putting this extra stress and strain on their colleagues or the medical system. So it's it's really important to get ahead of these things and make sure that you're really taking good care of yourself.
SPEAKER_01:I'm so glad you mentioned that. And I'm actually I've been invited into several um health systems, nonprofits, foundations in order to work on one of the strategic building blocks of prosilience, which I love and I usually start with all of my clients in the organizations, is the managing personal energy piece. And so when we're able to start doing that, it's easier to fulfill our heart-based service in whatever your profession's in, where you are serving and caring for others, without, you know, prescribing to some of the more performative self-care things that we're always uh asked to do. Like these energy practices are actually ones that will help you find relief in the moment and also help you refill your, you know, your gas tank for the next moment.
SPEAKER_00:I definitely want to get into those four building blocks. Um I think that'll be really important. But first, I just want to talk like, were there any moments that brought you like to your knees? And how did that shift your view of resilience?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. I'm thinking of like three right now.
SPEAKER_00:But not that having two kidney transplants and a daughter who was sick, you know, isn't enough. But like you, you obviously you tried to get through all that, but were there some moments where where you realized I just can't keep doing this?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And I think that's one thing that really blindsided me was having three decades of my own chronic illness management, being very familiar with the medical system, being very, very comfortable advocating for myself and and for my daughter in the medical setting. Then to have these emotional and mental and behavioral things come up, I didn't know how to support her because that's not how I processed my my medical experience or, you know, nothing bad happened to me during my transplants, but it's all medical trauma. These are huge things. And I know that her diagnosis and the week in the hospital there and all of those things were actually also medical traumas for her because she had never had anything like that happen. Um, but what's really standing out to me is after I had been doing this work for three or four years in a more general personal and professional development frame, I couldn't bring myself to get out of my car and go into my own house. I was thinking of what how can I get out of this? I can't keep doing this day in and day out, and I don't have an answer. But as we all do, I opened the door of the car, I trudged back in the house, and I kept going. But what I realized was I was just searching and hoping and holding on to this break I couldn't take. Like when's the next moment I can breathe? When's the next moment I can go do a target run by myself?
SPEAKER_00:And I realized I because that's the epitome. That's that is like we all aspire to do, right? That is the ultimate vacation.
SPEAKER_01:The ultimate vacation. And literally, I'm not proud of these practices or habits that I had, but I would go get a frozen Coke and a bag of courian Doritos and sit in the parking lot and cry and eat them and drink that. And then I would have some relief. But it it made me think, okay, what are some other ways that I can find relief right where I'm at? What are some ways that I can stay at my post yet not completely unravel? And so I started to take a look at those threads. Where were those moments and all of these really hard things? Because if you can imagine me trying to survive through COVID as well, and having a daughter who has to go to these medical appointments and PT and OT and all of these things, and how do I keep myself safe on my immunosuppressants? And thankfully, my husband is a wonderful partner and was able to, you know, step in and do a lot of that for me. But I looked for the thread, and the parts of the relief that I could kind of cobble together were these small moments of pause, these small moments of sitting in an exam room with her and holding her hand, and being in the exam room with her and holding her hand, and that's it. Not thinking about, okay, what is this MRI result gonna be? What is the next prescription or treatment she might need to know? It's being where your feet are breathing. I know that that's so like cliche. But that's what started to turn things for me when I realized that relief begins with a pause and resilience doesn't start with more strength, it begins with a pause. So not only was I finding relief in those pause moments, those presence moments, but I also was starting to strengthen my resilience and my prosilience for moving forward.
SPEAKER_00:Were there some signs in your body that you could feel that you were ignoring?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Where do we start? Um well here, tightness. Sorry, yes, my heart and my chest. Yeah, tightness. Um swirling thoughts when mostly I don't have swirling thoughts, but those were increasing. So uh a lot of headaches, um, tightness. Um feeling almost disconnected even from my body. That was a sign. So, and then of course, uh, when I talk about the anxiety, also then physically manifesting into me not being able to eat without feeling sick. I'd eat, I'd be in a fetal position on the bed. My daughter would be in her room needing help because she was sick from a treatment, right? But I couldn't get up and help her. I I wasn't the mom I wanted to be. And so all of those I couldn't that you wanted to be. No, I couldn't. And and I accept that and I understand that, and I don't beat myself up for it now. But in the moment, of course I was, because I think society and my own pressure on myself made me think that I needed to do it all in order to deserve a break. When in actuality, just showing up. I mean, we don't need to do anything in order to deserve a break. We deserve that for ourselves. Just being here on earth, we're allowed to do that for ourselves.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. So this is so you discovered the concept of prosilience during your caregiving journey. So you mentioned that there were four key blocks that that go towards presilience. Can you tell us what those are?
SPEAKER_01:Sure. Well, the first one is calm yourself. Okay, so you're meeting a challenge, you calm yourself. That's where some of the pause practices that I share come in. Um it's the nervous system regulation, it's being where your feet are, it's coming back into yourself so that fear isn't driving your next building block, which is choosing the strategy in which you want to meet the challenge. When you have this challenge facing you, do you want to accept it and adapt? Do you want to reframe it? Or is there a way that you can change it? Once you choose that strategy, and so you have sort of your guiding light, like you have something that you can focus on and not let everything keep swirling, then you engage one of your seven resilience muscles that we're all born with. Some of them take more energy to engage. And so a lot of times there will be key ones that we um fall back on. I'm doing the air quotes fall back on, but it it's not a bad thing. Those are just the strong ones that we have. But there are others available to us that we can strengthen, and those resilience muscles are positivity, confidence, creativity, connection, priorities, structure, and experimenting. And then one of the I mentioned it at last, but it's actually one that I work on first with people, really, is learning to manage your personal energy. Because human energy fuels resilience. And if we don't have an energy store in our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energies, we could have the strongest resilience muscles. We wouldn't be able to access them and engage them as effectively as we'd like to to move through a challenge. And so when I think about myself sitting in my car, not being able to get out of the car and go into my house right away. I think about that all the women in the are tired. I think about all of the energy that was inside of me was draining, and I didn't know how to find the leaks and plug them and start refilling them so that I could access that resilience that everyone thought I had and I did have, but I just wasn't engaging it or accessing it effectively or efficiently.
SPEAKER_00:Just because you're getting back up doesn't mean you've helped yourself in any way. No, it's like you're because there's still other work to do.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And that's why I I really hit on learning to manage your personal energy because when we can take stock of that even on a daily basis, and it's not all gonna be full all the time, it's kind of talking about uh, you know, even the the work-life balance myth, which is more which I believe is like a slice of pie, uh, a piece of pie, you know, a whole pie and then slices of them.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Some slices are bigger than others.
SPEAKER_01:And at different times of the year, in different seasons of your life. And so when I start working with organizations on supporting their community of family caregivers, when I start working with individual family caregivers, we start with building block one of calming yourself, those pauses, and then learning to manage your personal energy so that you have the fuel to support yourself in the other areas so you can strengthen and keep moving through challenges without falling down.
SPEAKER_00:So, what are some of the common ways that we unknowingly drain ourselves?
SPEAKER_01:Some of these are going to sound really cliche, and I hate saying them because I don't sometimes like to practice them either. But um, the physical piece, sleep hygiene. Do you look at your phone, you know, an hour before you go to bed, or do you shut it off so that your mind can decompress? So that's actually draining two of your personal energies. It's draining that physical piece, but it's also draining that mental piece because your thoughts can get spinning and turning and not allow you to sleep. So that's affecting two of them. It's probably affecting all of them because they're so all interconnected. Um, I would say the the mental piece, one thing I share a lot is the um myth of multitasking. And I think that's being discussed more and more lately, which I think is great. When you are multitasking, if you go from one task to another, it can take as much as 20 minutes to get back to the first task that you're working on. And so that is completely draining your mental energy.
SPEAKER_00:Because you're always having to remember to go back to that first task and you're this mental list of things that you're wanting to do is constantly running.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And so one way to do that is monotask. Um, or if you really love the idea of multitasking and it makes you feel like you're accomplishing more, uh, maybe write some of those things down so you don't hold them in your mind and drain that mental list. Um, other things with the the physical piece would be not taking time to get away from some of the work that we do here, uh, you know, in front of our computer, um, running from here to there. Where can you stop and take a moment and just um regulate your central nervous system? Where can you breathe and remind yourself that you're safe uh even though you feel extremely busy?
SPEAKER_00:What are some strategies that we can use to start plugging up some of these energy energy drains?
SPEAKER_01:Sure. Well, I would think let's go back to the um sleep hygiene piece. So one of the first plugs would be make an agreement with yourself to put the phone down, to not be in front of a screen, or I don't know, maybe if you are wear some of the blue blocker sunglasses, uh, to so that your your brain is not affected by that blue light. But make one conscious decision that can help plug one leak. Sleep hat hygiene. For me, is I have a very difficult time putting that phone down. So what I do try to do is uh set an extra 30 minutes before I really want to try to start winding down and do my scrolling then, and then try to let my my mind calm so that my body can calm and really get the sleep that it needs to restore itself.
SPEAKER_00:I do have a tensive scrolling before going to bed and checking in on everything um, you know, a couple minutes before. But yeah the last thing I always do is I turn on this um, these like binaural beats. Yeah, kind of these these different sounds and just the kind of this relaxing music. I put it on every night. I have a timer so that it turns off automatically after 45 minutes. And it really just it's like it triggers my brain. Okay, this is decompression time, and um, it's almost instantaneous how how quickly my brain now shuts down when when I hear that music, and it's great for like meditating and it and it helps me undo everything that I've done in the last 45 minutes by by scrolling on my phone. So yeah, it's a great, it's great practice before going to bed just just to kind of be with yourself. I guess that's meditation.
SPEAKER_01:It is. I love I love that, and I do use some of those same, you know, strategies myself. And you can pick different binaural beats, you know, one healing, one that's you know, calming anxiety, one that's what is um, I don't know if I like this one. I I get really good sleep around it, but I'm kind of worried about the fact that I may not be dreaming because there's one that's called like dreamless sleep. I'm like, oh, okay. But I think I think sleep and dreaming really helps our our mind and our brain make sense of what happened during the day. So I don't want that every night. Um, but yes, definitely. I I love that suggestion.
SPEAKER_00:One of the messages that you talked about was starting with a pause, and that's to help build resilience. So why is pausing so hard for high achieving women?
SPEAKER_01:My opinion is, and one, because I've lived it, and two, because I've um observed it, is that we believe we need to earn our rest. And so we push. Like, am I good enough now? Did I do enough today to earn this? Am I good enough now? We are enough. We're enough. And and that's where I think these pause practices can really come into helping people see that and not be so performative and accept ourselves for who we are, how we are, doing what we can, where we're at with what we have. Just taking that pause and breathing, coming back into our humanness and our body and recognizing that we're enough. Is it that you you got out of bed today? That's enough. If you're the load that you're carrying is heavy and it's difficult to interact with others, that's okay. What can you do to pause and acknowledge how you're feeling and then move from there in a way that isn't dysregulating and it isn't performative and it isn't pushing ourselves. It's that guilt of I didn't do enough. I don't deserve this when in actuality we do.
SPEAKER_00:We do. I've always had this work now, play later mentality. But the problem is that there's always work to do. And so that play never really comes. My former spouse was kind of like a play now, work later type, which you know, it it created a lot of tension and jealousy on my part because I would see him resting and I'd be like, why can't I rest? I've got all this stuff to do. But in truth, there was there was some jealousy there, and I wish I could have rested, but I tend to fill up my time with so many things. And some of that is perfectionism, right? Like the house always needed to be clean, everything needed to be done well. And so I would put all these standards and all these responsibilities on myself that probably didn't need to happen, but as a result, that playtime, that relaxation time, that rest time never really seemed to come.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And I totally resonate with that. I think one thing that my kidney disease did for me and it being so young, and and my mom has pointed this out to me quite a bit, is that I'm really good at resting because my body needed it. And thankfully, I carried that forward for quite a bit. I think until I started trying to climb the corporate ladder because that's what I thought I was supposed to do, even if it wasn't what I wanted to do. I love the fact that you're able to look back and say, yeah, that that was self-imposed. But I also feel like you're accepting of that and you're not like beating yourself up, and that will allow you to find more time to play now.
SPEAKER_00:You've said that it's all about managing your personal energy. And that's the key to burnout relief. So it's not necessarily finding more time in a day, it's managing your personal energy. So how can we begin to shift out of the, well, just manage your schedule better mindset? Right.
SPEAKER_01:You know, and I don't think it has to be an either or. I also love to live in the both and. Is there a way to manage time and manage our personal energy? Is there a way for us to be more intentional with the energy that we put into some of our schedules? Is there a way for us to show up in a powerful way in our different um time management tools or different meetings or all of the responsibilities that we have? But I do believe it all starts with an awareness of our personal energy, our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energies that can be drained and they also can be refilled. So it's not like you're going to have a perfect piece of a perfect pie, even with our energies. When I I work with clients, I do um an energy map. We take a look at, okay, where are you right now in each of these energies? Do you see a pattern? Is there something that you know is draining you here? Can we plug that so that you can fill that tank a little bit more and it'll help your emotional energy? When we're tired, it's very easy for most of us to become a little more emotional because we're working so hard to bring that physical energy up, because that's the one that really, really strikes us right away that we don't have the extra energy to manage our emotions. So that's where we might find ourselves snapping at our family, snapping at colleagues. And so just being aware of where you're at with each with each of those energies is the first step. And then from there, like we talked about plugging the physical energy drain with the sleep sleep hygiene. Then you can figure out okay, this is one act that I can change that's going to actually plug that, and then I can start pouring some energy into there, like going outside for a quick um breath of fresh air.
SPEAKER_00:Can we talk a little bit about caregiver burnout? You know, you had your daughter who had some medical needs. I have children of my own. I also live with my nine year old mother in law who has dementia and her own medical needs. So we are kind of in the sandwich generation, right? We're caring for our own children who have needs, we're caring for older generations who have needs. Can be really, really stressful. So, do you have any advice for people who are caregivers?
SPEAKER_01:I do. I first start with let's be gentle with ourselves. Because as you just described, there are how many different quote unquote lives that you're living right now? You have caring for your children, caring for your mother-in-law, you have your work. Sorry, guys, we're not going to be able to be 100% in all those areas all the time. And if we try to be, we're going to fall down. We're going to burn out. We're not going to be able to support ourselves so that we can support others. So that's where the idea of um I'm going to say work life, but this is going to be like work caregiving for our elders, caregiving for our children needs to become a balance in the way that things shift and change. Like one day, your children might need a quarter piece of the pie. And so you can allow them that and then give yourself permission to know you're not going to be able to also give, you know, three quarters of the pie to your mother-in-law and then somewhere sneak in some extra time for work.
SPEAKER_00:And a piece of the pie for myself. But sometimes it seems like one piece of the pie is always significantly bigger than the others. So is it just a matter of finding a way for that piece of pie to be smaller? So let's say you're caregiving for one specific person who takes up a lot of your time and a lot of your energy, but you're still expected to go to work and take care of your kids. So the piece of pie for yourself is getting smaller and smaller by the day.
SPEAKER_01:Or is the piece of the pie for yourself one of the main ingredients that make up all of the pie? So when I talk about taking the break that you can't because you can't get away, what are those pause practices you can do throughout your day that build to help make up the whole foundation of the pie? Maybe it's the crust underneath. Is it um going to an appointment with your mother-in-law and not thinking about work or the children being in that room? And as you're there, remembering to breathe and regulate and know that you only need to be in that space right there. You monotask in that space right there. Because if you're in all of those places, if you're in all of those pieces of pie, you're not doing any justice to what you're trying to do in that one room. So that's where I I experienced this um this past spring, where I took a step, I I I dipped a toe into the sandwich generation. My um parents live several states away. And my father had a medical emergency, and my daughter also was dealing with um a whole other diagnosis here at home. And I needed to decide what needs my attention most right now because I do have a great support system here at home for my daughter. So I felt comfortable. And if I wouldn't have, I would have found something, right? So that I could go to this more emergent situation and help my mom and dad stay away. And I found myself starting to drift back home while there was something very important going on right in front of me. And I remembered to like, okay, I'm gonna sit here next to my dad's hospital bed as he comes out of anesthesia, and I'm gonna hold his hand and we're gonna breathe. And he wasn't aware, but started mirroring my breathing back. I was mostly doing it for myself, but it also helped him.
SPEAKER_00:So you're there in that moment, you're not thinking about everything else that you should be doing or that maybe needs your attention. You're right there and you're taking care of yourself by doing breathing exercises there in that moment.
SPEAKER_01:Right. You can take care of yourself and be present for your loved one at the same time.
SPEAKER_00:I like that idea. So a lot of us feel like we're never doing enough, whether that be at work, at home, with our kids, for our parents. So, what would you say to any woman out there or any person out there who's exhausted from trying to be everything for everyone?
SPEAKER_01:What is your definition of enough? Why are you trying to be everything for everyone in your life? What do you want in this moment? We can't control the circumstances of our lives for the most part. But we can control how we show up in it. And even if you were everything to everyone in the past, doesn't mean in this moment you need to do it again.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So today's episode, um, we're gonna be calling it all all the women in me are tired. So what does that phrase mean to you personally?
SPEAKER_01:When I look back at it, I mean, I saw this meme years ago. And it was this um figure laying on a ground on the ground, and it just said, all the people in me and t are tired. I'm like, yes. And then I applied it to myself when I couldn't get out of my car and go into my home, when I was laying on my bed in a fetal position, like all of me. This isn't physical exhaustion. This is every piece of me is exhausted, and I don't know how I'm going to move forward. And when I found the managing your personal energy, I was like, oh, that's it. So it could also be tired. All of the energies in me are being drained, right? But all the women in me are tired. The physical part of me, the mental, the emotional, the spiritual part of me, the working mother part of me, the entrepreneur and business owner part of me, the loving daughter and the caring sister and the supportive wife. All of those women in me are tired. And I can attend to them by managing my personal energy.
SPEAKER_00:And you created the care well circle for family caregivers. So, as part of this, you're going to be giving the listeners like two free weeks, I think, to be part of the care well circle.
SPEAKER_01:It's a restorative, video centric platform. It's something that I wished I had. I know that's also cliche that people say, I created something I wished I had, but it truly is. When I was living in the hospital with my daughter after a partial brain tumor resection during COVID for a month, like I tried to go to these support groups online and all of these things. And I was reading all of these Facebook support group text threads, which were great, but I was craving face-to-face interaction. And I couldn't get that in person. And I wanted to be able to go in anytime. Like I can't make a Zoom call right now because doctors are rounding. Like I wanted to be in that support group, but I couldn't. And so this is a 24-7 um restorative video platform where you can come and you can quietly observe, or you can practice the pause practices I post on Mondays, or you can come in and look at the share and support posts on Wednesdays, on Fridays, there are resources, and um, we're going to have monthly experts coming in for lives once a month. There's a lunchtime support group the second Tuesday of every month. Um, the fourth Thursday, there's one in the evening. And if you can't make it, that's okay. There's recordings. But I wanted a place where people could have touch points and they could see faces, and that's Carewell Circle.
SPEAKER_00:Is there a like a code or something that you need to use to get no, no?
SPEAKER_01:There's actually if you go to ProzilienceCoach.com forward slash carewell circle, it should take you to the landing page that allows you to sign up. And there's a two-week pause, I call it the two-week pause included to see if this is something that will support you because I don't want to add more to your plate. I want this to be a place of respite and relief. And if that's not it for you, no hard feelings. You know, you can you can depart after the two weeks. And and if not, then you're you're welcome to join us each month.
SPEAKER_00:Amazing. That's quite the gift. Jen, I love quotes. Is there a particular quote that you love and that you'd like to share with us?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, but first I'm gonna take down a quote I don't care for. Everything happens for a reason. That's really hard for me. Um, I don't see why my daughter's brain tumor happened, at least in the moment. Um, I I have learned so much from her and her grace and her resilience. And she's actually the inspiration for the work that I do what I do right now. So the quote that I turn to is pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. And that that quote is attributed to a lot of different people. I'm not sure if anyone really knows where it came from, but I'm just gonna uh share this that it doesn't matter to me who first said it because during my first kidney transplant, I learned it firsthand from the kids at children's hospital. These kids were riding their tricycles as they were getting their infusions with their parents like running down the hallway with their poles behind them. And I was like, Who am I to lay in this bed and say poor me all of the time when these kids are showing me what it means to live? Yeah. So that's the suffering is optional.
SPEAKER_00:The pain is there, it's it's there, it's always gonna be there. But I think it's how we interpret that pain and what we make that pain how it makes us feel, and and how we internalize that, that really changes our experience. Jen, where can listeners find you?
SPEAKER_01:My website, prosiliencecoach.com. I should have picked an easier um, you know, website to spell, but it's P R O S I L I N C E dot com. Um, there you can find you know ideas and resources for caregivers. There is the Care Well Circle sign up. Um, I also have a page there for organizations who I also like to work with, um organizations who have a community of family caregivers to go in and help them learn some of these um strategies so that they can support them in a more sustainable way as well. I'm also on Instagram and LinkedIn.
SPEAKER_00:I'm gonna be putting all of those links in the show notes. So if anybody wants to go and see you, they can they can find you there.
SPEAKER_01:I'd be very happy to see some smiling faces and to help support them.
SPEAKER_00:I love that. So, Jen, thank you so much for being here and for sharing so openly with us. Your perspective is so validating and so needed, especially for you know people in the audience who feel like they're doing it all but still feeling like they're falling behind. Yeah. And I know that a lot of people are gonna walk away from this episode with a little bit more hope and a whole lot more clarity.
SPEAKER_01:Well, thank you so much for sharing this with your listeners.
SPEAKER_00:And thanks to all of you who are hanging out with us on Paging Doctor Mom. If today's episode resonated with you, then go ahead and hit the subscribe button and follow so you don't miss what's coming up next. And if you want to keep the conversation going, you can find me over on Instagram at dr Angela Downey. I'd love to hear from you. So take care for now. You are doing better than you think. Thanks for spending time with me today. I hope something in this episode resonated with you. If it did, hit follow, subscribe, or share it with someone who needs to hear it today. The codependent doctor is not medical advice and doesn't include speaking to your healthcare provider. If you're in a crisis, please go to the nearest ER or call 911 or reach out to your local mental health helpline. I'll be back here next week with more support, stories, and strategies because we're healing together.