When mutual recognition happens between persons, the act of recognition opens up worlds of communication and collaboration. This is the essential basis of mindful care, we pay mindful attention to our relationship with others. We recognize our connection with others and how our care can nourish them and their life. Reciprocally, we recognize how their care can nourish us and our life. We just need to pause and recognize we enough time to connect first before we provide care.
From the first moment we slow down and open-mindedly engaged with someone who has dementia as caregivers, we enable ourselves to work with them in novel situations to meet their needs. When we ask how they are doing and listen to their response with empathy, we can find it within ourselves to fashion collaborative care that is compassionate and appropriate to what they are experiencing.
Let’s say that grandpa said, after he told me he was doing fair to middling when I greeted him in he morning, that he was hungry. I could ask him what he wanted for breakfast. “Do you want some cereal?” And most often he would say yes, but sometimes he would ask for something else. Or maybe I would offer to make him some eggs. Or maybe he would see danish on the counter top and ask for it. He would ask for something he wanted that I didn’t offer, on certain occasions, and I would respond to his expressed wants by providing him with what he asked for if I could. I would do my best to accommodate him and his wishes.
He would shuffle back to his comfortable chair in the living room, sit down, and look out over his backyard. He would comment on the beauty of the trees, pines and hardwoods, and relax into the space that he recognized so well. Whatever he would want to do, we would talk about and negotiate. We often turned on the TV and found a sporting event that he might like to watch. Many times, I would be reading and researching when he first woke up and I could hear his shuffling steps as he came out of his room on the other side of the house. I would stop what I was doing when I reached a stopping point and attend to him.
Negotiation, which Kitwood, mentions second in his list, comes from recognition. I would negotiate all kinds of things with grandpa. We would negotiate about walking to get the mail, which we would only do if it weren’t too hot. We would negotiate what we watched, mostly sporting events which we both could enjoy. Sometimes we would find Hallmark movies that were so similar and repeated so often that I could always predict the plot line. We would negotiate how much coffee he drank, because he was supposed to drink less fluid to reduce the noxious effects of too much hydration for his Congestive Heart Failure.
I advocated for him to go out into the community to run errands with me much of the time when he was reluctant. If I found the right kind of errand he would often go with me. When he could no longer accompany me, that discussion also involved negotiation. He expressed his reluctance to leave his home in way that convinced me that the risks outweighed the benefits of his social interactions with others.
When we recognize each other as human beings in an open-hearted way, we prepare ourselves to flexibly adapt to each other’s views on and wishes about what can be done. This is the heart of person-centered care, making ourselves amenable to the wants, needs, feelings, thoughts, values, and norms of the people who receive our care. When we make ourselves adaptable in interpersonal encounters based on the experiences of others, we ourselves open up to the world and grow, because our practice of compassionate care invariably fulfills and heals us as caregivers as well.
