'Therapeutic lies' can ease patient's anxiety
Published: August 11, 2011
If you are caring for the memory impaired, one of the most important lessons you need to learn is never to argue with them. First and foremost, you will never win the argument! Secondly, you're only going to end up tormenting the both of you. Just go with the flow. Even when our loved ones are jabbering, making absolutely no sense at all, we are better off just agreeing with them.
For example: Should you wake up one day and suddenly find that you are now called "Bob," just become Bob! By telling them they're mistaken will only send them sinking deeper into their own confusion, creating a heavy bout of anxiety and nervousness. As caregiver, this is exactly what you are trying to avoid.
While caring for my father who suffered from Alzheimer's, I experienced many evenings when he would say to me, "It's starting to get dark outside. If I don't get home soon, my mother is going to start worrying about me." Now, instead of telling him that he was a man in his eighties and that his mother had passed away some twenty years ago, I would calmly tell him, "I just talked to your mother on the telephone a little while ago. She knows you're spending the night here with me. Everything is going to be okay." Nine out of ten times, by the next morning, he wouldn't even remember having been worried in the first place.
A year or so ago I was confronted by a fellow caregiver who was very upset with me. She couldn't believe that I was actually telling her to go home and straight-out lie to her husband. I tried explaining to her that she needed to do what was best for herself and her husband, but she didn't want any part of this. Lo and behold, six weeks later, I received a phone call from this same lady. She called to let me know she had been at the end of her rope and decided to take me up on my advice. With a smile in her voice she admitted that it worked, things had now become a lot easier for her.
I used to describe this as telling "little white lies." But recently I met someone who told me that I should call them "therapeutic lies." I couldn't have agreed more. So, from here on out, that is how I will refer to them.
Keeping a loved one's anxiety under control is vital for someone who has Alzheimer's or any other kind of dementia related disease. So, if you have to bend the truth a little by telling a therapeutic fib, so be it. Consider it to be an act of love.
Gary Joseph LeBlanc was the primary caregiver of his father for a decade after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and has published a new expanded edition of his book, "Staying Afloat in a Sea of Forgetfulness", released July 2011. The book can be
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