[00:00.5]
Welcome to Inside Personal Growth podcast Deep dive with us as we unlock the secrets to personal development, empowering you to thrive. Here, growth isn't just a goal, it's a journey. Tune in, transform, and take your life to the next level by listening to just one of our podcasts.

[00:20.0]
Well, welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. This is Greg Voisen, the host of Inside Personal Growth. And we have a special guest joining us from Napa, California, and her name is Lisa Skinner. Lisa, good day to you. How are you doing?

[00:36.3]
Hi, Greg. I'm having a great day. The weather is gorgeous here and I'm so, so pleased to be here as your guest today and I'm pleased to have you. And I'm going to let the listeners know a bit about you and then we'll get in to your book and everything which we will be talking about.

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So, we're going to dive into this conversation, and really your topic touches, millions of families around the world and it is Alzheimer's and dementia and it's truth and lies.

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And we're going to have the book title come across the video here so people can actually see the book. So, you know, it requires, as you've said, courage, compassion, and complete reimagining of how we connect to those loved ones that we lose, the ones that we actually end up in dementia, care or Alzheimer's care.

[01:40.7]
Lisa is a behavioral specialist who spent over three decades working in the field of Alzheimer's disease and related dementia. She isn't just an expert. She's lived it, with eight family members diagnosed with dementia.

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She transformed her personal pain into purpose. And she's been on this mission for quite some time, becoming one of the most sought after voices in dementia care. She's a certified dementia care trainer, through the Alzheimer's Association.

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She's a TEDx speaker and has appeared on CBS News, NBC, Fox News, and ABCs. The book we're talking about is Truth, Lies and Alzheimer's. It's Secret Faces, co authored with Douglas W.

[02:26.9]
Collins. It's a follow up to her number one bestseller, not all who Wonder Need Be Lost. That's another book and we'll put a link to that as well in the show Notes for that. And it's not just another clinical guide.

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She tells powerful stories from her years in elder care. Elise offers something families does desperately need and that's counterintuitive solutions that transform the caregiving experience. She tackles the questions that keep caregivers up at night, how do I respond to false beliefs?

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I'm abandoning my parent if I seek professional care, how do we make the most of our time left together? So today we're gonna explore all this on this podcast show and we're gonna talk about her book. And Liser, thank you so much because this is a topic that, that's really important.

[03:21.6]
Now I mentioned to the audience already that you had eight family members affected by dementia, starting with your grandmother when you were 15. How did the early experience with your grandmother's birds in the mattress, I remember you telling me that story, set you on this 25 year path to becoming a dementia behavioral specialist.

[03:44.8]
And what was the turning point or the moment where you realized that you could help others navigate this? Well, that experience, the day that I went and visited my grandmother expecting to just have a normal catch up conversation with her, turned into something that, just really kind of devastated me because I didn't even know that there was anything wrong with my grandmother.

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And you know, a, typical day, we sat down in her living room and within two minutes she started telling me how scared she was every single day and every single night.

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And she couldn't sleep because these birds were living in her mattress and they were coming out at night and pecking on her feet, face. Wow. And then she proceeded to tell me about and asked me to look at the floor, and asked me if I saw the rats running around.

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And then she also, during the conversation told me that on top of everything else, I've got these men that keep trying to break into my house and they are, when, when they get in, they're stealing my jewelry and all my personal belongings.

[05:12.1]
And I'll tell you, by that time my jaw was on the floor and I really didn't know how to respond to probably the most far fetched stories I've ever heard in my life. But to answer your question, that that whole experience stayed with me through today.

[05:38.0]
Yeah, it was a turning point. I mean you obviously, you know, it's, you're, as you're young, you're very impressionable, you know, exactly. And I had a lot of my clients share with me over the decades that they had an early experience when they were young or adolescent age that had a huge impact on them because they weren't expecting it.

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This is their, they're looking at, you, know, a relative and these weird behaviors are showing up and you know, we just don't know what to make of it and nobody gave us any warning. Well, you know, one of the things you speak about in the book is joining their reality.

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It's kind of a philosophy. Now, obviously, as somebody who works with caregivers, it's so very important. And one of yours is the most counterintuitive recommendation to stop correcting people with dementia. Because I think that's the first thing a caregiver who doesn't know much about it will do.

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And you say join their reality. Can you walk the listeners through why this approach in your estimation works and share a specific example from the book where this made kind of a dramatic difference when people shifted this counterintuitive approach?

[07:02.8]
Sure. So years ago, as a matter of fact, it was when I first started working in the elder care industry. And the standard practice back then was called reality orientation therapy.

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And what that meant is people were advised, therapists, family members, caregivers were advised that if a person was symptomatic of cognitive decline and had memory issues and weren't always lucid and you know, having false beliefs about what was going on in their world, the standard practice was to correct them and steer them back into the healthy person's reality.

[07:55.8]
It dismiss their reality by basically, you know, trying to convince them that what it is that they're saying this was not true. Right. And this was practiced for a very long time and just through trial and error and you know, seeing the results of that, what it ended up doing was creating far more agitation and frustration.

[08:25.4]
Then really was worth it because people who live with Alzheimer's disease dementia, they do, lose their short term memory.

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It's kind of like a switch that goes on and off and it goes on and off. And when that switch flips off and their short term memory is basically short circuiting for that period of time or malfunctioning, they actually are traveling back into a different period of their life and it's different for everybody.

[09:04.5]
So I have actually seen some people when that switch flips off and their short term memory is not, working, our long term memories actually stay intact for the duration of the disease. So when the short term memory is not working, we pull from our long term memory And the way that we are able to tell what period of time they've kind of traveled back to is by the cues, by the things they're telling us.

[09:36.9]
So if somebody's asking for their mother, their, they're probably back in a period of time when they're either a child or maybe an adolescent. And so, this was the standard practice for a long Time. And it seemed to just promote so much more agitation and pain on the person living with the cognitive decline.

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Because through trial and error we discovered that no matter what you say to somebody who is having what appears to you to be a false belief, it's not a false belief to them.

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It's their truth, it's their reality and it is futile. This is learned by trial and error and experience and I've experienced it too to try to convince them otherwise. So the new approach that was adapted, as a result of that really not working was the one that you just referred to called join their reality.

[10:48.5]
Meet them where they are. And that has been extremely effective. But the reason why I refer to it as being counterintuitive is because it's not our instinctive gut reaction way to respond to somebody who's telling you something, like my grandmother, that was so far fetched there's no way it could have been true.

[11:14.6]
So we want to correct them. I mean, we're wired to fix the people we love, to, you know, to make them better. And that just did not work. Work. It backfired, in other words. So joining their reality is really the most dignified and, and effective way.

[11:39.8]
An effective way. Now I, it doesn't mean that you have to just flat out lie, but let me give you an example. So, and this, this is from my book, this is a true story.

[11:54.9]
And one of the eight family members that lived with dementia in my experience was my mother in law, so my husband's mother. And she happened to be over at our house one weekend. She was visiting and everything seemed to be perfectly normal, kind of like with my grandmother.

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And all of her name was Marianne. We call her a different name in the book, but her real name's Marianne. All of a sudden she jumps up from the sofa and she said, I have to get home, I have to get home. And I said, Marianne, why do you think you need to rush home?

[12:31.0]
He said, because Marty's sitting there waiting for me to come home and fix him dinner. He's going to be so upset if I'm not there to give him his dinner. He's used to eating at a certain time every day and I'm sitting here, I need to get to him.

[12:47.2]
Well, Marty had passed away five years earlier. So in her brain that short term memory switch flipped off. She's traveled back to a different time frame of her life where she, you know, believes her husband is alive and well and waiting for her at home, for her to come home.

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And fix him dinner. Well, they're living in a different reality as you said. In other words, that's their reality. Now one of the things I think the listeners would want to know because you are knowledgeable and you work with the Alzheimer's association, what is the current trajectory and path regarding treatment for Alzheimer's?

[13:37.0]
I think a lot of listeners out there would like to know. They're trying to figure it out, they're trying to navigate this crazy world that they've just been thrown into. And you know, it's the whole neuroscience element of what's going on in the brain.

[13:52.4]
I mean your course, which we're going to offer to our listeners for $97 and I want to mention that now, is really something. So if you're out there and you're listening, she has minding dementia training program and she reduced it for all of our listeners from two, hundred and forty seven to ninety seven dollars.

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And there'll be a link in the show notes below so you can click on that to get the course. It's quite thorough. It's a six part course, from a certified person who knows the dementia world. Now back to my question because I think everybody has this.

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You know, we hear about new drugs, we hear about things coming out. I think people get a little confused. Obviously they go to a doctor and he says, well this might work or that might work. What's been your experience with all of this?

[14:55.7]
There's really no known treatments yet that have proven to slut to change the trajectory. This is a progressive, irreversible disease. There are actually about 200 known brain diseases that cause dementia.

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Alzheimer's is the number one most heard of and common. And when we use the term dementia, we're really referring to the symptoms that show up because they are all very similar. The different brain diseases attack different parts of the brain and people can live with more than one disease at the same time.

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We call that mixed dementia. But it had been 20 years since a new drug, was produced to try to treat Alzheimer's disease that was actually approved by the fda.

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And those are your cholinesterase inhibitor drugs, your aricept, your namenda. Not everybody is able to tolerate them and it doesn't work on everybody. But the people that could tolerate it and it did seem to work.

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What it is known for is slowing down the progression of the disease, but it's really prolonging the progression of the disease, disease and then and it differs from person to person. It just stops working.

[16:26.3]
You know, I just watched a documentary not that long ago on Netflix, and I'm sure you've seen it. There was a couple in your area, the Bay Area, and they were both starting to experience it. I know this won't work for everybody, but I'm an advocate.

[16:44.9]
They radically changed their diet. Yeah, I was going to get to that. Yeah, they basically went to a vegan diet. Tough to do. I was vegan for a while. I'm vegetarian now. But they went to this vegan diet and the woman who was progressing faster than the man totally did an amazing shift.

[17:06.0]
I couldn't believe what I was watching, because she was so challenged. So what, what would you say to listeners right now about, you know, hopefully it's not too late. People can change their diet like this couple did. They were in their, I think late 70s, early 80s, when this occurred.

[17:25.8]
Do you remember the documentary I'm talking about? No. But I do know, of, you know, just a myriad of studies over decades that, that has shown a correlation between lifestyle and health choices and, helping reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease and also, in some cases shown improvement.

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But I do want to say that there are a ton of risk factors that play a role into whether, we are more at risk or for developing Alzheimer's disease or less risk and its, age, its genetics, its ethnicity, its gender.

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And then on the other side, those are what we call non modifiable. We can't change any of those. We are the age we're at, we are the gender we are, et cetera, et cetera. And then you have, on the other side of the page you have your modifiable risk factor.

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And those include diet, those include exercise programs or regimes. Includes, keeping your brain active and stimulated. But it also addresses very, very common medical conditions that some of us have.

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And the number one risk factor that's modifiable, is living with cardiovascular disease. But the reason why it is classified as modifiable is because we can treat it, we can change it, we can manage it through medications and diet and exercise.

[19:16.1]
There's sleep apnea is a huge risk factor. Lack of sleep, poor sleep, disrupted sleep, hearing loss is a huge risk factor to increasing a person's risk. But with hearing aids that can be treated and managed to, So there are, it's a huge laundry list of modifiable risk factors.

[19:38.7]
But to your point, diet really, has shown huge, results in potentially either minimizing Your risk or showing improvement based on what you eat.

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You can start that at any age, at any time. And the recommended foods are to kind of follow more of like a Mediterranean style diet or keto diet, where you're eating leafy green vegetables and leaner meats.

[20:18.9]
Fish, chicken, the number one thing they're telling us to, that's the most damaging and harmful to us is eating ultra processed foods. Yeah.

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And then processed foods. And try to minimize your sugar intake. Our brains do not like sugar. It's not our friend. And all these foods, the reason why they are so harmful, because they have found through these scientific studies that they cause inflammation not only in our bodies, but in our brains.

[20:57.2]
Right. Yeah. And when they do the scans, they, they see that and I think, you know, they can pick that up. Now you, you speak in your book about reminiscence therapy in action, and you used a story about Tom, the litigation attorney.

[21:16.6]
He was agitated and searched for his office until you recreated the law office in his bedroom. Right. Like put it in his bedroom. Can you explain what reminiscences, therapy is and how caregivers who are listening out there can apply this approach at home without professional resources?

[21:38.2]
Sure. And this actually ties back to that short term memory, malfunctioning and people kind of ending up or traveling back to another time period in their life. And this was true of Tom.

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And this is a real story. I mean I worked with this man, I witnessed it and just saw the miraculous results. So what happened with Tom is that his, he was in his latter stage of his dementia and his short term memory was basically non existent.

[22:14.3]
So in his mind he was living back in the time where he was a very, successful and prestigious litigation attorney in Washington D.C. and he had been placed by his family in this memory care neighborhood.

[22:34.8]
It was a lockdown, so nobody could get out. And, without a code, for their protection and their safety. And this man from day one was agitated, angry, combative, just so difficult.

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He was abusive to staff. He'd scream at him because he was frustrated, because in his mind he was looking for his office so he could get to work and practice law. And nobody would tell him how to get there or let him out of this building so he could go to work.

[23:11.5]
And this was his reality. So every single day Tom walked the halls of the memory care neighborhood looking for his office, asking people, where is my office? Why won't anybody help me? Why won't anybody tell me?

[23:28.5]
And the caregivers weren't Trained in join their reality, or reminiscence therapy. And they were correcting him, say, oh Tom, you live here now, you haven't practiced law for a long time, like kind of get over it.

[23:46.4]
Well, no, he did not get over it. And the, the longer this went on, the more and more frustrated he got and the more vocal he got, calling them names, swearing up and down. So we had just, this was back in the early 90s, we had just me and the administrator gone to a very specialized training in reminiscence therapy.

[24:18.0]
And the training was on offering things to people, who obviously their short term memories were not functioning properly and they had regressed to another time period in their life.

[24:36.1]
So basically what poor Tom was begging us for was to let him get back to his business. And that's all he wanted. He just wanted to get back into his office and work on his cases. So he worked with the family, his family, and they brought in things that represented things in his office that were familiar to him, that he would recognize.

[25:01.9]
And boy, what a difference. So instead of being angry and combative and disruptive and all the things that I described Tom was, he finally was able. We set up a kind of like an office like setting in his room, right.

[25:20.6]
And he came out for his three meals a day. He was much more pleasant. He was actually, he actually socialized with the other residents. And then he would say, this is so cute. He goes, okay guys, gotta get back to work.

[25:36.4]
I'll see you, next meal. And he'd slip into his office and go to work and he was as happy as a clam. Wow. And this is what reminiscence therapy does. It helps them reconnect with the life that they are, that they're currently living in, which is not the same reality as our life, but it's their reality.

[26:01.9]
So, it was just an unbelievable metamorphosis with introducing the reminiscence therapy. It can be done in a lot of different ways. So just, it's a great, it's a great tool that you're giving the listeners, that's for certain.

[26:23.8]
Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna say I have witnessed since the early 90s when this was first introduced, I have witnessed over and over and over again, case by case by case, it be effective. Well, that is a great story you, know about tomorrow now there's listeners out there.

[26:44.4]
And I recently, within the last three months, listened to a podcast that Michelle Obama did with, the creator of the TV series The Simpsons and this gentleman's family and his wife were dealing with a mother who basically, very quickly slipped into, dementia, Alzheimer's.

[27:11.0]
I mean, we're talking. I had a friend this happened to as well. So I know what they were talking about. One of the things happened is they, after a long time of him caring for her, he just couldn't anymore the husband and put her into the facility.

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So here's the story. You know, he still loved her immensely. But she had found somebody in the dementia facility that she was going to have a relationship with. This whole dialogue in this podcast was about how the family kind of navigated that whole thing.

[27:49.0]
You've certainly seen this and been around it and know how just challenging this must be. What advice would you give somebody? I thought that podcast was so revealing about the, emotions and feelings that the kids were having who were telling the story as well as the father who was married to the mother who was put into the facility.

[28:14.1]
It reminds me of several, spouses in, one of the support groups that I led at a memory care unit. And the husband had frontotemporal dementia and she was perfectly fine and she would come into my support group and one of the things that she was dealing with which just, I mean, they had been married 50 something years.

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Yeah. And his short term memory was non existent. He didn't remember her as being his wife, although she visited him every single day. He just thought she was a nice lady that came by. But he proclaimed his love for this other resident that lived in the facility and would talk to her about it.

[29:10.5]
This is my lady, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, to his own wife. And it just crushed her. Yep. Same story here. Same identical story. And you're right, I have seen this so many times.

[29:25.7]
Times. But she understood that this was his new reality. And as much as it hurt him and their kids to watch their dad proclaim his love for a strange woman, she also had dementia.

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And so there was really nothing really going on between them. They just each thought that they were each other's significant other. They had this relationship going, but there was, you know, like nothing physical or anything, but this poor woman.

[30:02.2]
And she came to my support group and pretty much talked about it every single session that we did. And you could see the pain in her face and the hurt in her eyes of how this man that she had been married to all these decades was proclaim, Proclaiming his love for another woman.

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And just basically, she was irrelevant to him in his new reality. But she also Just through going through you know, like therapy and learning as much as she possibly could.

[30:41.0]
And that's why she came to my support group about the changing brain and some of the things that could happen and people, the healthy people can expect and this is one of them that she was able to understand it and finally say, yeah, it hurts, but I know I can't take it personally because he's not intending to hurt me.

[31:08.4]
He doesn't remember, remember me at all. And so, she joined his reality and went along with it. You know, I think what's important you say there is that there is a support group like what you hold for people like this, who are the caregivers who are dealing with this.

[31:29.1]
And that is really why I wanted to emphasize that, you know, do reach out to Lisa Skinner, find out where there's a support group. If you don't have one near, I'm sure she can advise you, and do if you can, if you're dealing with this, get this minding dementia course, $97.

[31:52.8]
Very, very inexpensive course at that. As she said, it's kind of a giveaway at that price. But the other thing I want to talk about is you emphasize throughout your book that behaviors are only languages somebody with dementia has left. And can you give the listeners two to three examples of what different problem behaviors are actually, trying to communicate.

[32:17.7]
And trying to communicate, yes. So at some point as people are progressing through the stages of dementia, they do lose their ability to communicate with us, in a traditional way.

[32:33.6]
It's whether they have aphasia and cannot talk or cannot find the right words. That's one example of the damage to the brain. People develop, aphasia, or they just stop communicating altogether.

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But the way it typically manifests is in these behaviors. And there are a lot of triggers that kind of surface.

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And where these behaviors surface and what has been learned through by this is that it is their way of supplementing for the fact that they cannot tell us or articulate their wants, their needs.

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If they're in pain, if they're hot, if they're cold, something is bothering them. And it's through these behaviors that we have to be able to recognize that they're trying to tell us something.

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It's part of the disease. They're not trying to be difficult or mean or anything like that. It's the only way that they have been able to figure out a way to communicate that there's something that is wrong, that they, they want fixed or is happening with them.

[34:11.2]
It could be, it could be they're hot or they're cold or they're bored or they, are experiencing some pain or discomfort. Maybe their clothes aren't fitting them correctly, they're too tight or, you know, there's just a huge list of triggers that we call them that could, cause a behavior.

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But the most important thing for people to realize is the behaviors that we're seeing are their way of trying to tell us something. And the hard part on us as loved ones and caregivers is it's up to us to figure out what has triggered that behavior.

[34:56.5]
Yes. Yeah. And I, that's the key. What has triggered the behavior? It could be environmental, it could be emotional, it could be, you know, there's just a huge, array of things that could be causing their, their discomfort or trying to.

[35:17.5]
They could be hungry. You know, people with dementia because their short term memory doesn't work all the time the way it's supposed to. They may have just had a meal and then two seconds later forgot that they ate it and they think that they're supposed to be eating again.

[35:33.3]
They, they feel hungry or they think it's meal time. This happens all the time. So they can't tell you that because their minds, their brains have too much damage to articulate it to us. So it shows up in the form of some, unusual behaviors.

[35:52.8]
Yeah. And I think that being observant and watching and observing, you can probably figure out what those behaviors and what they're trying to tell you. And you know, you have in the book three essential tools and you call in your personal message at the end.

[36:11.3]
You distill everything into these three tools. We've talked about some of them, join their reality with one. Two, address the stranger in the mirror. And three, discover their happy place. Now, for someone who's just starting out, Lisa, this journey with a loved one, which of these should they focus on first?

[36:35.8]
And if so, why?

[36:40.4]
Well, I would say primarily join their reality. Because if you can join their reality, you will have already found their happy place. Place for that given period of time and they will stay in that happy place instead of, if you're arguing and trying to correct, they're going to leave that happy place and they're going to just become extremely frustrated and it could actually escalate to what we call a catastrophic reaction.

[37:08.9]
In other words, they will have a total meltdown because they're frustrated. They feel that, they're not being taken seriously. You're not believing them, they're not being validated, you're not being empathetic. So joining their reality kind of solves both those problems.

[37:31.6]
And then the stranger in the mirror actually is a very unusual phenomenon. Do you remember the story in my book with Harold? Yeah. And he made friends with himself in his own reflection because this is another example of a man who was in the latter stage of his Alzheimer's disease.

[37:58.6]
And he walked down the hall and there was a full length mirror there. And one day he just stopped and stared and looked at it. And he didn't recognize his own reflection in the mirror because his short term memory was pretty much shot.

[38:14.5]
And he was living in a different time frame of his life and it happened to be when he was a younger man. So he didn't, he didn't recognize this old guy who was staring back at him in the mirror. So he went into the living room and he said to his wife, hey, who's that guy that's hanging around in our hallway?

[38:37.4]
And she says, oh, that's just Harold, meaning him. But she didn't say it's you. She said, oh, that's just Harold. Well, he took that meaning, that it was a completely different man.

[38:52.9]
And over this months, the next few months, he became friends with Harold, with Harold himself. And he'd go in the kitchen and he'd get cookies. His favorites were Lorna Dunes.

[39:09.3]
And he would offer Harold a cookie and try to push it through the mirror. And his wife would find crumbs on the floor at the bottom of the mirror. And then one day he was going down the hallway and he looked in the mirror and saw that Harold was wearing these shoes, shoes that looked familiar to the real Harold.

[39:32.2]
And he went and he said to Nancy, his wife says, I must really, really like this guy. We must have become really good friends because it looks like I gave him my shoes, my favorite shoes. It was the cutest story, real story.

[39:51.6]
And this happens all the time. And we call that phenomenon Stranger in the mirror because they don't recognize their own reflection. But this was a really cute, harmless story. But the reason why I included it in my book was because it can, it can really blow up in a caregiver's, situation because I've seen this where our caregiver might lead the person to give them a shower through the bathroom to get to the shower.

[40:26.9]
And there's a mirror in most bathrooms. And let's say the person that they're caring for looks in the mirror, doesn't recognize themself as being the person in the mirror. And a lot of times they think, oh my gosh, I'm not going to take my clothes off in front of that stranger and have that stranger besides staring at me while I'm getting in the shower and just have a fit.

[40:55.4]
And if you didn't know as a caregiver or family member about the stranger in the mirror phenomenon, you wouldn't have a clue what triggered that refusal to get in the shower and the combative behavior.

[41:10.9]
If you're trying to insist they get in the shower and it's a simple fix, you take them out of the room, get them maybe interested in something for a few minutes, you go back, you cover up the mirror with towels or a blanket or remove it altogether at some point and that would fix the problem.

[41:30.3]
If they can't see themselves in the mirror, they're not going to, not recognize themselves and think that there's a stranger staring at them. And this applies to any mirror in the house. So all of these are great tools for our listeners.

[41:45.8]
And again, the book is Truth, Lies and Alzheimer's. And we going to give you the link to the website. It's actually pretty easy. It's just minding dementia summit.com.

[42:03.2]
minding dementia summit.com is where you're going to want to go look to the show notes below as well, so that you can actually find her website by just clicking on that Now Lisa, in kind of wrapping up the interview.

[42:20.3]
The book, offers all these practical tools we've been talking about, but underneath it all is this philosophy about still finding joy and connection, with someone that you're losing to dementia or Alzheimer's.

[42:36.3]
How do you hold both the grief and the possibility at the same time? And what would you want listeners to know about their own capacity for this kind of caregiving? You know, it's like this conundrum. You got this grief, you know, that you're holding because you're losing somebody, and possibility at the same time, which it probably doesn't seem like there's much possibility to most people other than decline.

[43:06.7]
Well, I think that a person, a family member, will carry grief no matter what. So it boils down to the choices to be in constant conflict with the person that you care about by always arguing with them, trying to correct them, having them resist them, that, starting arguments and you know, you could live in turmoil, or you can find a way to provide them with a more dignified, higher quality of life that you'll Both or all benefit from one of peace and calm and harmony.

[43:53.4]
And I have seen that work just by applying a lot of these tools and strategies and principles that we've been talking about today. So it kind of comes down to what would be easier for everybody involved.

[44:10.7]
Having a harmonious, quality relationship with your loved one for the rest of the time that they have here or always being. Being in conflict. And that's typically how most families trudge through the journey, of going through dementia with their loved ones or caregivers by, making it harder on themselves and their loved one than it really needs to be.

[44:39.6]
But most people don't know what they don't know. They don't know that these tools are out there. And there's a more. There's effective ways of doing things and ineffective ways of doing things. And most people as a result of that are constantly in a state of reaction when these things come up.

[45:00.6]
And they don't know how to respond and they don't know how to handle it and they don't recognize it as being their loved one trying to tell them something. So it is probably. And you know, I've, you, You mentioned it.

[45:17.8]
I, I have been in this situation eight times in my family and it's probably from my. Where I have stood probably one of the hardest things that any of us will ever have to take on in our lives.

[45:33.9]
It's painful, it's hurtful. We all want our, you know, the best for our loved ones and to stand by and helplessly and hopelessly, not be able to fix them. And this isn't just coming from me.

[45:51.0]
It's probably every family member I have ever talked to. But there are ways that we can provide a, meaningful, purposeful, full, happy life for those despite the disease if we are equipped with the right tools and the information to provide that environment for them.

[46:16.4]
And it is real, it's doable. And it just takes knowledge and training and knowing what to do. But anybody can do it. Anybody can provide, this environment, whether it's at home, at your home, at their home, at a institutionalized setting with properly trained caregivers.

[46:39.5]
So that's what I would emphasize to people that it doesn't have to be a journey of torment the entire way. Don't forget these diseases. The, the run of the disease is.

[46:57.6]
Can be decades long. My grandmother lived with it for 20 years. Yeah, that is a very, very long time to try to maintain a decent, relationship with somebody and to go through it Always arguing with them and fighting and causing tension just is, you know, wouldn't be anybody's first choice.

[47:22.2]
Well, you know, you give people a lot of hope. And the fact that you understand this, again, with all your certifications, with all your knowledge, your training, your 30 years of background and experience for my listeners, definitely go out and get the book Truth, Lies and Alzheimer's.

[47:40.7]
We're going to put a link in the show notes as well, to Amazon so that you can pick up a copy. The course itself can only be gotten@mindingdementiasummit.com There is a link that'll be below there.

[47:57.0]
And she has chosen to give Inside Personal Growth listeners a huge discount that at $97. So I want to make certain that you click, on the link below. That's the only place you'll be able to get that. Go ahead. We didn't mention it comes with a, really comprehensive workbook too, that people can use as their own personal guide throughout this channel journey.

[48:18.3]
Oh, so there's a downloadable PDF workbook. Right. So they'll get that and you can buy the book separately. Obviously it doesn't come with the book, I'm sure. But the workbook, which would be wonderful for people to have.

[48:33.5]
So thank you for mentioning that. I'm glad that we got that in there. So for everybody, it's Lisa Skinner, where we've given you the website mindingdementiasummit.com. go check it out. You'll see her podcast as well. She's got her own podcast.

[48:50.4]
She's also got resources there. The course is there. You can learn more about it. Lisa, it's been a pleasure having you on Inside Personal Growth discussing a very important topic that affects, I would say probably 70 to 80% of the people that are out there today have at one point known a friend or a family member or an uncle or a cousin or somebody who's actually had dementia, or Alzheimer's.

[49:18.2]
So thank you. Any last words? Well, real quickly, I do want to point out that this is definitely, a topic that is trending more and more. But the thing that's kind of nerve wracking is we're being told by the World Health Organization and Alzheimer's association that the number of people expanded, expected to develop Alzheimer's disease in the next 25 years is going to triple unless a cure or a treatment is found.

[49:51.6]
So what does that mean? Bottom line? More and more and more families are going to be touched by this disease. So we definitely need to be prepared. Society is not right now, but there are ways to, to prepare ourselves for it.

[50:09.9]
Well, you can't say that we haven't given them some preparation here in this 45 minute podcast. So thank you all for listening and hanging in, with Lisa and I today. And again, check the links out in our show notes.

[50:25.7]
And Lisa, pleasure having you on my show. It's been an honor and I've learned a lot today, especially your tools. So thank you so much. Thanks again for having me. It's been a great pleasure for me too, Greg. I appreciate your support very, very much in talking about this.

[50:43.3]
Thank you. Have a good rest of your day. You too. Bye. Bye. Thank you for listening to this podcast on Inside Personal Growth. We appreciate your support. And for more information about new podcasts, please go to inside personal growth.com or any of your favorite channels to listen to our podcast.

[51:02.3]
Thanks again and have a wonderful day.