Support

Sharon D. Anderson
Stroke Survivors Tattler

January 22, 2014

-– There’s a fine line between under and over support and getting it “just-right”.

On Saturday, my mom celebrated her 100th birthday.  Garry, a good friend, was at the party.  He was sitting down to tie his shoes with one hand and another guest offered to tie his shoes for him.

Garry told her he could do it himself and proceeded to tie his shoes.  She was amazed that he could tie shoes with one hand.

It is really easy to do everything for stroke survivors.  However, the more you do for a survivor, the less they do for themselves.  It is difficult to watch a survivor struggle to put on socks or shoes or put water into the kettle to make tea, especially when you know that if you helped it would be much easier for them and you – at least in the short term.

It can be much easier to do activities yourself than to let the survivor do it themselves or assist only with the parts of the task they cannot do at the time.  Absolutely it will take less time to do it for them.  Absolutely you are more efficient.

However over the long term, they do less and less.  You are going to have do more.  It will get more and more onerous.  Over time, you will feel more burdened.

Survivors will not recover miraculously. Survivors can’t patiently wait and “hope” recovery will happen.

Survivors have to be engaged in everyday tasks to recover. They have to use their brain and their muscles.  Think about the young children who were left in their cribs in orphanages in countries like Romania, because there were too few staff.  Those children could not develop.  They didn’t talk or walk like children nurtured in normal family environments.

It is the same after stroke. Survivors need to be engaged in enriched environments, not lying in bed or sitting passively in front of the TV.

Exercise and repetition will help survivors recover and increase their capability.  When stroke survivors do what they can, to the best of their current capability, they learn what they can do.  They can learn to adapt the activity as they need to.  It doesn’t have to be done perfectly; just doing something interesting is useful.

However especially to begin with, both the survivor and their family partners are unsure about how much the survivor can do. Often people are worried about causing another stroke or making the survivor too tired.  Many times survivors are left in a room, just sitting there.  It can be just as easy to under-support the survivor as over-support them.

So I have some tips for getting the amount of support just right:

1. Talk to each other!
2. Share what you both would like!
3. Make a pact to talk to each other about the amount of support the survivor wants and when and what you can do to help. 
4. Set some long term goals, but break them down into doable chunks.
5. If you think the expectations are too great or too little, talk about why and what you think they should be. 
6. Don’t get angry when things don’t work out—brainstorm together about how it could be different. 
7. Keep a diary or list of your successes.  Count the small victories as well as the large ones.