Ep. 153 How Midlife Caregiving Triggers Anxiety & Identity Loss and Coping Skills to Ease the Ache

Are you quietly grieving while still showing up for everyone else?
Your kids need you differently, and your parent needs you more—everything inside can start to shift.

In this episode you’ll discover:

1. A deeper understanding of how anxiety and buziness in midlife often masks hidden grief of these profound relationship changes
2. Practical coping tools to manage emotional overwhelm and identity shifts
3. Language to name your experience and reconnect with your sense of self

If you’ve been carrying too much for too long, this episode will help you name the ache and soften the load.🎧 Listen now to reclaim clarity, calm, and a deeper connection to yourself in midlife.

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About the Host:
MJ Murray Vachon LCSW is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with more than 48,000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching her Mental Wellness curriculum, Inner Challenge. Four years ago she overcame her fear of technology to create a podcast that integrated her vast clinical experience and practical wisdom of cultivating mental wellness using the latest information from neuroscience. MJ was Social Worker of the Year in 2011 for Region 2/IN.

Creating Midlife Calm is a podcast designed to guide you through the challenges of midlife, tackling issues like anxiety, low self-esteem, feeling unworthy, procrastination, and isolation, while offering strategies for improving relationships, family support, emotional wellbeing, mental wellness, and parenting, with a focus on mindfulness, stress management, coping skills, and personal growth to stop rumination, overthinking, and increase confidence through self-care, emotional healing, and mental health support.

Transcript

M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:00

In this episode, you'll discover how to ease the ache of midlife caregiving. Welcome to Creating Midlife Calm, a podcast dedicated to empowering midlife minds to overcome anxiety, stop feeling like crap and become more present with your family, all while achieving greater success at work. I'm MJ Murray Vachon, a licensed clinical social worker with over 48, 000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching mental wellness. Welcome to the podcast. On Monday, we talked about the invisible load of midlife caregiving, where you're sandwiched between the needs of your children, grandchildren, and aging parents. As you know, the tasks of balancing all of this are enormous. On Monday, we focused on the invisible load, the emotional weight that not only clutters your schedule and your to-do list, but also fills your head and heart with constant concern. That heavy quiet ache you carry about the people you love. In this episode, you'll discover the hidden grief that caregiving often brings, not just for the people you love, but for the version of yourself you're slowly having to let go of. Whether it's stepping back as a parent or watching your own parent age. This episode explores the ache of becoming someone new. Before we dive in, let's revisit Monday's inner challenge. Your inner challenge was to take five minutes and ask yourself. When it comes to the people I love, I worry that I. If you did it, you might have noticed some things you're caring that aren't really yours to fix, but maybe you also notice something deeper that some of what you're caring isn't about them at all. It's about you. And more specifically about who you were. Who you're no longer allowed to be. This is a type of grief that often gets quietly tucked into the everyday reality of being a midlife caregiver. Letting go of parenting in real time is painful in a way that's hard to put into words. You've spent decades being the center of someone's life, remembering their appointments, cheering them on, tracking their moods, managing the rhythms of their days, and then one day they don't need you in the same way. A client recently said to me. No one needs me like they used to. I feel invisible in my own home except when it comes to meal prep and dishes. There was no anger in her voice. Just sadness and grief. It's not just that her children had changed, it's that she no longer knew who she was in the absence of being needed. That's the part we don't talk about enough. Parenting doesn't end. It just shifts. Your child gets her driver's license or goes to college and you feel a mix of relief and loss. Their steps towards independence leave you with time and space to ask the question, who am I now? Yes, the same developmental question your teen is asking. It also circles back to you. But before you dive into answering it, give yourself time to feel the silent ache of letting go. For many parents I've worked with, this often starts around junior year in high school. The invisible weight of grief begins to sneak in. The sadness is often two-pronged. The first is the sorrow of missing the day-to-day joys of raising a child. You might not miss packing lunches or driving to the 6:00 AM swim practice, but you might deeply miss the humor they bring to the dinner table, the friends who eat you out of house and home, and the many activities that made you the cheerleader you never were. The second is regret. 18 years goes by quickly unless you have a newborn or a grade schooler. But if you're parenting a teen, you suddenly have a front row seat to all the things you wished you would've done. I've sat with parents who regret not treating their children's learning disability or attention challenges. Others who worry they didn't instill values beyond academic achievement. This too is part of grief, and let me say this, it's not your fault. You've done your best. None of us give our children everything. If we did, why would they ever leave home? It's okay that your grief includes not just missing the joy and the energy your child brings, but also a kind of earned wisdom, the awareness of what they still need to work on. I encourage parents to put that wisdom into words. I worked with a couple whose son was incredibly gifted in the arts. They poured their support into his passion, but his grades and other subjects suffered limiting his college options. At first, they blamed themselves wondering if they should have pushed him harder, but over time they realized that their son's natural stubbornness the same quality that made him such a powerful artist, also made him resist anything he wasn't interested in. They had an honest conversation with him. They shared their perspective and then asked him, do you see yourself this way? He replied, isn't everyone like this? They gently said to him, no. Some of your peers have worked hard to build the skills of doing things they don't enjoy. That's something you haven't had to do yet. And if you want to grow, it's a skill worth learning. We'll support you, but it has to start with you. Inside that moment wasn't blame. Inside this grief of letting go is hard earned wisdom. Don't let the shame or the tendency to over assume responsibility block an honest conversation with your child. You know this child in a way no one else does. The silent grief of letting go of parenting is a normal stage of midlife. It doesn't need to take over your week, but journaling once in a while or having coffee with a trusted friend to put it into words and talk about it out loud can really help you feel seen and lighten the load. Now, let's talk about your parents. One of the deepest griefs in caregiving is realizing that you're starting to feel like the parent instead of the child. A friend of mine once said, I still call my mom, but it's not her anymore. She's there, but she's not her. She only focuses on her worries and whether my dad is eating enough. This kind of loss is tricky. It doesn't come with a clean beginning or an end. There's no memorial, no formal goodbye, just a slow, steady unraveling of who they were until one day you realize you've lost something huge and no one even saw it happen. You're still showing up. You're still caregiving. Emotionally, you're grieving. You're grieving the parent who had the energy and mental sharpness to truly engage with your life. The one who made you feel seen, the one who believed you were the best thing that ever happened to them, and that loss really hurts. But what if your caregiving experience is more complicated? What if you're caring for a parent with whom you've never had a close or safe relationship? That's another form of grief, a silent grief that comes with a daily reminder that you never had the parent you wanted or deserved. And with this comes a painful question, why am I giving to this person what they never gave to me? This is a scary and important question for you to wrestle with. If you don't anger and resentment can build. Years ago, I had a friend in this situation. When her father died, I went to the funeral without really knowing anyone else in her family. At the funeral, the minister said, You're probably wondering what good I could say about a man who struggled with drugs and alcohol his whole life, who let his selfishness get in the way of being a good father and husband. What I can tell you is this, through grace, some luck, and a very strong mother, he had wonderful children. Children who in the last few months of his life gave to him he could never give to them. There wasn't a dry eye in the church. Later I asked my friend how she found it in herself to show up for her dad. She said, I really didn't do it for my dad. I did it for my kids. I wanted them to see a different way of being. Whatever your unique grief in letting go of a parent is, your work is the same. It is to put words to your own experience, your own story, so you see you. It won't match your siblings versions. It is solely and souly yours. It is the work of your soul. Caregiving is a mirror to your soul and a training ground for your heart. It teaches you how to be more loving, more kind, and honestly a lot less selfish. Being a therapist has taught me that the two most powerful times for personal growth are birth and death. Doing the work of naming the silent waves of grief that swell inside of you. Now, that's a masterclass in being human. Naming your grief doesn't mean wallowing in sadness it actually helps point you toward the next stage of your life. With hard one wisdom, you begin to answer the question, who am I now without a child at home or a parent alive in this world? In this episode, you explored the deeply personal grief that often hides within the invisible load of caregiving. Letting go of your identity as a parent in real time, and letting go of your role as a child when your parents age and pass away. By putting your grief into words and honoring your experience, whatever it looks, like you ease the weight of what you carry and create space for your next chapter to unfold. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Monday with more creating midlife calm.