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 that they inhabit, if we cannot get over our fear of forgetting or losing our way, we cannot serve them and connect with their experiences. Often it seems to me that we are afraid of the realities that they are living with, and because of this fear, we shy away from being with them authentically and validating what they are experiencing.
This is why caregiving is so challenging, because our own state of affairs can lead us to project our emotions into the relationship, and this will prevent us from empathizing and validating the experiences of others. Mindfulness can give us an essential tool in repositioning ourselves, it can give us freedom in exposing our fear, sadness, and anger so that we can work with them more skillfully and join others even when we are fearful or sad or angry. We can identify and name what is getting in the way so that we can see clearly and validate unequivocally what those for whom we care are experiencing.
When we can feel the emotions and understand the views of others without projecting our emotional experiences into the relationship, we can discern what matters to the persons for whom we care, whether they have dementia or not. When we empathize with and validate the experiences of persons who are living with dementia, they can then join us in a circle of mutual recognition, where moral actors are accountable to each other.
I remember several concerns that seemed odd to me at the the time that my grandfather had. They would come up in conversations we had as we sat together in the afternoon. They would provoke him to get up a do things in patterned ways. At first, I didn’t quite understand why these things mattered to him, but over time I gained more awareness of how these daily practices grounded his sense of who he was. For example, despite his age and his diminishing coordination, he loved to walk to the mailbox and get his mail every day. In the event that I didn’t keep my eye on his movements, he would attempt to go get the mail several times each afternoon, having forgotten that he went earlier.
I would catch him at the front door with his walker, once we convinced him over the course of several months that walking required him to use a walker. He resisted the idea at first of not being able to walk on his own, as many people his age and generation do. After lunch at various points, I would hear the front door open. I would go to the door where I found him in his blue Florida Gator hat and sunglasses. I would ask him, “Hey grandpa, where are you going?”
“I’m going to get the mail,” he would respond gruffly. And I would remind him that he had already gone, standing next to him with my hand on his shoulder, as he looked at me perplexed. I would share in his sense of confusion for a moment, and give him space to be confused. I would say that he already went in a very matter of fact way and let him have time to be confused without pressing him about anything.
I wouldn’t need to reassure myself in any way that I had remembered and he should by saying to him, “Don’t you remember?” I would just remind him simply and move on without nagging him, standing with him by the door until he decided to go occupy his time doing something else. I would accept his forgetting and validate his confusion by giving him space and let him be silent. And sometimes, I would suggest another activity for us to do together.
