Dementia Care The Person Centered Approach

And the reason why is because my grandmother believed if this had happened that way, just like she believed in the rats and she believed in the men and she believed in the birds, she— if she stated that to me, it's because she believed in her reality, in her mind, that she didn't recognize me. She didn't have a clue who I was. So I've been trained to practice what's called a person-centered approach to dementia care. It's been around maybe 20 years. It was called Reality Orientation Therapy when I first started doing this professionally and counseling families. The difference is Reality Orientation Therapy emphasizes correcting and fixing and trying to steer the person with dementia back into the healthy brain, the brain of the, the healthy person's reality. Now, what people didn't quite understand is her reality is just as real to her as my reality is to me, but they are not aligned. They are incongruent. But that doesn't mean that she doesn't, um, 100% believe what she's saying. Yes.