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“Life is like a box of chocolate. You never know what you are gonna get.” Forrest Gump

Everyone, at some point in their life, will face a challenge. Resilience is what gives us the emotional strength to deal with challenges that life brings along our path. Care partners and people living with dementia are starting this journey with a life experience that is unique to each one of you. We want to honour the life experience you have and positive supports you already have in your life.

Because resilience is built on our positive and negative experiences, we can apply our early life’s lessons later in life. Think of when you learned to ride a bike, which might feel like a lifetime ago, or learning to drive a car. You have learned to manage perhaps some fear, to anticipate what you would need to address a flat tire, or how to deal with having to take an unexpected detour.

An image is often worth a thousand words. The following video will introduce you to a teeter-totter. This teeter-totter can help you reflect on your resilience. You will find exercises that will build on this image as you move through Seeds of Hope family learning series.

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Care partners and people living with dementia have mentioned they like to think about resilience as their ability to bounce forward. When your teeter-totter leans toward the positive, you have more capacity to handle the unexpected hurdles that come along. Just like driving a car or riding a bike, we all need to be moving forward to get over the bump on the road. That’s how, when maintaining a positive balance, we learn to bounce forward and be more resilient!

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Life Skills

Life skills are mental processes that help us plan, juggle many demands, remember instructions, and focus our attention successfully.  When we have strong life skills, they seem invisible to others! 

Think of an air traffic controller. For an airport to run smoothly, a successful air traffic controller keeps tabs on incoming and outgoing planes on multiple runways. Just like an air traffic controller, life skills enable us to keep the multiple life demands and distractions we have from crashing into one another. 

Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University (2011). Building the Brain’s “Air Traffic Control” System: How Early Experiences Shape the Development of Executive Function: Working Paper No. 11. Retrieved from www.developingchild.harvard.edu.

In your teeter-totter, strong life skills increase your ability to have more weight on the challenging side while remaining positive. Mapping your life skills can allow you to reach for resources that can support them, allowing you to keep bouncing forward.

The following PDF has a reflection activity to help you map out your life skills. Thinking about how you are feeling today, look at both statements on each row and choose the one that applies to you the most now. Reflecting on how you are doing can feel challenging, but this can also be an opportunity to increase your awareness of what you need.

For Reflection...

Now that you’ve completed the Life Skills Check-In take a few minutes to reflect on your results and consider the following questions.  Feel free to make some notes.

• What stands out to you as you think about your results?

• What will you do to build your life skills as you continue to build your resilience and bounce forward?

Your Balance Check-In

Reflecting on what you are doing well and areas you can improve on can help you stay upright and keep moving forward—just like riding a bike!

The tool below will help you to reflect on your situation as it is today.

For each side of the teeter-totter, we provide examples. Think about how each category applies to your situation and decide how big of a role it plays in your life. You may find that none of the suggestions apply to you; feel free to choose “other.” You can add comments once you submit your results to remember what “other” meant for you. If you are a member, you can save your results to your dashboard to compare later.

1. Positive Supports: We all have things in our life that we prefer to do or that once done, we feel grateful to have had the opportunity to do. How do you recharge? 
2. Stressors: Stress is part of life. When positive, stress can motivate us. Ongoing and extreme stress can make it difficult to tackle the challenges in our lives. What is weighing you down today? 
3. Life Skills: Life skills are not static. Depending on the circumstances, we can rely on a greater or smaller number of them. How well is your air traffic control system working? These are the same questions as you completed in the previous exercise. Feel free to refer back to the life skills checklist.

You might notice that this activity appears at various points within this Seeds of Hope program. The dementia trajectory has an ongoing impact on people living with dementia and their care partners. It’s helpful over time to pause and think about your positive supports, stressors, and life skills. 

More Learning Resources

Alberta Family Wellness Initiative

What are Executive Function Skills

Executive Function & Self-Regulation

The middle stage of dementia is also called "moderate dementia." In this stage, thinking and memory become more challenging as dementia progresses. People who share insight into their dementia may continue to be aware of their condition. It isnormal in middle stage to require additionalsupport with daily tasks.

For families and care partners, it is the point where they may increasingly need to provide care. It may include moving the person to a care facility. Everyone involved will need help and support because of the changes faced by the person with dementia and their family.

Click and download the infographic below to learn more about the middle stage of dementia.

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An Insider's Perspective on the Middle Stage

Christine Bryden was a top civil servant and single mother of three children when she was diagnosed with dementia at the age of 46. "Dancing with Dementia" is a vivid account of her experiences of living with dementia, exploring the effects of memory problems, loss of independence, difficulties in communication and the exhaustion of coping with simple tasks.

Here is an audio file from Christine's book. Take a few minutes to listen to her words as she shares from the perspective of a person living in the middle stage of the disease. Feel free to make some notes as you listen.

Helpful Tips to Address Symptoms in the Middle Stage

Take the quiz below to learn some helpful strategies for dealing with common symptoms in the middle stage of dementia.

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More Learning Resources

Dancing with Dementia by Christine Bryden

Progression Series: Overview

Progression Series: Middle Stage

Shared Experiences: Changes You May Experience

First Steps For Families

Ways to Help

Reducing Caregiver Stress

A Handbook for Care

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Click on the icon below to download and print a brief self-reflection activity sheet.  The purpose of this tool is to help you think about what you have learned and to provide a space for you to document some of your thoughts and ideas for moving forward.

Click on the icon below to download and print a brief self-reflection activity sheet.  The purpose of this tool is to help you think about what you have learned and to provide a space for you to document some of your thoughts and ideas for moving forward.

Whatever your personal goal might be, an action plan can help you get to where you need to go.

Completing a personal action plan can greatly enhance your motivation and keep you focused on what you can confidently achieve.  It's important that you succeed!

Take some time to think about what you can do to continue to live a full life and best cope with the changes you are experiencing.

Download and print a copy of the activity sheet My Personal Action Plan below.  Reflect on and answer the statements in both columns.  Then circle the number between 0 and 10 that represents your confidence level.

If you rate your confidence below a 7, you might want to look at the barriers and consider reworking your action plan so that it's something you are confident that you can accomplish.

Whatever your personal goal might be, an action plan can help you get to where you need to go.

 

Healing can take many forms as life gradually returns to normal.  You will embark on this new start in life at your own pace. 

Here, we have two stories from care partners who are moving forward in life.  They share their feelings about this step in their caregiving journey and their plans for the future. 

Edith's Story

Having completed her journey as a care partner, Edith Stein shares her plans for the future.

Barb's Story

Having completed her journey as a care partner, Barb Campbell shares her plans for the future.

Click on the icon below to download and print a brief self-reflection activity sheet.  The purpose of this tool is to help you think about what you have learned and to provide a space for you to document some of your thoughts and ideas for moving forward.

Communication is both verbal and nonverbal. Both means of communication are important, but nonverbal communication becomes an even more valuable tool when dealing with memory issues.  

Watching other people and their body language helps us to understand a conversation better, as so much of our language can have different meanings depending on how it is stated.

Here’s a look at the detailed differences between verbal and non-verbal communication.  Download and print a copy of the activity sheet.  Take a few moments to review the information.

For Reflection...

After you've read the activity sheet, take a few minutes to reflect on the following questions.  Feel free to make some notes.

• What stood out to you as you read the information? What surprised you?
• What does all this mean for you as a care partner?
• Now that you've reviewed the activity sheet, what will you continue to do in your role as a care partner?  What will you stop or do differently?

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More Learning Resources

Communication - Day to Day Series

Enhancing Communication: A By Us For Us Guide

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Click on the icon below to download and print a brief self-reflection activity sheet.  The purpose of this tool is to help you think about what you have learned and to provide a space for you to document some of your thoughts and ideas for moving forward.

This session includes the following parts:

Part 1:  Communication and the Brain

Part 2:  Communication and Dementia

Part 3:  Verbal vs non-verbal Communication

Part 4:  Practical Communication Tips

Part 5:  Questions for Reflection

Part 6:  Questions Others Have Asked

Summary

Work through the various parts of the session at your leisure. Move from one part to another at your own pace and in the order that makes sense to you, based on your own needs and interests.

At any time, you may scroll to the Search bar and type a specific question or topic to learn more.