A Shift in Perspective: From Fixers to Listeners

fixer to listener

I have been a family caregiver for aging adults for almost two decades. And in that period, I have learned a bit about how and why some decisions work and a lot about those that don’t.

Like many of you, I owe much of what I know about caregiving to living with the repercussions from a bunch of impulsive decisions and more than a few downright stupid mistakes. We start out as fixers. And why not? When something that has always been the same starts to change for the worse, our every impulse tells us to make it better again. No thank you, we didn’t order this, please send it back.

But that’s not the new road we’re on. “Return to normal life” is not on the menu. And so fixes don’t always work. When my mom was diagnosed with dementia, we thought that the easy fix was a home monitor (also called a PERS). But we failed to consider that she may well lose it, or mistakenly misuse it, as her capacity to understand why she had it and how it worked diminished.