As I mentioned before, when I started the work of caring for my grandpa, I found my way into an identity as a caregiver. Then when I began to work in hospice, I found that lots of the patients and families that I would see were living with grief related to losing parents and spouses …
We invite you to explore some of these resources more on your own. You might do this before or after our meeting. In order to explore some of these mindfulness of touch and self-compassion practices, you might explore one or two of the following resources. Make it easy for yourself and choose what seems the …
Objectives: Guided Practice The Neurobiology of Careful Touch Touch engages CT afferents that flow into the brain stem up through vagal system and provide a calming and soothing pathway that activates parasympathetic nervous response. Touch nerve fibers are not myelinated and therefore transmit impulses to the brain stem and midbrain more slowly. You can calm …
It makes my heart glad to remember that I got the privilege to spend at least a few of his last years with my grandpa taking care of him and taking care of me. At first, not quite understanding who I was, how important caregiving was to me as a person, I judged myself as …
If we suppose that somebody with Alzheimer’s Dementia is “already gone” or “merely a body,” as I have heard some exasperated family members or caregivers say, then we will not be able to see how creative they can be. This creativity is an invitation to us to step out of our own ways of thinking …
When deficits in cognition make it difficult for the self of the dementia patient to emerge, we can use our empathy and intuitive sense of the person to help them to bring out their submerged self. I can think of lots of examples of how this worked with my grandpa and also most of the other …
Holding space, or gently receiving and holding the emotional experience of others, is absolutely fundamental to good care for persons with dementia. We as caregivers practice this skill very often, and it requires that we are able to hold all the different parts of ourselves. We have to be able to recognize the different voices …
The power of validating persons with dementia comes from the soul of interpersonal human connection, which is based in empathy. I was taught in my family of origin that the emotions of other people were scary and that not talking openly about emotions was a safer course. My mom and dad struggled to communicate about …
When we validate another person’s experience, we demonstrate to them that we empathize with their state of mind. We care enough to get in touch with how they think, feel, and the stories that they tell and join them in their moral and emotional space. If we come to the relationship fearful of the spaces …
I remember so many times my grandfather and I were able to relax together. He had cultivated relaxation over nine decades. We relaxed in times when family was around, times of abundant joy, times when just the two of us were doing something. One particularly clear example comes to mind. When I was a youth …
