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. Sadly, even when our loved ones are blabbering, 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,” then just become Bob! Telling them they’re mistaken will only send them sinking deeper into their confusion, creating a heavy bout of anxiety. As a caregiver, this is precisely what you are trying to avoid.
While caring for my father, who was living with Alzheimer’s disease, 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.” 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 reassuring him he’s okay, the following day, he wouldn’t even remember having been worried in the first place.
Many describe this as telling little white lies, fiblets, or therapeutic lies. Call them what you want, but please use caution.
Nobody likes to be lied to. People are still . . . people. So, before throwing out these false statements, you need to ask yourself a sincere question. “Is the lie in your benefit or theirs?” Because they need to be in theirs. Make sure that it is being used for their own safety and well-being. Please don’t fall into the habit of using these fibs for your own convenience, or it may come back to haunt you.
Keeping a loved one’s anxiety under control is vital for such a person who has Alzheimer’s or any other kind of dementia-related disease. So, if you must bend the truth a little by telling a therapeutic fib, so be it. If it helps them take their medication, stops them from wandering, keeping them safe and calm, these are an example of a situation where your little white lie may be appropriate. Use them cautiously and consider it to be an act of love.
Gary Joseph LeBlanc, CDCS
DSF Education Director & Author
