When your caring role changes, it can feel like the ground shifts beneath you. Whether the person you’ve cared for moves into a nursing home or no longer needs your support, the emotional impact can be profound and often overlooked. In this piece, Mike Hatch shares his personal experience and insights from other carers, exploring the feelings of loss, guilt, relief, and adjustment that come with this transition—and offering practical ideas to help you navigate life after caring.

Why I Have Written This

I decided to put some thoughts on paper because I found very little on the feeling / emotional impact on the carer when the caring role changes. If anyone reads this and finds it helpful, that is great. I don’t mean to cause any carer distress, but I did want to share some of the feelings that I have been going through and continue to live with. People have told me that it is OK to have difficult, painful and often conflicting feelings and emotions. I wanted to share what some of those feelings and emotions might be. I also wanted to share some thoughts from carers I’ve met and talked with, who have gone through or are going through similar experiences.

My Personal Journey

My wife and I have been together for 40 years. I’ve been providing an increasing amount of care for my wife who has been living with two types of dementia for the past eleven years. A period in hospital led to the unwanted but inevitable admission to a nursing home. This for me was a decision that I had avoided making for more than two years, going against strong medical, social care, family and friends’ advice. Somehow my career experience in health and social care did not prepare me for the lived and living caring experience that I have been through and continue to live through.

How Caring Can Change

Looking after someone, a parent, husband / wife / partner, a child / young person, relative, friend or neighbour, can be and frequently is lifechanging. So, what happens and how does it feel, when caring stops or there is a major change in the type of care that the carer needs to start giving?

Caring can change because the person cared for no longer needs your care, or needs or opts for a different sort of care. That can be because the person cared for recovers, dies, moves into a care home or moves into an independent living situation away from home. It could also be because the person doing the caring, like myself, develops health issues which make it difficult, dangerous or even impossible for the carer to continue caring.

This article concentrates on experiences and feelings that I and carers I’ve talked with, have gone through when the person they’ve been caring for, enters a residential or nursing home.

"When you yield your care responsibilities to the care workers in a care home, you realise that you have lost some of your sense of identity as a carer. Caring for me had become the priority over and above anything else in life."

Little seems to have been written about some of the physical and emotional reactions that carers may experience when they relinquish the care of the person they have been caring for and yield most or all of the caring responsibility to the nursing and care staff in the residential or nursing home to which the cared for person has been admitted.

Every Caring Relationship is Unique

It is important to remember that every caring relationship is unique and every caring relationship has a history. Not every caring relationship has a happy loving history. Family, cultural and religious expectations and/or financial issues will often have a significant influence on how a relationship has developed, before it ever becomes a care giving relationship.

All these issues and potentially many more, will no doubt generate expectations and are likely to continue to have an impact on the carer while caring, when the caring role changes.

Tensions between the carer and other members of the cared for person’s family, regularly add to the pressures and stresses associated with caring, particularly when the carer is having to make arrangements for alternative care. So often, less involved family members, fail to understand the impact of intense daily 24/7 caring which include regularly disturbed nights. They may not appreciate the effect on the carer’s physical and emotional health and feel a different outcome should happen or that person should not go into care. This can create further feelings of guilt, stress and additional anxiety for the primary carer; I was fortunate and grateful in having total support from family.

People who have never been carers, often do not realise or understand the impact that caring for someone can have on the health of a carer. This can be particularly true where that caring is intense, unpredictable and/or constant, and has been going on for many years. When you stop being a carer or your caring role changes, it can feel as though you are expected to step back to become again the person you used to be before you ever became a carer.

Caring Changes You

Caring for someone, particularly if that caring has continued over a significant period of time, changes you as a person. You become an expert at navigating the health and social care system. You learn numerous useful facts about how the health, social care, education systems and the independent sector organisations work or do not work.

You find out how hard a fight it can be to get the information, advice, physical and mental health, practical and emotional support that the person you care for and you as carer, needed. All too often care and support become available as a result of a crisis. Crisis is something that could have been avoided if that care and support had been available when you’d needed it.

You learn a lot about yourself, what you are capable of doing and what you cannot cope with. You discover what you have to do to keep yourself going both physically and mentally, (yourself and the person you’re caring for). You discover your strengths and weaknesses, what triggers both positive and negative emotional responses and how best to manage these. You acquire, often without realising it, new, improved, updated, relevant skills. 

Practicalities and Barriers

When the caring situation changes, feelings of grief, loss, guilt, disorientation, emptiness, loneliness and relief are common. Even in a group of family or friends you can feel empty and totally alone. At the same time as dealing with many conflicting feelings, you have practical issues to deal with.

When the person cared for moves into residential or nursing home care, practical matters will require attention. These may include financial, legal and property issues as well as keeping in touch with family and friends. Arrangements for paying for care are not straightforward.

If the person entering care, has less than £23,250 of savings (as of 2025) then social care services should be expected to make a financial assessment and provide financial support. Over that amount, you as carer will have to make payment arrangements directly with the home. In some circumstances, the property that the person cared for was living in, will either have to be cleared and sold to cover care costs, or if the accommodation is rented, again there may be pressure to release the tenancy.

Arrangements for the person you care for to be admitted to care, happen alongside these practical matters. Involvement of the person care for to choose and visit the home is the ideal. As a carer you will be dealing with your own feelings as well as those of the person you’ve been looking after. There will be many situations where the person you care for may not be fit, well enough or able to choose where to go and so the responsibility falls to you the carer, sometimes but not always assisted and occasionally resisted by other family members.

Making Difficult Decisions

A major area of difficulty for me, was that my wife, like so many in her situation, was totally resistant to any type of residential or nursing home care. For some people this is because they do not realise or have insight into their need for care (which may be a mental capacity issue). For my wife it was lack of insight, fear of the unknown and not wanting to be parted from me. Physically moving someone who does not want to move from home is extremely difficult to manage and is physically and emotionally challenging and stressful.

Dealing with this kind of resistance can feel overwhelming. What made it even more difficult for me, was that I didn’t want to lose the person I love and care for, to a care home; but the advice was that I was no longer physically well enough even with exceptional home care and live-in care, to give her the care she needed.

Every caring situation is unique as is every caring relationship. Pressures for a daughter or son arranging admission of a parent into care may include that daughter or son needing to work as well as care; and if they have stopped work to care, how easy is it to pick up with work again?

Loss

Where the person admitted to care is the husband or the wife or the partner, the wife, husband or partner (respectively) is losing the person he or she has lived with and hopefully loved for however many years. That is also likely to be true for a daughter or son. Making the person’s room as comfortable and homely as possible, putting their name on all their clothes, getting to know the staff and they, you, as the former full time carer, sets off an tsunami of feelings.

Those feelings range from grief and loss to guilt and to relief. When you yield your care responsibilities to the care workers in a care home, you realise that you have lost some of your sense of identity as a carer. For some carers particularly when that care has been intense, 24/7 and for a long time, like it has been for me, caring will have been your whole world, your total focus. Caring for me had become the priority over and above anything else in life.

Effects of Loss

The loss of this caring role which made you feel valued and needed, leaves you feeling numb and empty. The days and nights that were full of being needed. Even if the person cared for didn’t always want to be cared for because they thought they were more capable than they were, you suddenly stop and you start to miss the person who as well as being their carer, you were also their partner, son or daughter.

You will do well in these circumstances, not to feel a roller coaster of emotions and feelings which include:

• Feeling bad about what you have done, putting the person you love and care for into a care home
• Should you have tried harder to keep caring for them at home, should you not have given in?
• Feeling that you have betrayed the person you love and care for
• Feeling that as a result you are a failure.

I continue to feel some of these, months after my wife’s admission to the nursing home.

One of the other effects that I’ve experienced, possibly other carers may have too, is a loss of confidence. Things that you wouldn’t have given a second thought about doing before you became a carer, are now quite challenging. Socialising, arranging to go away somewhere for a few days break, can now feel like a mountain to climb.

Relief

If you have been caring for a loved one whose health problem has changed their personality and made them subject to mood swings, you feel they are not the person you knew and loved, but are a stranger who comes and goes. The person you’ve been caring for may have been verbally and physically abusive which can be difficult to erase from your memory. When that person goes into care or dies, there is profound relief that this experience has ended but then you have guilt to live with because you are living with all these feelings and this can take a long time to process.

Amid all these feelings, it is still possible to feel some relief. ‘Someone else is managing the care that I was providing, maybe they will be able to give that care better than me and then again maybe they will not.’ Is it OK to enjoy some freedom and not have the same amount of worry? This can feel selfish and uncaring but perhaps it is not; maybe it is a little about looking after yourself, your own health and welfare.

When You Are No Longer Caring 24/7

One of the big issues that many carers who yield caring to care home staff experience, is the feeling of total physical, mental and emotional exhaustion. I’ve certainly discovered this. Often carers feel unwell, run down, and we begin to allow ourselves to notice the health issues that we have been too busy caring to notice or give attention to.

It can feel strange to do things just for yourself such as meals or washing and cleaning. Professionals, family and friends may start to try to involve you in activities or interests that you used to enjoy and share with them. This will difficult where you still have a role as spouse, partner, daughter, son, part carer of the person now living in this care home.

Your Role Now and How It May Feel

Yes, while the person continues to live in the care home, you are still partly a carer. You will have to decide how much care and what sort of care you want or feel able to provide and discuss this with the care home staff.  Whenever you visit you are still playing a part in the care of the person you used to give full time care to. You are also monitoring the care given, offering information from your own experience of caring for this person over the years in the hope and expectation that it contributes to making the care home’s caring more effective.

Can Be Tough

Going to see and spend time with the person you were caring for at home, can be a difficult and at times quite an emotionally painful experience. You may be asked “when are you going to take me home?” or “Why won’t you take me home, I don’t want to be here?” There may be days when you visit when you experience rejection, “I don’t want you here,” “you don’t love me anymore.” On other days you might find yourself joining in to help with an activity arranged within the home.

Another difficult time can be at the end of a visit, “where are you going, why?” “What time will you be home?” and then dealing with some distress when you eventually depart. This all adds to the feelings of guilt and betrayal that as the carer, you continue to carry with you.

Practical and Emotional

You are also likely be managing the finances and paying the bills and realise that you are on a different financial level with the loss of a pension for example. Worry about the changes in financial situation when the person cared for goes into care, frequently add to your concerns and may lead to anxiety and depression on top of the sense of a partial loss of the person you used to care for and still love.

Back at home there are constant reminders of the person you were looking after. That can be positive to keep them alive in the memory, but it can also be painful because that person is no longer physically living with you. You have more time to think, perhaps sadness about what has led to the person you were caring for not being with you and the effect on both your lives. There may be some anger, asking yourself why this is happening to us, but perhaps hopelessness because there is little you can do to change the situation.

For some carers caring is or has been quite a traumatic experience. Reliving some of those traumatic experiences can develop into something akin to post traumatic stress. Difficult caring experiences can reawaken past trauma, making the whole period of adjusting to life after caring, significantly more difficult, distressing and demanding.

Adjustment

There are no time limits on the period of adjustment that you need to go through. Getting more regular sleep may take a while to achieve and however much sleep you manage, you still feel tired with little motivation to do anything more than you absolutely have to. Things you used to enjoy may no longer interest you. There is a risk after a few weeks, you may feel sufficiently rested to think, that maybe I could manage to care full time again. Be careful, this is a risky place to be in, because there’s plenty of evidence of carers who have chosen this way forward, in a few weeks being back to where you were, with all the distress that the person cared for and you have to go through again and perhaps ultimately what you are doing is trying to fulfil your own need and assuage your own guilt!

"There are no time limits on the period of adjustment that you need to go through. Things you used to enjoy may no longer interest you, and however much sleep you manage, you still feel tired with little motivation to do anything more than you absolutely have to."

Moving On Ideas

Lots of care providing organisations offer ideas about moving on from caring; here are a few that I’ve been offered.

• Find time for a break or breaks even if it is a regular half day away, time for yourself, make time to recharge
• Don’t try to do too much too soon or make too many decisions initially / quickly
• Attend to any neglected health problems or any that come to light since caring ceased or changed focus
• Begin to explore a different day-to-day life, particularly if this has to involve work or volunteering
• Try taking up some gentle exercise
• Notice how you are feeling – feel some self-compassion, are you being too self-critical? How would you talk to a friend who was in the same situation as you?
• Forgive yourself for any guilt that you continue to feel
• Believe that you’ve been as good a carer as possible
• Begin to reconnect with family and friends, rebuild relationships
• Allow time to rest and adjust, seek support, if necessary, from professionals
• Without making commitments, start thinking about things that you might be interested in, not yet but in the future.

In Conclusion

I have written this very much from personal experience, bringing in some of the thoughts and feelings that carers I’ve met recently, have shared with me. I consider myself to have been quite fortunate; our families and friends have all been supportive, some carers I’ve spoken with, have not had that support. The care my wife is receiving has been very good thus far.

My thanks to former colleagues, professional contacts and friends some who have been or are carers, for your ideas and suggestions. My thoughts and warm good wishes to any carers reading this, particularly if you have been or are at the moment going through similar experiences.

Mike Hatch
October 2025