Additional Resources Mentioned
Takeaways
We shared 5 tips:
- Believe in your own creativity
- Forget memory
- Open with a beautiful question
- Use beautiful listening
- Create gifts from the experience
Read More in This Blog
Full Episode Transcript
Nancy Treaster
Do you struggle to create meaningful connections with your loved one living with dementia? Almost all of us do. In this episode, Sue and I are talking with Anne Basting, founder of the award-winning nonprofit TimeSlips, about how to create intentionally meaningful moments and connections. We’re sharing five tips.
Sue
And thank you so much for joining us today. You’re an artist, a writer. You’re also the founder of the nonprofit TimeSlips, where you use creative storytelling to bring meaning and joy through creative engagement.
We’re excited to bring the concepts you’re championing at TimeSlips to our listeners because they make such a positive change in our connection with our loved ones while they’re living with dementia. And please tell us more about yourself and about today’s topic.
Anne Basting
Well, I’m thrilled to be here. Thank you for the work that you do. And I also am happy to share this. I believe or not started out with a PhD in theater studies, was a professor for 25 years and would use the creative storytelling to do large scale creative projects. The whole thing started when I was really exploring whether or not theater techniques would work with people with dementia volunteering on a locked Alzheimer’s unit and was trying reminiscence techniques, which were very common. This was back in 1996, still common today to really focus on reminiscence techniques, but nothing was really working. It was a pretty bleak common room situation at the nursing home until I shifted and just brought in a picture and happened to be the Marlboro man, believe it or not, and a sketch pad. And I just said, what do you want to call him? Let’s make it up. You have trouble with memory. Let’s forget all of that and just open the moment and make something up together. And that ended up with a 45 minute story where we were laughing and singing and such joy that I had not experienced in my six weeks of volunteering there. And it showed me that I had to teach these tools to people moving forward. The caregivers were hungry for this as were the people experiencing these conditions. So for the last 25, 30 years, I’ve been pretty single focused on trying to share these techniques with anyone in that care in care relationships and then embedding them into care systems.
Nancy Treaster
You know, one of the things that I find most interesting about this, you have a theater background. You know, I was a computer science major. So it feels a little overwhelming to think, you know, how am I going to do something that you appear, you know, obviously comes naturally to you, even though you did discover it, once you did it, it comes naturally. But you were quick to tell me, you know, we all have a level of creativity we need to believe in. And that’s our tip one. So why don’t we talk a little bit about that?
Anne Basting
Honestly, we’ve been training people in this approach and doing research on it. So we know it works. There’s over a dozen research studies. So we’ve been training people for 30 years. And the first thing every single person says is I can’t do this. I’m not creative. And I’m like, it just breaks my heart because if you know, the second thing I say is, okay, who can breathe? and everyone raises their hand. Congratulations, you’re all creative because creativity is a unique human attribute. We all have it. It’s just a little tragedy that somewhere along in our education process, somewhere we built self-doubt about our creative capacity. So the first part of all of our training workshops is getting people back in touch with their own form of creativity and building that creative confidence in their own creative capacity to do it. And research now tells us that that creative expression is really good for our brains, whether or not we’re experiencing cognitive changes or we’re experiencing stress, which harms our brain health as well as caregivers, that creativity and engaging in it reduces brain aging by expanding cognitive reserve. Learning and playing and using imagination all expand cognitive reserve.
Sue
Memory. is so powerful. And this is what leads us to tip two. Forget memory. Tell us more about what this means.
Anne Basting
Well, if you think about it this way, if you approach someone with dementia and ask them a question that expects a factual answer or that is built on shared memory, do you remember who the president is? Right? That’s a great question. What’s the date today? What’s my name? There is one answer. And that pathway for that answer, pretty good chance that it’s blocked in whatever’s happening in the brain, right? If you rephrase that question into a more open one, then that is based on imagination. So if you kind of can release the expectation of memory and open up the freedom of expression through imagination, you open yourself to a thousand different answers, right? And I know that it can be incredibly difficult to do. And I know that now even more after 25 years of doing this work, my own mother experienced dementia. And I walk into the room carrying all of our lifelong shared memories and I have to really discipline myself to kind of set them down because that’s not the way to open up. Relying on them and trying to remind her of all of those things is not the way to open up meaningful connection because it’s asking her to risk forgetting and not being able to connect with me if I’m asking her, do you remember the time we did this? Do you remember the time we did that?
She might not be able to remember. So it’s triggering her to maybe experience shame of not being able to do it, fear that she can’t remember it, my own fear that I’m losing her, right? When if you just shift and learn to let go of the expectation of memory you can connect in the emotional moment of the now through imagination-based engagement. And that is, I think once caregivers get it, they’re like, my gosh. It’s so overwhelming, that impulse and desire to heal the person’s wounded memory by supplying the answers or by relying or rebuilding the past that you sort of
Anne Basting
You know, rebuild the past brick by brick and you end up with this brick wall between you and the person so that you can’t connect that way. But you just have to train yourself to walk around it to the moment and the now and the imagination.
Sue
It’s just so beautifully said. We talk so much about staying fully present in the moment with our loved one. And this is such a beautiful representation of why and what the power of that is for them and for us.
Nancy Treaster
Right, I love that idea too. As you also mentioned, Anne, that just being creative is good for us. So, you know, this whole process is good for both people. But the key here, go ahead.
Anne Basting
Yeah, it’s got a bi-directional benefit. You’re allowing the person to be creative that you’re caring for and you’re being creative. So you’re both building cognitive reserve and also it’s just joyful.
Nancy Treaster
Yeah, so what’s wrong with that? That sounds fabulous. So, exactly. So tip three really is the meat and potatoes behind everything we’re talking about here, which is how do we then move from, we left our memory, the whole concept of memory on the floor when we walked in the door. So what are we gonna do to have this meaningful conversation? And so tip three is to open with what you call a beautiful question. Tell us more about that.
Anne Basting
So a beautiful question is really just one that opens the moment to a shared moment of discovery, a shared experience of wonder. There’s no right or wrong answer. Oftentimes they’re a little poetic. They’re inviting you to think a little bit differently about the world around you. And also maybe they trigger the senses a little bit, engaging in the senses. So that can be very confusing. So what are some examples of that? Some of the ones we really love at Timeslips are if you could lift your arms right now and just take flight, where would you like to go? Where would you fly?
And you can then follow that up with all kinds of questions, like what does it feel like? What do you see? What do you hear? Who’s coming with you, right? You can follow up those questions with other questions of wonderment. Another is, let’s see, what is something in your home you treasure, right? What is a treasure in your home?
We have, you know, on the time slip site, you can find lots and lots and lots of these examples. The quest, the beautiful question can be a question in and of itself, or it can be something that opens a prompt. So we also, in our training, train people to identify prompts. Prompts are anything that opens your curiosity, right? So you can be walking past a window and look outside and just say, what do you see? Perfectly open, non yes or no question, and then just go from there and follow up from there. What do you hear? What do you imagine you hear outside? What smells can you imagine outside, right? So you could also use as a prompt, say a piece of art on your wall that you’ve seen a thousand times, but when you use a frame of wonderment, it opens it up a little differently.
Anne Basting
What do you see here? What do you think is happening? What name, what do you want to name the people in it? Really, again, imagination based rather than memory based.
Sue
Well, something that’s so beautiful about that is when we are doing what you’re saying, which is staying fully present in this present moment, and we’re asking our care receiver a beautiful question, something that’s going to give them the opportunity to be present in where they are and whatever moves them, then the other gift of that is our listening to what they’re saying. So let’s talk a little bit more about what beautiful listening is.
Anne Basting
Well, if you think about it, if you’re a person experiencing dementia, you can get very used to being ignored. People tend to repeat themselves a lot, and so people tend not to listen to the repetition. You don’t know you’re repeating yourself, and so you’re kind of hurt and baffled that people are not listening to you. Or maybe your words don’t make sense to people or you can get very emotional and people start really ignoring your expression. If you can imagine asking a person who’s experiencing that a beautiful question and then genuinely waiting and offering what we call proof of listening that the person is being heard, you’re writing down their expression and asking them if you’ve gotten it right and correcting it if you haven’t, echoing their expression, their facial expression, the words, the pitch, the humor, the seriousness, really seriously like echoing back what’s being heard and correcting it. And that is proof that the person you’re really trying to capture what the person is saying. That can feel transformative to a person experiencing dementia, that to go from being ignored and having self doubt in your own creative and expressive capacity to feeling the empowerment of those expressive tools again and being invited to use them and being told, I’m going to help you build a story here. I’m going to help you build something expression by echoing what you’re saying. It is, you can feel that power when you’re echoing someone like that and it genuinely feels like it’s kind of a radical act of love.
Nancy Treaster
And so positive. And so positive for them to feel that they’re getting feedback, that what they’re doing is right. When you’re living with dementia, it feels like everything you’re doing is wrong. And here you’re doing something right, because there is no right or wrong, right? Sue and I both, when we discovered time slips, we both had the same reaction, which is, my goodness, I am so sorry that I didn’t have this knowledge, the whole concept of how to have these meaningful conversations when I was caring for my loved ones living with dementia. My father-in-law had Alzheimer’s and he was talkative really up until the very end. And I know we did not have meaningful conversations with him and we certainly didn’t listen to him and give him positive feedback. And I can absolutely see how this would have supported him in a much better way. My husband had primary progressive aphasia, which is a subtype of frontotempo dementia, which means his language skills went away early. So I struggle with how we could have helped him have a better engagement with the concept of asking him to respond and such. Thoughts on that?
Anne Basting
Yeah, I went down to Florida a couple of years ago now, right in the Fort Myers area and did a talk and then a demonstration workshop. And the folks gathered in this demonstration workshop were, I did not know this, but they all had aphasia. And so none of them had verbal language expression. And I thought, huh, okay.
Anne Basting
Let’s dive in, see how this is gonna work. And we told the most beautiful story. Again, we used a prompt image of a cowgirl and people responded to the beautiful questions with gesture. And I would echo the gesture and then the whole group would echo the gesture so that we were all, it became almost a beautiful, tender movement piece. It was astonishing. People also had sound, so if they didn’t have word, they made sounds so that we filled in the soundscape with the movements. You could feel people feeling the power of expression that they didn’t know they could use, and you could feel that in the caregivers going, my god, I didn’t know this approach existed and now I’m going to use it.
Nancy Treaster
And really that same concept of somebody is listening to me. You know someone with aphasia hasn’t felt that for a very, very long time. And so just by you echoing their movements and encouraging them, you’re letting them know you’re listening. And I love that. I love that. The last tip we have, because I think this is really interesting as well, is we’ve gone through, let’s say we go through this process and we’ll talk later about how you can find the training you need to go through this process.
Nancy Treaster
Let’s say we’ve gone through this process, but the end result can actually be gifts that we can give ourselves, we can give loved ones. Tip five is to leverage the experience to create different kinds of gifts. And I think that’s awesome.
Anne Basting
You know, a lot of times with, you know, therapeutic arts, people say, this is all about the process. We don’t care about the product. And I’m like, you know what? That’s stripping away a huge part of the benefit of this work that if like, re like reinvigorating the power of expression through that active listening and beautiful questions. You’re giving people back the ability to make something and give a gift to people because when you’re in an intense experience of care, receiving care, you don’t you’ve lost your ability to give back. You people don’t have those avenues anymore that carve out a sense of purpose or generosity, right, to other people. And oftentimes those are people who’ve been very generous in their lives and very caring for other people. And suddenly it’s switched and they can’t give back. They don’t have a way to do it. So if you’re doing a beautiful question, you’re shaping a story or you’re shaping a poem or just even asking for a few words like pull an apple out of a bowl of fruit and write a micro poem about that apple. What does it smell like? What does it taste like? Write it on a little note card and maybe do a little drawing of it. And then you have a little gift to give people, right? To your family members. You could mail it as a postcard to someone. If you’re doing a creative story about say a painting that the family knows very well, just hit audio record in your voice memo and you can echo and shape a story together and then just press send and give it to your family so that they know that this creative care process is possible and they can hear the joyfulness of it because that kindles hope for meaningful connection for the whole family.
It’s hard, this dementia journey but there is joy and creativity and hope all the way along to the end.
Sue
Well, this is so beautiful. And thank you so very much for bringing this to our listeners, for sharing it with us. I am excited about the potential and possibilities of this for our listeners and for their connections with their loved ones and also for the loved ones and their connections with the family. So thank you again so very much. Do you have any other comments that you’d like to share? And how do people find out more about time slips?
Anne Basting
We are just relaunching our website. We’ve rebuilt our training system. So we built a new website to show people the new training system, timeslips.org. We have a pathway that’s a free training for family and friends for family caregivers. We partnered with Dementia Friendly America. So it’s dfamerica.org backslash timeslips. that’s our, put that in there, yeah.
Sue
And we’ll make sure we put that, and I apologize, Nancy, we’re gonna edit to put this. If you wAnnea go ahead and make a little comment, Anne, we put everything in the show notes, so if you wAnnea just go ahead and say it and say that that’s, yeah, podcast, I’m sorry, yes, podcast description. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, yeah, podcast description. So go ahead, I’m sorry, say that again, Anne.
Nancy Treaster
Podcast description, podcast description. We stopped calling it show notes because nobody knows what that is but us.
Anne Basting
So we partnered with dementia friendly America df America org Backslash time slips and that is our free family and friends 45 minute training We have a whole training system for professionals You can become a certified facilitator of time slips and that has training in what we call creative communication for everyday moments of care and creative storytelling for more activity-based things, creative storytelling. And then once you are certified as a facilitator, we just designed a Train the Trainer program to help increase the sustainability because this field, as we all know, is plagued by turnover. So how do you keep a method like this locked in to the person-centered care approach of an organization?
You can train one of your certified facilitators to be a trainer. And we have a trainer institute happening in Atlanta, and they’re also online. We have multiple virtual trainer institutes coming up. So all of that information should be on timeslips.org. You can learn more as well. I have a book called Creative Care. It’s in paperback, very reasonable. And you’ll learn all kinds of different ways and examples of the beautiful questions and the proof of listening and then what happens when these approaches are infused into different care systems.
Nancy Treaster
Fantastic, fantastic. All right, well, let’s summarize and I wAnnea thank you as well, for joining us today and opening our minds to all of this possibility and how we can create meaningful moments with our loved ones. It’s awesome. We shared five tips.
Sue
Tip one, believe in your own creativity.
Nancy Treaster
Tip two was to forget memory.
Sue
Tip three, open with a beautiful question.
Nancy Treaster
And tip four is don’t forget to use beautiful listening.
Sue
And five is create gifts from your experience.
Nancy Treaster
Now if you have tips about meaningful conversations with people living with dementia, please share those on our Facebook page or our Instagram page. The links are in the podcast description. Anything we’ve shared today, anything that you need to know from today’s session will also be in the podcast description. We’ll have links. So anything that Anne mentioned, we’ll have links to as well.
There is for every podcast a matching blog, which is effectively the written version of the podcast. Just check this podcast number and then go to our website, the caregiversjourney.org, go to the blogs page and find the blog with the same number and you have effectively the notes from this podcast. We really, really appreciate you listening. If you like this podcast, please follow it, subscribe to it, and share it with others.
Sue
We’re all on this journey together.
Nancy Treaster
Yes, we are.
