Helping my folks with dementia that have challenging behaviors reconnect with their families and themselves through communication & activities is what I live for.

However, in the beginning, as a new professional and as someone who had never experienced dementia before in real life before, I felt overwhelmed by the behaviors I was seeing in my new patients. Yelling, refusals, sundowning and meltdowns were my everyday reality. One time in particular, one of my patients berated me for hours on end until I had to leave the room crying.

Over time and with many years of practice, trial, error and thousands of patients, I learned the secret to calming challenging dementia behaviors and helping my folks act more like themselves before dementia.

I learned what to say in the face of specific challenging behaviors and the right activities that calm/distract them mid challenging behavior was the key success in managing the behaviors.

Once I discovered the right communication skills and activities for the specific challenging behaviors I was facing, I would teach the families of my patients these skills so the results their loved ones were getting at the hospital could be more long term.

However, when Covid-19 struck, everything changed. Visiting hours were cut. Being cut off from their loved ones understandably devastated my patients and eliminated my ability to help my patients long term by teaching their families. With so much hopelessness in our hospital and the world in general, I wanted to reach out to the at home caregivers I no longer had in person access to.

I turned to Facebook to give support to other dementia caregivers and share creative solutions to challenging behaviors that they were now facing alone.

While there were plenty of Facebook groups out there that gave general advice on caregiving, I couldn’t find one that focused on creative non-medication solutions to the challenging dementia behaviors I saw everyday, so I decided to create a facebook group that offered this.

When the group started, the questions from caregivers on challenging dementia behaviors came pouring in. After a while, I noticed the same questions being asked over and over again. Instead of continuing to answer the same questions, I created a YouTube channel that I could link to questions or simply post to the group. Now instead of helping a hand full of caregivers at my job a week, Dementia Success Path now helps thousands of caregivers everyday for free on Instagram, our Facebook Group and Youtube Channel and has helped thousands of caregivers get wins using activities and communication skills in our free series “Caregiver Wins.”

We also offer an affordable ($27 a month with discounts available for getting on the waitlist) membership, Dementia Caregiving Made Easy, that helps a tight knit community of like minded caregivers learn all of the communication skills and activities they need to tackle challenging behaviors so they can spend less time dealing with the behaviors and more time enjoying their loved ones/clients. If you want to learn more about the free & membership paths on tackling challenging dementia behaviors, keep scrolling.