Few things frustrate families more than seeing an elderly parent struggling with day to day tasks but refusing to ask for help. The once capable person needs assistance going to the grocery store, cooking meals, taking medication, cleaning, and even bathing. But they’ve announced they’re “fine” and gotten offended when someone tries to offer assistance. It’s like they’ve become stubborn. But despite how it may look from the outside, there are serious psychological and emotional reasons for why seniors don’t want to admit they need help – even when their struggle is clear to everyone else.
When families recognize why this is occurring, they become better equipped to approach the situation and find means of assistance that do not trample on pride and independence.
It Feels Like Admitting Defeat
For many elderly adults, needing help is a game-changer. For decades they’ve been self-sufficient and capable, often the ones helping others out in the first place. Accepting that now they cannot handle everything feels like an acknowledgement that they’ve become the frail, elderly person they never aspired to be.
It’s not vanity – it’s identity. When a person’s identity exists as someone able to do it all, needing assistance along the way threatens who they are. Accepting help means accepting deterioration, it’s admitting they’re getting old, surrendering their own life as they once knew it. This isn’t easy for anyone to face, so many elderly simply deny they’re getting help when it’s clear they should.
The longer one can deny they can’t handle things, the easier it is to save face. First, one doesn’t need help with bringing in heavy grocery bags – then cooking a full dinner – then bathing without slipping. Each detraction feels like one more step toward complete dependence; therefore seniors avoid it at all costs.
It Feels Like Losing Control
There’s a connection between not asking for help and fear of what accepting help will become. Many seniors have seen friends get assisted into nursing homes just because they needed someone else to cook their meals. They think that if they allow their kids to help them with meals, they’ll take away their choice of when and what to eat.
Where this fear is irrational, at times, it’s not without basis. When family or doctors seek someone to have help because they need it, the preferences of the elderly are disregarded “for their own good.” The person who just needed help with housekeeping now has someone dictating their daily schedule.
Seniors avoid taking that first step because they feel it’s where the path leads them. Finding a home care provider Philadelphia can ease this transition with focused care that helps with what needs helping without taking over entirely.
There are other fears as well – of becoming a burden – which further complicate a senior’s desire to avoid asking for help. Seniors don’t want their children to think that they’re stealing from them or using them improperly. They don’t want their children to realize they’re now the needy ones – the roles flipped after decades of family dynamics that worked. The role reversal is uncomfortable and feels like it discounts their personhood.
Pride Overpowers Safety
Possibly one of the biggest factors involved that family cannot always appreciate is pride. The elderly grew up in different eras where asking for help was seen as weakness. Self-sufficiency became a core tenant in life. Needing assistance meant shameful living. These people could do it all, so why should they give up their dignity?
Instead of asking for help, many seniors put their safety at risk; they’d rather skip dinner than admit they need someone to help make food; they’d rather avoid bathing than asking someone how to keep them safe while getting into the tub; they’d rather mismanage medications than acknowledge that sometimes timing and doses are confusing.
While this puts people’s lives at risk daily, from the perspective of seniors, keeping their pride intact as the final shred of independence seems more viable than preventing possible dangers.
They Don’t Want To Acknowledge Change
Finally, for some seniors – at least part of the time – denial becomes a stage in which they realize they need help but fail to recognize it themselves. Sometimes they truly don’t understand how much change has occurred or how it’s dangerous for them.
People rarely acknowledge how much they’ve regressed since each change occurs slowly from cooking full meals to just eating crackers or cheese; skipping a meal here or there gets unnoticed by someone who made a sandwich last week but by next month can’t remember which meal was which.
Senior citizens fail to realize that each day is stacked upon one another; now it becomes a pattern of decline but if someone forgets that they struggled with something yesterday, today seems like a whole new day instead of continuing deterioration.
When families point out things, it feels like exaggeration or overreaction on behalf of the senior who’s simply just trying to do their best.
Generational Thinking
The elderly population was raised in times that really applauded self-reliance efforts; many seniors grew up during or after the depression when needing help meant one couldn’t provide for themselves; as people grew older and had families in times where boundaries existed among neighbors, others figured out their problems independently and privately.
These generational attitudes run deep; modern times applaud the healthier concept that needing assistance is normal and positive – requesting help implies intelligence rather than weakness – but these are more modern concepts many seniors did not internalize themselves. Thus, needing help still provides the stigma previously associated with failure in younger years.
What Changes Seniors’ Minds About Getting Help
When families understand the why behind resistance, they can more easily adapt the how to approach it. Attempting to get someone on board by forcing them into battle with family attempting to convince them they’re wrong backfires – it pushes all the defensiveness buttons (pride, fear, denial) stronger than ever before and digs them in deeper.
Instead, family members need to frame assistance as a way to maintain personal independence instead of surrendering it. Instead of “you can’t cook safely anymore,” say “if you have help with meal prep you can maintain your independence by staying in your house instead of moving somewhere that has a cafeteria.” Instead of taking over, provide limited specific help to cover the most dangerous gaps while leaving the senior capable of everything else better sought.
Sometimes it takes an incident – a trip, hospitalization, major medication error – for seniors finally to see why they need help. Ideally families are able to find ways before seniors realize but resistance is real and often strong enough that it takes something scary to break through it finally.
Thus families should keep communication open during this time where should a senior come around eventually, they’ve already discovered resources and options through the family beforehand to provide respectfully.
Thanks for stopping by!
Magda
xoxo