This book is a practical just-in-time resource for family caregivers. It helps them sustain themselves by reaching out for the love and support they and their loved ones need. Any single topic can become a doorway towards lightening their load.
Besides the caregivers themselves, this book is also a valuable resource for friends, neighbors, professional colleagues, fellow congregants and others who are concerned that these caregivers are at risk of burning out but haven't yet found a way to help them. As the author says, "friends don't let friends burn out any more than friends let friends drive drunk." With this book in hand, they can reach out to the caregiver, begin a conversation about how they are doing and, as appropriate, offer to help them use it.
Reach In, Part One of the book, coaches them to get clear about what they need and to take stock of their personal strengths and resources. It also coaches them to see if, like most people, they have some resistance to reaching out and accepting help from people who care about them. He playfully calls this resistance "RDD: Receiving Deficit Disorder" and coaches caregivers to take small steps to see what it feels like to open up to receiving loving help. Often their "RDD" is due to their legitimate concern that accepting help will require them to sacrifice their family's privacy. The author shows them how to set and communicate their boundaries ("their privacy settings") so this will no longer be an issue for them.
Reach Out, Part Two, coaches them in finding the best ways for them to reach out, including using the new caresites i.e. free websites for them to use in communicating with people who care about them.
Resources For Reaching Out, the third section, provides resources they can use to help sustain them in providing care for their loved one.
This book is endorsed by a wide range of respected experts in the fields of caregiving, social work, spirituality and medicine. It is also highly recommended by the leaders of the major online caring communities (Caring Bridge and Lotsa Helping Hands), which the author terms "caresites," who also recommend its use by professionals: social workers, therapists, nurses, healthcare chaplains, physicians and others.
Mr. August is an award-winning healthcare innovator (inventor of Bedscapes(R)), life coach and keynote presenter. He was a family caregiver for his own parents and mother-in-law. In this book, he draws on what he learned from his own caregiving experiences, from his life coaching clients and research interviews he conducted with family caregivers who have been especially effective in reaching out for what they and their loved ones need. He presented the key concepts and tools in this book to caregivers of family members who are paralyzed, in a two-year national speaking tour for the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation's Caregiver Day Program.
