Fun fact, you can let people be wrong.

This is something I learned when my father started to forget everything… And I mean everything.

I was surprised he knew his own name sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disparaging him, these were facts. Everything is in past tense because he’s now six feet under. I’m neither happy nor sad about it. I sometimes miss him, but I had a very vague idea of the suffering he endured in the last few years of his life; I’m happy that his suffering has ended, but I’m sorry that was the only conclusion he was going to get from his condition.

Back to the point at hand, when he was starting to forget, it was often more harmful and confusing to try to correct him. He wouldn’t understand, and he would end up confused, then he would forget why he’s confused, and the cycle would start again because he would ask the same questions about things that were not real. Either those things never existed, and were just a product of his brain slowing deteriorating, or they were from so far in his history that he wasn’t making sense.

It was far far less problematic for him if I accepted whatever he told me as his reality, and put myself into that reality, rather than trying to drag him back to this reality. He was clearly confused, mistaken, and sometimes outright wrong in what he was saying, maybe it was based on something he learned in school that was later debunked or something, but it was really common.

For his sake, I stopped bringing him to our reality. I don’t need to remind him 10x a day that his wife left him, so any questions regarding where she is or when she’ll be home, I deflected; “she’s gone out”/“I don’t know when she’ll return” I tried not to lie to him, just give him enough information to answer his questions, but not enough to rock the boat of his fragile reality. In reality, she’s gone out (to live with her new husband), and I don’t know when she’ll return (probably never).

A few years prior, he considered his ex wife to be dead to him. There was a religious component on that, I’m not going to go into it, but he had very strong feelings about it that seemed to go away.

It was so severe that she actually visited him when he was sent into a care facility (my brother and I simply didn’t have the time, training, or skillset to continue to care for him). When she visited, she was his “wife”. All him about it after, and he wouldn’t even realize that she had been by. It was so genuine that the staff called and asked about it, saying his “wife” was just there. I quickly corrected them (I was his POA).

Letting people be wrong is basically a superpower. You can have a completely crazy conversation with someone, and walk away with a better understanding of who they are. Along pointed questions and watching their brain try to figure it out in real time. I usually go for stuff surrounding why they believe what they believe in a non-threatening way. Try to make them really think about why they believe what they do. Some people just invent information to justify their position and it doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny. I usually don’t scrutinize, I play nice, but it’s an interesting exercise.

My favorite justification is “tradition”. Ok, but why is it tradition? Is it just that “we’ve always done this, so that’s what we do” or was it done one way in the past four a good reason, which no longer applies? My favorite story about tradition, which I have no idea if it’s real or not, is that when preparing a ham for some celebration (maybe Thanksgiving or Christmas or something), they cut the end off of the ham before cooking it, and someone questioned why. Well, there’s four generations in the house, let’s ask grandma/great grandma. The answer to why this tradition started? Because her husband always bought the biggest ham he could, and she never had cookware large enough for it to fit into. The fact is, some traditions based on a need that no longer exists, or they may be to fix a problem that no longer exists.

If you can successfully provoke them to think and question their reasons for believing what they do, you might just get them to open their own eyes.

Simply put, you cannot fix them. By arguing against what they believe to be true, you’re forcing them to justify their belief, in doing so, they convince themselves of their belief, which does more damage. Psychology is weird man.