The Caretaking Wilderness: How to Keep Your Edge Without Losing Yourself

And silence is a problem because it can make you invisible. And invisibility over time becomes identity. So you gradually become someone who doesn't ask, who doesn't expect, and who doesn't receive. And this loop keeps going because nothing breaks it. This show is powered by others over self. Hit that subscribe button to keep training your brain. From others over self, it's Hardcore and At Ease, a show about people who are keeping their edge without going over the edge. I'm host Shelly Rood. In working in mental wellness, there's baseline questions that I know by heart. Are you showering? Are you eating? Are you sleeping? And those questions exist to assess whether someone is okay. Now, one night I realized that nobody had asked them of me. My list was empty. And today we're going to go into the caretaking wilderness, what it takes from you, why peace is not on the other side of it, and the 3 moves that can change how you're standing inside of it. This is Hardcore and At Ease. Let's back up a few years. My daughter was a few months old and my spouse was in another depression spiral. This is the kind that comes every 2 or 3 years or so, and we were working through it together the way that we always do. Now, professionally, I work in mental wellness, so I know the baseline questions. We use these to assess whether someone is taking care of themselves. Basic things like, are you showering daily? Are you eating consistently? Are you sleeping? These are the basic things that help you tell whether a person is keeping themselves functional. Now, those questions exist for a reason, simply because they work. The problem is they tend to be asked of the one person in that room that is receiving the caretaking. Now, as the caretaker, I ran through that list for him and he was able to answer yes to every question. He was in a good place. He was just working through hard stuff. So he was getting the support that the system was designed to give him, and that's what was supposed to happen. But then as he was answering those questions, I started to look at that list as it applied to myself. I was the one up all night with the baby. I was the one who had not found a window to shower before getting the kids to school. Here I was running on empty while managing his care, the household, the children, owning a business, all of it. His list was looking really good with checkmarks, and I was glad to help him get those checkmarks. Mine, on the other hand, needed a little bit of work. It was time for Shelly to look at herself and say, Shelly, what are you eating? How are you sleeping? Are you doing the basics? The system of support is built to look at the person who's receiving the care most of the time because they're at the greatest need. But if no one's there to provide that care, then what are we doing? It's time to take a look today at the giver. This is the blind spot that we're going to raise a flag and awareness to. This is where the wilderness lives. This is the caretaking wilderness. It does not look like crisis from the outside. It actually looks like competence. A lot of times the caretakers look like people who have everything handled. It might even look like you. So I want you to hold this image before we go anywhere else in today's conversation. The checklist was full for the person that I was caring for, and it was running pretty close to empty for the one who was doing the caretaking. Not a lot of people were able to notice or see that discrepancy, and not a lot of people asked about it because the one who's giving the care, you and I, sometimes we don't look like we need it. So today's talk isn't about theory. I've watched People that I love battle alcohol addiction. I've seen this across more than one relationship. I have a child with special needs. I have watched depression cycles come back around in people that I've loved for years. I've even lost someone to this. I've been on the inside of this wilderness in multiple relationships, and sometimes even simultaneously. So when I tell you that the caretaking wilderness is real, I'm telling you this from the inside. Now, 2 weeks ago in episode 39, we laid the foundation for the series that we're in, the Wilderness Series. We covered what a wilderness is. There's 5 criteria that define it, why naming the terrain matters, and we covered why women veterans specifically are navigating wilderness situations that most leadership content doesn't address. So if you haven't heard that episode, go back to episode 39 and be sure to start there. Now, 4 weeks ago in episode 37, we went into the first wilderness type, the accusation wilderness. What happens when the institution becomes the threat, when you're required to keep performing for a system that quietly removes you from the outcome. So your homework after today's episode, if you haven't listened to episode 37, pop back over there and get ahold of what we call the accusation wilderness. Today's conversation is about the second wilderness type, the caretaking wilderness. Now, we're not picking these types at random. What we're doing is working through wilderness situations that women veterans specifically are living in most right now. These are the ones that have come up consistently in the conversations that we've been having for years, the stories that are being submitted, the community in general. These terrain types aren't theory. They're the ones that we know that women veterans are walking through, and that's why it's so important that we do take the time attention to address each one at the deeper level. The caretaking wilderness does not come with a map. Most of us ended up here anyway. We kind of walked into it because we said yes to the relationship, yes to the child, yes to the parent, yes to the person who's in front of us that needs something. The wilderness isn't this feeling that we are trapped. The wilderness is the depth of what love requires. That's not on the brochure when we signed up for the relationship. People don't usually tell us that the season we're in has no finish line. And so by the end of today's episode, what you're going to be able to do is have a name for what you're living in. We're going to talk about 5 root pulls that will help you identify what we're feeling, and we're going to wrap up with 3 moves that you can make this week that will help change how you're standing in this situation. So let's go. Before we get into the root pulls, I would like to establish a mindset shift because without it, everything is going to land the wrong way. A lot of what we're talking about today can be thought of as controversial or clinical. Now, the others over self— the others over self mindset is not about depleting yourself for others. It's about leading from a full center outward. Self first, and then over what we have some control over, and then others. This 3-phase sequence of self over others, right? We're reverse engineering others over self. This is the structure that makes sustainable service possible. And the caretaking wilderness is one of the most common places where that sequence collapses, where other and overs tend to swallow self entirely. And the whole framework falls apart when we do that. So before we name the terrain, we're going to name the posture that we're in. Caretaking is not victimhood. It's a leadership assignment. It's a very hard leadership assignment, and it's often very thankless. Caretaking comes with terrain that nobody has mapped for us, and it's still a choice that we're making every day. And that means that you have agency here, even when it doesn't feel like it. Now, here's the reframe that I want us to sit with for just a minute: welcome to the wilderness. Not welcome to your punishment, even though it feels that way a lot of times, not welcome to the place that you ended up because you made a lot of wrong turns. It's a genuine welcome because you walked into this wilderness carrying things that matter to you, leading people that matter to you and that need you. And you do hold standards that a lot of people around you aren't holding. So give yourself permission to say that you didn't just wander into this situation. You walked in here with purpose, with love, and with commitment. And the peace that I know that you're seeking, that real grounded peace, it does not wait for you on the other side of this. Oftentimes we want so much for this just to be over so we can move on. It is possible to find that sense of peace because it lives right now in your tactical center, and your tactical center came with you into this terrain. So it is here right now. And that's what we're going to be orienting to today. We're not talking about how to escape the wilderness, but how to be at ease inside of it. Now let's go through the framework for why this qualifies as wilderness, because naming it precisely is the first move that's going to help us heal through this. There's 5 criteria that define a wilderness. I'm gonna name all 5 first, and then we're gonna go through each one. No map, no training manual, the double bind, the worth collapse, and moral dissonance. 5 criteria. And if at least 3 out of those 5 are true, then you are in wilderness. You're not failing, you're just in wilderness. So let's go through how every one of them is active in the caretaking season. First of all, no map. There is no roadmap for watching someone that you love battle addiction. There's a lot of books out there, but there's no manual for caring for a parent whose mind is leaving their bod— whose mind is leaving before their body does. There is no training that can fully prepare you to become an expert on a subject that you never wanted to study because someone that you love needs you to. And you didn't do anything to deserve being in the will— the caretaking wilderness. You're just in territory that nobody's really chartered. And when the terrain has no name, when there's no map, it can feel like it owns you. So step one, is to name it. And when we name it, that doesn't mean that we're choosing to be here. It just means that we're accepting the position that we're in to move through it. The second criteria of wilderness is no training manual. Of all of your experience and your knowledge, of all of your time and service, it brought you to this moment. And then this terrain has shifted, and there's not really anything in the training of your life so far that's covered this specific ground. This can feel so personal, so specific, so yours. And the clinical world has names for what you're living— caretaker fatigue, compassion exhaustion— but knowing the name is not the same as having the manual. You are building the plane while you fly it, and every decision that you make in this terrain You're making it without the preparation that the situation requires. So we're gonna seek counsel and then we're gonna own our decision. So the third marker here to recognize that we are in the caretaking wilderness is called the double bind. This is the feeling that I am in a rock and a hard place. When you step back from the caregiving, things tend to fall apart without you. If you keep going at this pace, you're the one that's gonna be falling apart. Caretaking options tend to cost something no matter which way you choose. There's not really a clean exit. And so if you're feeling right now like every choice in front of you has a price attached to it, then that's the double bind that you're feeling. Sometimes as the person who's always been able to find a way through, we can start to wonder if maybe I'm the problem. And I want you to hear this from me today. You, my caretaking friend, are not the problem. You are somebody worth protecting. And accepting the fact that you're in the double bind instead of fighting it, really accepting this moment is what's gonna allow us to draw that line really clearly. Now, the fourth marker of being in the wilderness is the collapse of our worth. The worth collapse. When nobody around us is measuring what we're contributing. There's no performance review that the person receiving care is going to be able to give you. There's no promotions here, and oftentimes there's no recognition here. The work tends to be invisible until we stop doing it. So it can feel like all of the excellent work and the effort that we're making is producing nothing. And that's the caution that we wanna be thinking about when we feel like our effort is going in and nothing is coming back. When we start to feel that silence, then the wilderness is gonna start whispering things like, "You missed your window. You shouldn't even be here. The best of you's already happened." And so just be cautious of these little lies that are starting to come in because your internal value is not determined by what this season is returning to. Now, the 5th marker of knowing that we're in wilderness is moral dissonance. The conflict of feeling that we love this person and this is so hard. This moral dissonance is what makes this particular caretaking wilderness not just a hard season, but true wilderness, because you want both of you to make it. And the gap between the person that you love and what this season is requiring of you, it can create an internal dissonance or a gap that is genuinely destabilizing. It doesn't just hurt, it can make you question your very foundation of who you are and what you stand for. Sometimes we can't even find a name for what's happening. We just know that this feels really bad. And so if you are feeling that right now, it's okay to consider it confusion, but we're going to go even deeper and we're going to touch a little bit on moral injury and how the only move towards healing that you can make in this type of terrain is to understand the why. The why behind what did we believe about where we are that's being violated. So those are the 5 markers to recognize that we're even in wilderness. Say them back with me. There's no map. There's no training manual. I'm in a double bind. The worth collapse. And there's moral dissonance happening. So welcome to the wilderness. You didn't cause it, my friend. You can't prevent it. You can't even schedule your way out of it, no matter how much I try. You don't have to fight it. You will be able to find peace inside of this wilderness, but you just have to know where you are. So that is the whole shift. That's the mental shift that we're going to start with today. Please don't feel like you are failing. You are just in wilderness, and that still puts failure in the room. Yep, it's still there. But this is just to simply say welcome to you. This is terrain and caretaking terrain can be navigated. So now that we understand where our mind should be, let's talk about 5 root pulls that make this feel really hard. When my daughter was learning to walk, everything tripped her. Herself, the grass, a seam in the sidewalk, her own shoes. I mean, she had a direction that she wanted to go, whether it was toward the dog or the snack, you know, whatever was most interesting. And the world kept reaching up and grabbing her feet before she could get there. Now, from across the room, it looks like she just needs to try harder, right? Keep going. But from inside her body, there's a very real cause every single time she tripped. My uncle had a phrase for this. My uncle would say "Turf Smurf" anytime he tripped over what appeared to be nothing. He would kind of whisper to himself, but out loud, "Turf Smurf." So he would trip over a flat surface, just an open path, right? There's no reason to fall, but he would trip a little bit and just say, "Turf Smurf." And it was as if he had imagined this creature that would reach up from the earth and grab his foot just long enough to send him sideways. From the outside, someone might be watching and think that he's just clumsy or he's getting older, can't keep his balance. But from inside, he knew that something had grabbed him. Well, this is what a root pull is. A root pull is internal. and you feel it. Others don't always see it, but from the outside, they're watching you trip and they're drawing their own conclusions. She looks tired. She seems off. Something's wrong with her. But from the inside, you know that there's a real cause. Something in the terrain is reaching up and gripping the root system that we have spent years building and it's pulling in the opposite direction. It's not pulling hard enough to uproot us. We don't just jump out of the ground and fall over, but it pulls steady enough so that we have to consistently brace against it without even knowing exactly what we're bracing against. I know that you've felt this. This is the low-grade exhaustion that's not about sleep. This is about irritability that doesn't match the size of the moment. The question that surfaces when the house is finally quiet: what is it about this situation that is making today so hard? Not just every day, because every day as a caretaker is a little bit different. This day. What is making this day so hard? That's a root pull. And in the caretaking wilderness, there are 5 specific ones that are working on you at different times, sometimes simultaneously. And knowing which one has your foot on any given day is the difference between being able to brace blindly and moving forward with your eyes open. So here are the 5 root pulls of the caretaking wilderness. Root pull number 1: the terrain that you never signed up to study. The person that you care for brought terrain with them. Maybe it's substance use or abuse. Maybe it's a physical injury, somebody learning to walk again, and your job is to encourage them through the painful parts of rehab rather than absorbing the discomfort for them. Maybe it's mental illness, depression cycles, dementia, a chronic disease, or some self-destructive habits that bleed into the quality of life of everyone around them. You didn't choose the condition, you chose the person, but now you feel like you have to become an expert in something that you never wanted to know. I spent 5 years completing a 2-year seminary program because I was simultaneously running a business, raising 3 kids, and I had a son with special needs who was born the exact week that the world shut down in a pandemic. I did not plan to become an expert in special needs advocacy. I didn't plan to learn about developmental timelines or IEP negotiations, but I became an expert in this field because my son needed somebody who could understand that in order to care for him best. You learn the terminology. You show up for the appointments. You figure out who to call, what to ask, and how to fight for what your person needs in a system that's not designed to make it easy. That expertise is real, and the clinical world has a name for it: lived experience. It carries weight, significant weight in professional settings. So you need to give it that same weight in your own assessment of yourself. You're not stumbling through this. You're building knowledge in real time, under real conditions, in terrain that nobody charted for you in advance. So study the terrain the way that you have studied for the most demanding role that you've ever had. We're not doing this to fix the condition, but to understand it well enough to protect both yourself and the person in your care. From what? You don't even know yet. And here's the harder truth that belongs in this particular root pull: you can become the most educated, most prepared, most attentive person in this terrain, and the outcome is still not yours to control. The person in your care has agency, and God has a path. Your job is not to determine where that ends. Your job is to show up well inside of it, and those are two completely different assignments. So now that we understand the terrain itself, let's talk about what it does to the relationship, because the second root pull can come at us as a surprise. Root pull number 2: the line between caretaking and enabling. This is the line that is almost impossible to see when you are the one who loves them. Caretaking looks out for the best interest of another, even when they can't see it themselves. It separates the person from the behavior. It loves the person while rejecting what harms them. And it says, I see you and I'm not going anywhere, and I'm not going to let you stay here. On the other hand, enabling. Enabling protects someone from the consequences of their own choices. It looks like love and it feels like love, and it almost always is motivated by love, but it removes the friction that creates growth. And so here's a concrete example. Someone is recovering from a serious physical injury, and you can stand at the edge of what hurts and you can say, "One more step," or you can allow too much rest You can absorb too much discomfort on their behalf, and you can slow the recovery, and you can slow the physical recovery in the name of care. Enabling does not always look like permissiveness. Sometimes it looks like protection that just goes one step too far. Now, the same principle applies to someone in an addiction cycle. I have walked alongside people that I love through the process of recognizing alcohol dependency and attempting to seek help. My sister has self-detoxed multiple times in unsafe conditions. I've watched her do it, um, because she insists that she can handle it on her own. Now, she's also been through multiple rehab facilities and medical detoxes. When I went through a custody situation that required witnesses to testify about my ex-spouse's drinking, 3 people who knew the truth refused to show up in court for me. I understand now that some of what I did during those years was caretaking and some of it was enabling. The line was almost invisible to me at the time because I was the one who loved him, and love makes it really hard to see the line. Your job is to love the person and reject the behavior. Those two things are not in conflict. They are both required. The person and the behavior are not the same thing, and holding this distinction is what makes the care sustainable. Now here's the layer that most people never name: trauma bonding. Trauma bonding happens when the cycle of harm and repair in a relationship becomes the attachment itself. The crisis, the chaos, the reconciliation, and the calm, and then you're back into the crisis again. If you've lived inside of that cycle long enough, then the bond that formed in the hard moments, it can feel more real than any bond that's formed in the good ones. This isn't weakness. This is how human beings are wired under pressure. Your nervous system learns to associate intensity with connection. And the danger, my friend, is that trauma bonding can make enabling feel like loyalty, and it can make holding the line feel like abandonment. So if you find yourself unable to step back, even when the situation is clearly harming you, Then please ask yourself whether you're holding on out of love or out of the bond that formed when you were in the fire. Knowing the difference is the first step toward choosing which one that you're willing to build on. The signal that you've crossed from caretaking over into enabling is this: your own well-being is being sacrificed. You have a right to stand up for your own health and your own safety, and it's not selfish. That is what makes the care sustainable. I had to talk with a woman veteran recently who shared with me a time when she needed to be hospitalized, and when her husband came, was under the influence, and he was not a supportive care person for her at that time, and he had to be removed from the hospital. I love her for being in that moment and recognizing that he is not in a place to care for her when she needs care, and for standing up and having him removed from that situation. Your own health and safety is not selfish. It honors the agency of the person in your care, because what happens when you absorb every consequence for them, you quietly remove their opportunity to choose differently. In that instance, the husband could not deny the harsh reality that he either had to change his behaviors or care for his spouse. He wasn't able to do both at the same time. So now that you understand the terrain that you're studying, and where this line is between caregiving and enabling, let's go a little bit deeper. Root pull number 3 is the one that does its damage in complete silence. It's the thousand small silences. Now, at some point you might have stopped asking for things. The wanting didn't go away, it just went quiet because when you ask, it starts to cost more than it returns. So here's how this happens. You work really hard on something, nobody acknowledges it, so your heart breaks a little bit. You lower your expectations, and then you lower them again, and eventually you stop expecting anything at all. And this disappointment, it can trigger silence. And silence is a problem because it can make you invisible. And invisibility over time becomes identity. So you gradually become someone who doesn't ask, who doesn't expect, and who doesn't receive. And this loop keeps going because nothing breaks it. What we allow to continue will continue, and silence is the most allowed thing in the caretaking wilderness. So here's what this looks like in my own life. When my son was 4 months old, I accepted a promotion that required our household to move while my spouse was deployed. Functionally, I was a single parent executing this move alone, 4 months postpartum, and the things that I needed— help, acknowledgement, relief, someone to notice what I was managing— mostly it did not come. So I just stopped asking for that acknowledgement. I told myself that I was strong enough not to need that, but what I was really doing was training myself out of the expectation of what I deserved. So think about the woman who organized the kayaking event that we talked about earlier in the series. She planned a lot of it. She set up the lunch. She made sure everyone had what they needed, but she never actually said out loud, I want to be on the water too. That small desire, it stayed quiet and it turned into a big regret, and that regret became resentment. And not one person around her knew that any of it was happening. You have to keep speaking your desires out loud. This isn't complaining. We don't do this to try to fix them, and we don't do this to even make a plan. We just want to keep them alive. I want to go to that conference. Say it. I want time to work on what I'm building. I want to be seen as the person who keeps everything running. Say it out loud to yourself first. You don't even have to have an audience. When you're ready, you can say these things to a trusted person, but just say it. Because every time you swallow a desire to keep the peace, you train yourself to need less. And I'm not talking about selfish needs like a new purse. I'm talking about human needs of stability and safety. A woman who has trained herself to need less is a woman who's already started to disappear. I don't want you to disappear, my gracious friend. I see you. Now, root pull number 3, it works Slowly, and it works invisibly. So once you name it, you can interrupt it. And this interruption, it can be simpler than you think. It's just speaking. It's just saying, "I would really like a good meal this afternoon." So now that we've named the silence, we're ready for the root pull that comes after the silence has been running for too long. Root pull number 4 is the thankless math. This one nobody prepares you for. They call it humbleness. The person receiving care often will not recognize what you are doing. They may never say thank you. They may not even be capable of returning what you give. And in some cases, the very condition that requires the care is the same condition that prevents. So let me give you a picture that still lives in my body. It's 3 in the morning and my daughter needs to be fed, so I'm up. The house is completely quiet. My two boys are asleep. My spouse is asleep. He got what he needed that night. And here I am sitting in the dark alone with a baby in a house that's full of people. and there's not one person in the building who's awake to see it. This can feel like caregiver resentment, this uneasy, unsettled feeling deep in your heart saying, why am I the one doing this right now? It shouldn't be me. It should be fill in the name with, because you already know that name and jumped right to the front of your head. Caregiver resentment doesn't always feel like a dramatic moment. It can come in the quiet of a house that's resting when you are not. It's the contrast between what everyone else got that night and what you got. The specific loneliness of being completely unseen inside your own home. It doesn't start as resentment. It starts with something that we can't quite name. Somewhere between, I just feel sad, a little bit bitter, I'm just really tired. If you don't name it and address it, it's probably going to get worse. When you can say the phrase caregiver resentment, I'm experiencing caregiver resentment, then it can become this filter through which you can see everything in the relationship. And then the small thing can be measured against that 3:00 AM feeling. A loved one in a depression cycle can't always see what you're carrying. Someone in active addiction is not in a position to acknowledge the impact that they're making on the world around them. When I needed witnesses, when I needed witnesses to testify in court about what my child was being exposed to, 3 people who knew the truth declined to show up. They valued their own comfort and safety over a child that they claimed to love. I had poured years into those relationships. Those were not friends. That thankless math felt really brutal. Now, caregiver resentment is the cost of thankless math that goes unnamed for too long. It's not a character flaw. This is what happens when you keep giving without refilling and without telling anyone how empty your tank is or how low it's running. If the love and affection of another person were sufficient to equal what you're pouring out, then this wouldn't be a wilderness. It would just be love, right? I give some and you give some and I give some and you give some. That's not what we're talking about with caretaking. Caretaking tends to be a pouring action, and you have to be the one to refill your own tank. You have to find a higher reason to provide the care. You have to find something bigger than the relationship, something that holds when the gratitude does not come and the season has no end date in sight. I know what it is to grieve a person while they're still alive. To watch someone that you love make choices that cost them everything, and to show up again and again, day after day, encouraging but not really knowing. You can't make that choice for them. That sentence is the— this is both the hardest and the most freeing thing in this entire episode. You, my caretaker friend, are not responsible for the outcome. You are responsible for showing up well. Now, what they do with that showing up belongs to them and to God. Name your higher reason, write it down, and let's be sure to return to it when we feel that thankless math start to win. Now that we have been through the terrain the line between caring and enabling, the silence and the thankless math, we are going to come to a root pull that this audience can feel most personally because it involves the one person that you believed might never be the source of it. Root pull number 5 is caretaking for the leader. This is the root pull that hits differently for this audience. For people like us who were built to be led well and to choose our leaders, we give our trust to people who we believe have sure footing. A partner, a mentor, someone whose stability matched your own. You built your footing. You may have even built your own footing partly on theirs. And then that ground gets cracked. I know a woman veteran who spent 2 years as the primary person caring for an aging parent with dementia. Now, that parent had been verbally abusive for most of her life. He was supposed to be the leader of the family, and he was not. And now that he had dementia, her sibling said that it was too emotionally difficult to visit. So this dear woman veteran went every week. She sat with a person who still said cruel things, partially out of the disease and partially out of decades of habit. And she showed up. She showed up because she was the one who would. She wasn't there because it felt good. She was there because the person that she wanted to be showed up even when it cost her. She had made peace with the outcome being outside of her hands. And that is a clear, visible version of this root pull. But it also shows up in marriage, in partnership, in the dual military dynamic where the woman's career quietly shadows the man's without ever explicitly deciding that that was the arrangement. In my first marriage, I moved states, I changed units, I restructured my career around choices that were made without me being consulted. My military service was real, my rank was real, and still the default assumption—his career first, her career second—it grabbed—it operated like gravity. Nobody named it, it just was. And that is a root pull. It grabs you before you even see it coming. When the person who is supposed to lead fails, when the depression cycle deepens When the addiction escalates, when the partner who is supposed to be your anchor needs you to be theirs, you lose two things at once. You lose your own footing and you lose your faith in the person that you built your footing on. And so you do what your pattern tells you to do. And here is where the Wildflower Framework matters. Some of you take over immediately. You're effective. You also seethe quietly because you shouldn't have had to. Some of you adapt, restructuring our expectations, absorbing the gap. You can sustain the relationship longer, and you also lose yourself in the process. Now, some of our wildflowers, we reach for community and we pull others into the weight of the situation. We find support, and we also risk spreading the wound wider than it needs to go. None of these responses are wrong. They are patterns, and every pattern has a cost in this terrain. The goal is to know your pattern so that you can catch the cost before it runs you. Caregiver resentment in this root pull is tangled with grief. It's not just the grief of the hard season, but the grief of the what-if. What if the ground had been as solid as it looked when you chose to build on it? You may have built your life, your plans, your sense of the future on the assumption of this person's stability. And when that stability fractured, you lost two things at once. You lost the footing and you lost the future that you thought you were building toward. You are allowed to grieve what you thought this was going to be. That grief does not make you disloyal. It does not mean that you love them less. It means that you are human. And then you set it down long enough to take the next step, because the path is still unfolding. The outcome, what this relationship becomes, what this person chooses, what God does with all of it, it's not yours to determine. Your job is to stay rooted in who you are while that path unfolds. That grief, it doesn't get a funeral, but it can be carried with peace. So now that we've walked through all 5 of the root pulls, we're going to name that trap that lives underneath all of them, because there is something here that's making every single one of them worse. Here's the danger that we don't get warned about, because this is where most people can get lost and we don't even know it. Survival mode. You just buckle your head down, man, one foot in front of the other. We just get through this season just until things stabilize, just until things finally get better. And that season becomes a year, and that year becomes 5 years, and that situation becomes the new normal, and you are still in get-through-it mode with no finish line in sight. Still braced, still waiting, still treating a long-term terrain shift like a short-term emergency. I know what it's like to be in a season with no finish line. I have a special needs child. There's no graduation date on when that care is going to end. An addiction cycle that can span years with no closing chapter. Depression cycles— they come back around. What if it's clinical? What if it's hereditary? That calendar. I wish I could just put on there, oh, Thursday is going to be hard, but I can't. And so we can get stuck in this idea of survival mode. It's a trap. It can keep your head down when you need to be looking up. It can keep you in crisis posture when the terrain really requires a long-term, long-game strategy. It can prevent you from being at ease. Guide your own life. And a woman who cannot be at ease inside her own life is a woman who is going over the edge. And going over the edge, it does not serve her. It does not serve the person she is caring for. It doesn't serve anyone. The caretaking wilderness is not a sprint, my friend. It's a terrain shift. The goal is not to outlast it. The goal is to be fully ourselves in side of it. Hardcore in pursuit of what matters, at ease in who you are. Even here, especially here, the caregiver terrain wilderness is crazy. Survival mode and navigation, it can look the same on the outside because both people show up and both people do work. But the difference, the difference is what happens on the inside. Survival mode braces you for impact, but when we navigate, navigation moves with intention. Survival mode is just waiting for it to be over, but navigating accepts that this terrain is here and we're building a life inside of it. Peace is not waiting on the other side of this season. Peace is available Right now, I know that can be hard to hear, but right now in this season, in the middle of it, you can stop fighting the terrain and you can start to just move through it. And this is the whole shift. So now that we've named that trap, the question becomes, what do you anchor? What do you anchor to when everything around you feels unpredictable? And that's what this last section is about. Staying rooted. So how do you do it? How do you stay yourself in a season that's actively pulling at the edges of who you are? It's your tactical center. Your tactical center is your core self. It's your values, your foundational principles. It's the things that guide your decisions, even when the environment is pushing hard in the wrong direction. It's not the version of yourself that's been shaped by the chaos around you. Pulled along by someone else's destructive path. That's not you. It's not the version of you that's accumulated over years of silence and accommodation. I'm talking about your actual center. When we look at the Hardcore and Addies framework, we use target as a symbol, and the very T in the middle of that bullseye is our tactical center. And in this wilderness It's the only stable ground that you have because everything else outside of you is completely unpredictable. The condition, the behavior, the gratitude that might never come, the person who may or may not choose tomorrow differently. You cannot build any of your footing on any of that, but you can build it on who you are, what you believe, what you are willing to stand for, even when it costs you. Now, every flower has terrain where she needs to adjust or who lean into the other flowers, who know how to move through things that she does not. You don't always make the best decision in this terrain. Nobody does. And there's power in making the best decision available at the time with the information that you have. It's not failure. This is how wilderness navigation works. So your next right step is yours alone to take, and that's enough. And now that you know what those root pulls are, and what the trap is and what we need to anchor to. Here's 3 specific moves that you can do this week. The first move is to name the qualifier. Write down what you are navigating, the specific condition, the specific behavior or situation, substance abuse, a physical injury, mental illness, depression, chronic disease. Just name it plainly, and I don't want you to soften it. I know this can be hard because it feels like labeling, but you will find so much peace just by starting here. And then I want you to spend an hour this week studying it from the outside. I don't want you to think that we're trying to fix this. I just want you to learn how to understand the, the terrain well enough to protect both yourself and the person that's in your care from things that we don't know yet. Give yourself credit for the expertise that you're already building and hold it with open hands because you are becoming an expert in terrain that's ultimately not yours to control. And that's a different kind of mastery than we're used to. Learn to hold it that way. The second move that we're going to make in the caregiver terrain is to check the line. Ask yourself, am I caretaking? Enabling right now? Is my own well-being being sacrificed? Is the quality of my life bleeding into this terrain in ways that are not sustainable? Because that's going to show you pretty quickly that there needs to be a limit. Just one. Pick one limit that you need to set or reset this week. Until you have that limit, then you're going to find yourself floundering around and bleeding out in ways that are not going to be sustainable. Sometimes the limit itself is the gift. It can help you restore your safety, and it can restore their agency. It reminds them that they're not helpless. It gives back what over-caretaking can quietly remove. Now your third move in this wilderness terrain is to name your higher reason. Write down why you are doing this, and it has to have nothing to do with whether or not this person thanks you for it. Make it bigger than the relationship. Make it something that holds when the gratitude does not come, when your outcome is unclear, or when the path is going to go somewhere that you don't plan. I am doing this Because the person I want to be does not abandon people in their hardest season. I am doing this because my integrity is not contingent on their choices. I am doing this because I promised. I am doing this because this is what faith looks like when it costs something. Write that down and read it when that thankless math starts to win. But remember not to sacrifice your safety. Hold that outcome very loosely because you showed up, my friend. You chose love. And what happens from here, it's bigger than hands that are yours. We're not resigning to the outcome. We're gaining peace about the outcome. As we wrap up today, I'm going to leave you with one more thing, and I want you to use this one. The next time someone asks you how you're doing, a friend or a colleague, just anyone— church, school, grocery store— and you don't have words for what's happening, just try this. Say, "I'm good, just a few Turf Smurfs today." I mean, they're gonna look at you pretty sideways, and you can choose in that moment whether or not you want to explain what that means. But you'll know inside your heart. You'll know something in the terrain today is pulling at your roots. It's not your fault. It's not invisible. And you're tripping over it. You are navigating a wilderness that most people around you cannot see. Own that turf smurf, name that root pull, and keep moving. The caretaking wilderness is one of the most common wilderness seasons that we see in this community, and it's one of the most misunderstood because from the outside it looks like love, it looks noble, It looks like this is just what good people do, and it is all of those things, but it's also terrain. And terrain requires navigation, not endurance, not survival, not just gritting your teeth until it ends. You didn't wander in here. You walked in here carrying things that matter, leading somebody who needs you, and holding a standard that the people around you can't really hold. Your tactical center, it's right here with you. Peace came in here with you. It's been here the whole time, and it's available to you right now in this season, in this exact moment. Welcome to the wilderness, my friend. This is not a fight. This is terrain, and you know how to move. Thank you so much for your time with me today. I'm host Shelly Rood. I'm with you every Tuesday with lessons on life because we want you to keep your edge without going over it. This is Hardcore and At Ease, and if today's episode landed for you, share it with one person who's in the caretaking wilderness right now. The full written of everything that we covered today is in a post at shellyrood.substack.com. And the Wildflower Personality Assessment, that one is also ready for you at othersofyourself.shop. If you are a woman veteran, I encourage you to take the Wildflower Assessment so that you can know your pattern, know how you move through terrain like this, and know what you need. I will be back with you next Tuesday as usual. Have a great week, and until then, stay hardcore, be at ease, and trust the process. You're listening to Hardcore and At Ease. Keep the conversation going at join.othersoverself.com.