Whole Caregiver

This week, Erna gives us a deeper perspective of her experiences as a caregiver. She describes the transitions she experienced throughout her twenty-year caregiving trajectory, including the transition away from caregiving when her mother died. For those caregivers experiencing such transitions, it can be a time of both growth and deep difficulty. We see you.  To go along with our topic, here is o...

In this episode, Megan introduces the topic of transition with her experiences as a nurse, researcher, and family caregiver. The next several episodes will focus on transition experiences, starting with Erna and followed by some podcast guests. The quote of the day is attributed to Abraham Maslow: “One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and ag...

Hello and welcome to our podcast this week! We have a wonderful friend and guest, Rachel Cohen. She has a robust background in aging and intergenerational communities. She is so many things, but a few of the many are: a caregiving and community advocate, a wife, a duck mom, the founder and CEO of a consulting firm called Aging Dynamics, the Executive Director of LinkAGES Connects, and co-designer...

We are pumped to dive into our topic of the month: Caregiving in Community. To open the show, Megan shared a Yiddish Proverb for the quote this week: "God gave burdens, He also gave shoulders." We like to think of shoulders as our own and the shoulders of others. As social beings, we need the support of each other to make it through the mess of life. We both shared the importance of having chosen...

Hello and welcome to our second episode of the month focused on sandwich caregivers. We are really excited to welcome a friend and fellow caregiving advocate, Xue Peng. To us, Xue epitomizes a sandwich generation caregiver. She took on the care for aging parents as well as her nephews. With these responsibilities, she had to leave the workforce for a time. As she will discuss in the show, there we...

This month we will be focusing on a specific type of family caregiver--sandwich generation caregivers. While we talked a lot about this topic and the issues related to naming caregiving, we never defined sandwich generation caregivers in our discussion. So, here is a better late than never definition: someone caring for both young and old at the same time. They are essentially "sandwiched" between...

For our second January episode, we will be focusing on goal-making for our own well-being. What does it look like? How can we make things happen when there are so many other important responsibilities? In both the business and academic worlds where we come from, SMART goals are a thing. We do not dig into this during the episode, but we have provided some information about SMART goals here: https:...

To kick off the New Year, we wanted to share some insights we have gained about being well and being a family caregiver. For this episode, we will focus our attention on well-being. Our next episode will focus more on goal setting. We recognize that when a caregiver is balancing work, family, social relationships, and family caregiving, their well-being, goals, and needs can often come last. There...

In this episode, we continue our conversation about grief. We get more specific about ways we have coped with grief and provide examples of how others can be supported in their grief. You'll notice we both identify the important role counseling has played in our lives and grief experiences. And, we highlight other strategies including bereavement support groups, exercise, mindfulness, music, visua...

The holidays can be a difficult time where grief may seem more profound. Grief and loss are pretty universal experiences, and can be part of the fabric of family caregiving. We can grieve the loss of health, the loss of a future, loss of relationships, loss related to death, among other losses. For the next two episodes, we will talk about the nature of grief and loss. We will also introduce strat...

Last episode we took a deep dive with Megan and her caregiving origin story. Now, we are privileged to hear more about Erna's journey with family caregiving. Erna is a marketing executive for a non-profit company focused on health equity. She is also founder of her own company U*Realized that focuses on accessible solutions for family caregivers. If that was not enough, she has had over twenty yea...

In this episode, we take a deeper dive with Megan to understand her family caregiving origin story.  Here is a brief article about her and part of her journey: https://canvasrebel.com/meet-megan-thomas-hebdon/ Megan is a nursing professor, family caregiving researcher, and current family caregiver to her three children with chronic health conditions. Her work as a researcher focuses on well-being...

Welcome to our podcast! We are Erna Alfred Liousas and Megan Hebdon (The Caregiver Revolution), and we are excited to launch this podcast where we will explore all things family caregiving. We believe in addressing the holistic needs of family caregivers, and that is why we have named our podcast, "The Whole Caregiver." Much of what we will talk about will focus on family caregiving issues in earl...