Unseen Roles: Chronic Pain, Caretaking, and the Cost of Chronic Pain and Illness on Daily Life
Rick Elgersma, LMFT, M. Litt | Monique I. Elgersma, LMFT
2.0 General CEU Hours
Description: Chronic pain and illness reshape family life through loss, worry, and constant adjustment. Bodies deteriorate. Capabilities change. Dreams narrow or disappear altogether. Alongside these changes, sadness, anger, fear, and confusion begin to organize daily life. Partners and children adapt to what the body can no longer do, often absorbing responsibility without preparation or relief. This workshop brings therapists into the lived reality of families navigating chronic pain, with attention to role confusion, caretaker fatigue, and the quiet grief attached to altered futures. Presenters address how discrimination and misunderstanding compound relational strain inside families and treatment systems. Drawing from research, clinical practice, and lived experience, the session offers frameworks for recognizing adaptive patterns without minimizing heartache. Therapists learn how to assess relational flexibility, address ongoing worry, and intervene in ways that protect dignity, connection, and long-term relational health.
Learning Objectives:
- Identify the full cost of chronic pain and illness on individuals and families, including changes to bodies, capabilities, identity, future expectations, and daily functioning, alongside the emotional impact of ongoing worry, grief, anger, and confusion.
- Recognize how chronic pain reshapes family systems, including caretaker role development, role confusion, relational rigidity, and subtle forms of discrimination that emerge inside families and clinical settings despite good intentions.
- Apply practical clinical frameworks for assessing relational flexibility, addressing unconventional grief, and intervening in ways that reduce exhaustion, protect dignity, and strengthen connection for couples and families living with chronic pain.
CEU Workshop Agenda
10:45 am - Registration
11:00 am*- Lunch Served and Networking
11:15 am - Self-Introductions, Sponsor Spotlight, and Speaker
11:40 am - Learning Part I
12:45 pm - Break and Networking
1:00 pm - Learning Part II
1:55 pm - Closing and Evaluations
2:00 pm - Event Concludes
*Please arrive by 11:00 AM for lunch and networking. The program will begin promptly at 11:15 AM
Rick and Monique Elgersma are licensed marriage and family therapists, speakers, Enneagram experts, and co-founders of Real Connections Counseling & Coaching. Their clinical training comes from one of the country’s leading marriage and family therapy programs, and their work joins systems theory, Enneagram insight, lived disability experience, caregiving, grief, and more than 30 years of marriage with chronic pain and constant adaptation.
Rick was born with Spina Bifida and lives with chronic pain every day, bringing clinical training and lived experience into realities many disabled clients face long before treatment begins: adaptation fatigue, dignity wounds, dependence, independence, ableism, role confusion, hidden grief, medical trauma, spiritual strain, and the pressure to function inside an abled version of normal.
Monique brings clinical depth, systems thinking, Enneagram expertise, and the long, complex reality of loving, partnering, advocating, caregiving, building a family, and building a business inside that story. Together, they help clinicians understand disability as far more than a medical condition or access issue.
Disability changes relationships, bodies, identity, faith, sexuality, parenting, family systems, community participation, and the meaning of dependence and independence. Their team-based presentation gives therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and other helping professionals both clinical precision and lived truth, helping them recognize the hidden grief, role confusion, dignity injuries, discrimination patterns, and relational strain that often remain untreated when disability gets reduced to diagnosis, accommodation, burden, or inspiration.
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