BEST 5 Tips on Talking to Someone with Dementia
Are you a caregiver of someone with dementia and find yourself struggling to have a meaningful or even calm conversation with your loved one?
Is your loved one easily upset and you want to know what you can do to lower the likelihood that there will be a fight?
In this post, I give my my best 5 tips on talking to someone with dementia. This will serve as a foundation to call kinds of communication you will need to have with your loved one. From conversations around daily needs to more meaningful conversations like reminiscence.
These 5 tips are based on what I've seen has worked the best in my time working as a therapist with 1000's of dementia patients with challenging behaviors so you can have more peaceful and meaningful moments with your loved one.
If you do use one of these tips and when you do get that win, comment it down below so we can celebrate you.
Tip 1: Use Few Words as Possible (Keep it Simple)
In dementia, the ability to make sense of what you are saying goes down over time. It's easy to talk to your loved one the way your used to but if it is possible to use fewer words to tell your loved one something that is best.
An example of this is a story from my mentor. She illustrated this point from one of her early experiences. A very proud french woman with dementia was getting irritated with her around my mentor asking her how she wanted coffee.
After several days of her getting frustrated with my mentor, this lady threw her coffee at her. After reading about this tip, my mentor returned to her the next day and instead of a long question asked Coffee? And all was well. She drank it happily.
Tip 2: Make Sure You Are Heard
One of the biggest reason I've seen dementia folks get upset is due to a hearing issue. Either you’re talking to high pitched, talking away from their ear or you are too far away. Especially in the middle stages, dementia folks get agitated really fast when they can't hear you.
This happened to me with a man a few years back. I was talking to him in a high pitch and away from his ear. After 10 minutes of me trying to talk to him like this, he exploded on me. Knowing your loved one heard you can mean the difference of peace and chaos.
Tip 3: Pay Attention to Nonverbal Communication
Nonverbal communication means tone of voice, body language and facial expressions. If your saying something nice but you look mad, your loved one is mostly going to see that. If you felt like you said all of the right things but your loved one is upset, your nonverbal communication might be the reason why.
Going through the time of pandemic wearing masks and being in full space suits (PPE) has made nonverbal communication challenging. I've noticed that the mask especially makes it very difficult to communicate with my dementia folks than it used to be. They can't pick up on crucial cues and sometimes that's enough to trigger them
Tip 4: Let things go that don't affect health/safety
Here's the truth, dementia folks are going to do several things that are weird. They may put on 2 shirts, arrange things in a weird way and overall do things that may look strange to your average person. If you want to maintain peace in your home in place of work and don't want to deal with an agitated person.
Learn to let go of things they do that don't affect their health or safety. If your mom wants to put random knick-knacks on the kitchen table, let her. If mom wants to go for a walk out on a busy street, then put your foot down
Tips 5: Offer Choices
As your loved one loses the ability to do more and more things, making as many choices available to them as possible is going to be crucial to maintain peace in your home or place of work.
If an effort to gain more control, your loved one might say no to things they need to do. Choices will allow them to feel comfort in their own abilities and not freak out on you because they feel like someone else is calling all of the shots.
Something I do in music activities are to ask my folks if they want a relaxing song or a song to wake them up. It's a choice they can easily make and you'd be surprised the melt downs being given the opportunity to choose prevents.
Bonus Tip
Remind yourself that you are doing a good job. It may seem like in day to day care that you are falling short just know that you are doing a great job and that even if your loved one can't communicate it you mean the world to them.
Conclusion
I hope you now have a foundation of the 5 foundational communication strategies for folks with dementia which are
1) using few words
2) making sure your loved one hears you
3) nonverbal communication
4) letting things go
5) offering choices
These will keep your loved one calm and maintain peace in your home under most any circumstances.
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Communication & activity ideas that prevent & calm challenging behaviors
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