"Dancing With" the Family Member With Alzheimer's

By Christina O'Leary

Spring Hills Mount Vernon

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"Dancing With" the Family Member With Alzheimer's

It often starts as frustration and proceeds to heartache a feeling of helplessness, as family members struggle to communicate with a loved one with a progressive cognitive impairment like Alzheimer's disease.

Caregivers at home may benefit by adapting some of the best practices utilized by memory care professionals.

We describe our interactions as 'dancing with the resident,' and that means the resident takes the lead and we follow in how we respond to them.

This approach requires caregivers to relax their notions of what constitutes a meaningful connection. In the home setting, it's really very loving to try these methods.

Place a high priority on becoming attuned to things that excite and interest the individual, even if it means watching mom diaper a baby doll or dad push the buttons on an old phone or adding machine.

We use what we call Life/Work Access Attractions. These are thoughtfully designed interactive 'stage sets' with a therapeutic role.

Some residents are attracted to our full size nursery and layette. Former military men may gravitate to an old footlocker with items from the battlefield. Another setting with phones and business machines draws former teachers and office workers.

Interacting with these settings often helps the individual to access calming memories of times and places in their past when they were competent and happy. These interactions allow them to become that competent and happy person again, in the moment.

Family members may find it bewildering that their loved one prefers these touch-points outside of the “reality” of their home setting.

But these methods emphasize the respect that is inherent in letting the resident define what makes them happy.

Residents with dementia are often hypersensitive and these attractions are carefully designed to be so visually appealing that they literally can shift the attention of a person who is feeling agitated.

A familiar tactile or sensory experience often helps an Alzheimer's patient access deeper memories of once-familiar routines, which can have a calming effect. This helps to take them to a better place, emotionally.

Conversations can flow because of memories sparked by one of the Life/Work vignettes.

Residents with progressive memory loss are much more comfortable talking about earlier life memories, because the area of the brain that stores long term memories is affected later in the disease's progression.

A resident often knows more about their lives when they were 40 years younger than what they know about what happened last week.

By paying attention to what is shared, caregivers become the link to that individual's life history.