The success or failure of our relationships depends a great deal on the success or failure of our ability to communicate with the people in our lives. When we converse with them, we have certain assumptions about what the other person will know and understand that enables us to communicate in ways that promote the relationship instead of inhibit it. When these assumptions aren’t met, communication suffers in part because us humans find it difficult to take the perspective of someone who is more naïve than us.

Work by Dr. Susan Birch at the University of British Columbia has found that adults suffer from what she has termed the “curse of knowledge”. That is, when we have a memory or knowledge of some event, we are biased towards believing that everyone shares this knowledge. This bias is greater for personal events than for objective facts and we use this bias when making our assumptions during conversations with others. Imagine, then, being in a conversation with someone who should share the same memories as you, but who, in fact, no longer remembers everything. Communication breaks down and with that, so does the relationship. This is what happens when a loved one suffers from dementia.

As we are not equipped to automatically compensate for this newfound naiveté, we can end up unconsciously sabotaging the relationship by having erroneous expectations of what communication should look like. When it fails to meet our expectations, we get frustrated, hurt, and even angry at the other individual, who lacks the ability to understand what has gone wrong. Yet connection with our loved ones is essential – for them and us. With that in mind, here are some of the ways you can connect with your loved one with dementia, even when things are hard…