A woman on a caregiving forum recently admitted she resorted to pulling out her own birth certificate and old photo albums, desperately trying to “prove” her identity to her father. His dementia was worsening, and she was fighting with everything she had to drag him back to reality.
It’s a heartbreaking scene, and if you’ve cared for a parent with cognitive decline, you’ve likely been there. Our brains are hardwired for logic. When a parent says something flat-out wrong, our instinct is to fix it.
But when it comes to dementia, logic simply doesn’t work.
One person responded to the post with, “Never correct them, period”, which put the young woman in a naturally defensive position.
Caring for a person with dementia is already so difficult. Trying to guess what will work, finding out what worked last week that no longer works this week, adds to the stress of caring for someone who is slowing slipping away.
Learning to communicate effectively with a person with dementia is not black and white. There are no rules to this very personal and often painful experience. No “Do this” and “Don’t do that”. Some guidelines and strategies may be useful, but dementia is ever-changing, and strategies need to change with them. Your loved one may remember events one day, not the next, then remember them again. You think maybe you’ve got your old parent back. They may be reoriented to YOUR reality one day, but gone the next.
That’s the nature of this devastating disease.
When that story was shared online, the advice was blunt: ‘Never correct them, period.’ But as a caregiver, you are torn. Do you correct them with facts because you want to ground them in the truth? Or do you agree with a delusion, which feels like lying?
Correcting is often a subconscious attempt (of ours) to pull your loved one back into who they used to be. It’s often a desperate attempt to spark clarity, where you can feel connected to your person once again. When you arrive at the place where you realize logic no longer works, we are forced to accept the reality that they are truly in cognitive decline.
And in comes the heavy grief.
I saw this firsthand just the other day during a call with my sister. She was completely drained, her voice heavy with that bone-deep exhaustion only caregivers know. She’d spent the afternoon trapped in a circular argument with our mom—trying desperately to correct a distorted reality, trying to use facts where facts no longer fit.
Listening to her, it clicked for me why that advice on the forum—never correct them—is so brutally valid. Arguing with dementia is like trying to catch smoke; it leaves you empty-handed and gasping for breath.
Instead, lean into the emotion behind the words. I intuitively developed and used a framework during my clinical practice. It became second nature. I now call it “The Dementia Connection Method”. When you learn this structured framework, you stop looking at the facts and start looking at the feelings. It relies on a simple rhythm: Validate, Reassure, and Redirect.
I’ve been trying to teach my sister this approach. I’ll be honest with you—she hasn’t quite grasped it yet. We’re working through it, and it’s taking time. Why? Because undoing a lifetime of using logic to solve problems is incredibly hard work. Your brain wants to fix the fact; this method forces you to ignore the fact and look only at the feeling.
It is my mission to help caregivers create a more peaceful existence for themselves, because that is how we demonstrate empathic care for our loved ones. So we learn to no longer use logic in response to their questions. Especially when the logic seems so straightforward to you that your response may filter through annoyance, impatience, or even anger, as you answer the same question for the 20th time.
For example, if they are terrified because they think strangers are in the hallway, they aren’t looking for a headcount. They are communicating that they feel unsure. Scared. Agitated. Validate their feelings. Reassure them of their safety. Redirect them to something enjoyable – a cup of tea, a walk in the garden, a look at a photo album. It might sound something like this:
Validate: That must be annoying/frightening/scary! I’m so sorry you’re feeling that way.
Reassure: I’ve got this. I’m making sure you are safe. There’s nothing to worry about.
Redirect: Let’s go sit in the kitchen and I’ll make us a cup of tea.
Letting your loved one know you see how they are feeling can often defuse a situation and preserve peace and sanity for you both.
If you’re trying to learn this too, give yourself some grace. It’s a practice, not a magic switch. Your loved one still has the feelings, even if they no longer have the words.
Correction leads all too often into arguing, and arguing is a tragic, exhausting way to hold onto the past because admitting the truth – that your loved one is slipping away or has already left, hurts too much.