How To Improve Emotional Resilience And Faith Using Relationship-Centered Dementia Care
Are you finding it difficult to balance your relationship with your loved one and the endless caregiving tasks? This can be one of the most challenging aspects of dementia care, but what if focusing on your bond with them could actually ease the caregiving journey?
In this episode, Lizette reflects on their own experiences as a family caregiver, diving into the concept of relationship-centered care.
The shift from focusing on just the patient to placing the relationship between the caregiver and the person with dementia at the forefront has been pivotal in their journey.
The Importance of Nurturing Your Spiritual Relationship
One point that resonated strongly in the podcast is how caregivers can overlook the importance of their own spiritual and emotional health. The speaker emphasized that the first relationship you must protect is your relationship with God.
Caregiving can drain you emotionally, mentally, and physically. But staying grounded spiritually provides resilience. This isn’t something you’ll often hear when discussing dementia care.
Lizette shared a personal story about how their faith helped them maintain hope through difficult times. It’s a reminder that connecting spiritually doesn’t just support the caregiver—it benefits the care receiver as well.
The Past Shapes the Present
Another vital point that stood out was how your previous relationship with the person you’re caring for shapes your caregiving journey. Whether you’re a spouse, child, or grandchild, your history impacts your emotions, communication style, and how you respond to challenges.
One story shared in the episode highlighted a couple whose longstanding loving relationship eased the transition into caregiving, making difficult days more manageable.
On the other hand, Lizette shared their own more contentious relationship with their father, explaining how it affects the daily caregiving dynamic. These stories emphasize that acknowledging and addressing past relational patterns is essential to providing better care.
Relationship First, Tasks Second
It’s easy to become consumed by the endless list of caregiving tasks, from managing medications to personal hygiene.
However, Lizette suggests that the relationship should always come first.
When tasks become the primary focus, you risk losing the emotional connection that truly supports your loved one. Instead, relationship-centered care encourages caregivers to preserve the emotional bond by prioritizing communication, patience, and mutual respect.
This approach can even lead to fewer frustrations, increased trust, and a safer caregiving environment.
The episode concludes with practical advice for caregivers: focus on relationships, not just tasks. Whether it’s finding support in your spiritual life or understanding how past dynamics shape the present, taking care of your relationships is the key to compassionate and effective dementia care.
Would you like help in creating a more relationship-focused caregiving plan? Lizette offers personalized dementia care audits, designed to make the caregiving process smoother and more meaningful.
Take the time to care for your relationship with your loved one—it can make all the difference.
Read More:
176. Why Being In Charge, Not Control, Makes Dementia Care Easier
174. How To Best Transition Living Situations: Resources For Dementia Caregivers
Ever Wonder How To Know What Is Causing Your Caregiver Stress?
Take Our FREE Caregiver Stress Assessment Today!
https://dignicarebydesign.com/quiz
Are You A Christian Dementia Caregiver Struggling To Cope With Caregiving?Join the FREE “Ask the Dementia Mentor” Monthly Meet Up! And be on the podcast, get support and your questions answered.
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Read More:
Talking About Caregiver Burnout With Michelle Gordon
Check the other podcasts: https://dignicarebydesign.com/category/podcast/
Transcript
Introduction to Dementia Care
[0:01] Hey, Christian caregiver. Welcome to the podcast where I teach Bible-believing Christians how to navigate dementia with practical help, with a kingdom focus, and help you find hope for your future. This episode is brought to you by Think Different Dementia, where we create better futures for caregivers through community. Today’s episode is something I have been thinking a lot about lately, and that is relationship-centered care. As I was as an occupational therapist for over 31 years, where it started out for me was what’s called patient-centered care. Then I started my business and I started working with family caregivers and I turned into a family caregiver. And then I noticed and I recognized that patient-centered care is wonderful when you are coming at it from a healthcare perspective, where the medical model has to pay for skilled therapy or a procedure or whatever it is, right? That is what patient-centered care is. It is based on the medical model. Well, the reality is there is more than just a patient involved in dementia and dementia caregiving, right? We have a caregiver. And then I turned into a family caregiver of somebody living with cognitive impairment.
[1:20] And I recognized in my my journey that that was vastly, vastly different than patient-centered care. So I started focusing on more caregiver-centric care, putting the caregiver more in the focus of what it is that I do and how I help people. Because if you do not have a healthy caregiver, you do not have the ability
Transition to Relationship-Centered Care
[1:42] to keep the person living with dementia at home, right? Then as this journey continues to to unfold for me, I now have started to think about something that is more in tune with what I truly believe dementia and dementia caregiving needs to be about, and that is relationship-centered care. I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last several weeks as I am struggling with certain patterns of behavior that my dad and I have that is 100% related to our relationship, And that has really brought to the forefront for me, thinking more about what I’m calling relationship-centered dementia care. So I want you to stop and think a little bit about God, right? God is a God who is a God of relationships.
[2:33] He is triune relationship. Before the beginning of time, in eternity, God as a triune God is in relationship with himself, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He is a God of relationships.
[2:47] And God has been in relationship with himself as the Father, as the Son, and as the Spirit from before the beginning of time. And God created us as people, as humans, to be in relationship with him. But by expansion of that, we are created to be in relationship with each other.
Protecting Your Spiritual Relationship
[3:09] And so how on earth, Lisette, does this now actually relate to dementia and dementia caregiving? Well, I’m so glad you asked. Thank you very much. The very first thing I want you to consider as a family caregiver, as a Christian family caregiver of somebody living with dementia is that the first relationship you need to protect as a caregiver of somebody living with dementia is your vertical relationship with God. So you have to protect your spiritual life, your spiritual relationship that you have with God the Father, with God the Son, and with God the Holy Spirit, who has redeemed you and brought you out of darkness into a marvelous light from the moment of your salvation and your belief in a redeeming God who sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to die for our sins. So our very first relationship that we need to protect.
[4:09] That we need to consider as we are walking through a dementia caregiving journey is our vertical relationship with God, our walk with God, how our caregiving impacts our sanctification process in our continued walk and our continued growth in race and in faith. So I was reminded this past Sunday when we went to Sunday school, my husband was doing a presentation for a Sunday school on the Reformation, which is coming up in, you know, the historical Reformation. The day is October 31st. And so one of the things that he mentioned in his Sunday school was what the definition of faith is. So faith actually has three components. It is knowledge, so actual head knowledge, knowing who God is, knowing who Jesus is, knowing who the Holy Spirit is, understanding the knowledge of God. The second part of it is trust.
[5:11] So you cannot trust somebody if you do not know them, right? So faith consists of knowledge, trust, and then assent or agreement that that is true, that what you know and what you trust is actually true. So for example, and this is something my husband mentioned this week in the Sunday school, the devil… Has knowledge of God as a redeeming God. He knows who God is. He knows who Jesus is. He doesn’t trust God, and he doesn’t assent to that, so therefore he cannot have faith, right? So it was just a good reminder for me in the Sunday School presentation that in order for us to have a good vertical relationship with God, we actually have to have faith, and faith consists of both knowledge, trust and agreement or assent, right? So the very first relationship that we need to protect as a family caregiver
Horizontal Relationships in Caregiving
[6:07] of somebody living with dementia is our vertical relationship with God. The second relationship that we need to protect as we are in a dementia caregiving journey is our horizontal horizontal relationships with each other.
[6:24] And we have to start with which relationship are we in related to the person that we are taking care of. Because that particular relationship, first and foremost, is going to impact how we interact and how we work with and work through a dementia caregiving process.
[6:46] So the first one is, are you a spouse? Because that relationship looks different than if you are an adult child, right, of a person. If you are the adult child taking care of somebody living with dementia, that relationship as the adult child impacts how you are the caregiver, right? And then the third category of caregiver relationship that it could be is what is called a young adult caregiver. Now, a young adult caregiver is the category where it looks kind of more at an age bracket of a person. So, for example, they are typically in their early 20s up to about 42 years old. They are what’s called young adult caregivers. And within that category or within those relationships, it could be you are the child.
[7:37] Which of somebody living with dementia. You could be the grandchild of somebody living with dementia. You could actually be the spouse of somebody who is diagnosed with young-onset dementia. Or you could be a parent of a child living with dementia. And each one of these horizontal relationships that we have can impact how we navigate our dementia caregiving journey. And we need to protect that relationship first, right? We need to protect that particular relationship first. But within that category of relationships, we do need to acknowledge and know and understand that our previous relationship, whatever that was, is going to impact our relationship as a caregiver. For example, if you are a spouse of somebody living with dementia and you had a wonderful, good relationship with full of respect and honor and a godly relationship.
[8:35] It is vastly going to impact and change your dementia caregiving journey based on that previous relationship that you had. If you have a spousal relationship where there was constant bickering, where there was constant fighting, where there was constant conflict throughout that entire marriage prior to the dementia caregiving journey, that particular relationship is going to impact your ability to communicate
Impact of Previous Relationships
[9:04] and impact your relationship post-diagnosis of dementia. These relationships absolutely make a difference in how we are a caregiver. I will use a client of mine, Angela, and her family as an example. And shout out to Angela or Roy if you’re listening to this episode. I love you guys.
[9:26] You are an awesome, awesome family. You have no idea sometimes what a joy it is for me to work with your family because I I see the sweet, sweet love that every single one of you have for mom. And I see the sweet, sweet love that your family has for Jesus. And I love working with you. So yes, I am using you as an example today. But we had the privilege of actually visiting with my client, who is also my friend now, related to a Sunday lunch and seeing their interactions with mom who does live with dementia and seeing how these relationships impact people and have impacted her care, her husband and her relationship and the sweet, sweet love that is evident there, the daughter’s relationship with her mom and the sweet, sweet love and relationship that was there before her dementia journey.
[10:22] As well as her son-in-law and her grandchildren’s relationship with her related to her dementia care journey. It 100% has impacted her care and their ability to continue to minister to her in these latter parts of her life. And then I’ll use my own particular situation, which I’m working very hard. I’m extremely transparent in these podcast episodes that I am not perfect and I make a lot of mistakes, but I have always had a very contentious, very difficult, very fighting relationship with my father my entire life. And my dad is a fighter. He fights with everybody.
[11:04] He is angry all the time. He bickers with my mom. He bickers with me. He bickers with my sister. He bickers with my husband. He’s just always been a person who is fighting. And so I have to work doubly hard right now to really work on not being responsive to that. Because as his dementia and as his cognition continues to change, what he’s going to remember is all of these fights. Because he will remember how it made him feel. And so I have to work very, very hard not to engage in these little squabbles, these little arguments, these little fights. And so absolutely your previous relationship, your horizontal relationship with
Understanding Relationship-Centered Care
[11:46] other people is going to impact your dementia caregiving journey. So what is relationship centered care? So the third point, what is?
[11:56] Relationship-centered care. Relationship-centered care is that we maintain as best we can that relationship first. Specifically, specifically in the case of people who had good, wonderful, sweet, kind, loving relationships before dementia, one of the challenges is dementia can make you constantly try to correct or reason and cause squabbles where there weren’t squabbles or conflict where there wasn’t conflict before in the relationship. And if you are one of these people who is in that blessed position to have had good relationships with the person that you’re caring for, I ask you to first look at your relationship. Keep your relationship first. Your relationship needs to be primary and then the tasks, the things to do, the stuff we need to get done to provide care needs to be secondary to that relationship. Because remember, when Jesus ministered to us, when he was here in his earthly ministry, he cared for his people. He washed his apostles’ feet. He raised widows’ children so that they wouldn’t be widows anymore.
[13:09] He cared for orphans, and he did all of that in a relationship with us. Are you feeling stressed as a Christian dementia caregiver, let me help. I offer a monthly dementia care audit to one listener of this program to provide you with personalized but evidence-based strategies from a biblical perspective. We only have one session available each month. Don’t miss this opportunity to make your dementia caregiving journey easier. Schedule your own dementia care audit today.
Prioritizing Relationships Over Tasks
[13:46] So our relationship needs to come first and the tasks need to come second. Often what happens in a caregiving journey, whether it be when we’re parents, whether it be because we’re busy, we’re working, whatever, we sometimes become so task-focused. We become so task-oriented because they haven’t showered in a week, they haven’t changed their clothes in a month, they haven’t thrown out the spoiled food out of the fridge. Whatever the tasks are, we get so focused on the task. We need to take the car away. We need to do this. We need to do that. And yes, those tasks are important, but not at the expense of the relationship. Because as the person continues to change, if you do not have that relationship with which you can base it upon, then the tasks are going to get harder to do. So first focus on the relationship, use relationship-centered caregiving skills before you go try to do the tasks. What will this result in? Well, here are a few things that it will actually result in if you focus on your relationship first and the tasks second.
[14:51] Number one is you will increase the trust between you and the person you’re providing care for. Number two, it is going to increase your safety as well as the person who is being cared for. Number three, it is going to decrease your frustration as a caregiver. It is going to decrease your anger. It is going to result in less of these challenging or responsive behaviors that are so common in a caregiving journey.
Benefits of Relationship-Centered Care
[15:20] And it is going to increase your emotional resilience over time.
[15:25] And as you continue to do that, remembering that first, it is your vertical relationship with God that is important. Then it is your horizontal relationship with your person that you are caring for, and then it is in the context of a relationship-centered caregiving. If you follow these three concepts, if you keep them in mind, it will increase your faith because as you’re journeying through this process.
[15:56] It is going to increase your knowledge of God, it is going to increase your trust in Him. And the third part of faith is assent or agreement or acknowledgement that that is true. So I hope you were blessed by today’s short little episode where we talked about relationship-centered dementia care and dementia care giving. And I am so blessed to serve you in this capacity. I invite you, if you are struggling in any part of this, whether it be you don’t have a good relationship with the person you’re providing care for, whether you’re struggling with the day-to-day challenges that you have that you need a little bit of help or coaching with, I invite you to sign up for a one-on-one free coaching opportunity where you become a co-creator of this podcast.
[16:49] You come onto the podcast. You do not need to be on camera. We can change your name. I just want to be able to serve you. I do this in two ways. We have a monthly meetup and I have these one-on-one coaching opportunities for you to actually come with your specific real life struggles or questions and have them answered by a dementia coach that is also a Christian. So if you’re interested in that, the link is in the show notes and you can message me the word audit, A-U-D-I-T on Facebook or on Messenger or or on Instagram and sign up for one of these free opportunities to have some one-on-one coaching for about 20 to
Closing Thoughts and Invitation
[17:32] 30 minutes and be a co-creator of this podcast. And as I try to remember to end all of my podcasts, may the Lord bless you and keep you. And I look forward to being able to serve you in my next episode.
