Each person with dementia will respond to the difficulties they experience in an individual way due to everyone having different personalities.
For some people having a range of difficulties in memory and thinking can result in them feeling:
- Frustrated
- Angry
- Upset
- Distressed
- Alone
- Frightened
Recognising the feelings of the person with dementia and identifying what might be triggering these feelings will be helpful when working out how the person then responds.
For example, Joe was trying to do up the buttons on his shirt and he could not do this easily due to the difficulty in co-ordinating and working out how to sequence the task. This led to the feeling of being frustrated.
In your notebook write down the difficulty the person was experiencing and try to identify the feelings that have arisen from this difficulty.