Making Sense of the Mess: Understanding the Grief of Dementia, and the Power of Perspective and Self-Care

Description

This workshop addresses how caring for a person who is living with any kind of dementia inherently involves entering a world of uncertainty and grief. Doing so can feel chaotic, messy, and overwhelming for care partners. It’s hard to understand what is going on, what to do next, and how to effectively help someone with a brain disease that is ever-changing.

This workshop helps “make sense of the mess” that can come with caring for someone impacted by dementia by exploring the underlying grief and loss involved, by empowering people to change their perspectives, and by understanding why self-care is not a selfish act, but an act of self-preservation.

Ripple Effects: Navigating the Challenges of Dementia While Staying Afloat as a Care Partner

Description

This workshop is designed for anyone who is interested in learning more about the difference between normal aging and dementia. It will identify the most common forms of dementia, and shed light on how dementia can affect our brains, abilities, and influence our behavior. The program focuses on common emotional struggles that many care partners face, and how to cope with difficult feelings in a healthy fashion. It will additionally explore strategies to manage caregiver stress, as well as the art of accepting assistance from others so that you are not only able to take better care of your loved ones, but also of yourself.

Can You Relate: How Empathy and Compassion Can Help Prevent Crisis, Avoid Burnout, and Bring Fulfillment to our Work.

Description

This workshop addresses how dementia affects our brain, abilities, and influences our behavior. Attendees will learn how to apply the 4 steps of empathy to their professional work, and to identify some of the major challenges that clients living with this illness and their families face, and how to support them. In this workshop, we will discuss how dementia puts those living with this disease at risk for many things that can lead to crisis situations. Finally, we will explore the concept of caregiver burnout and ways to avoid it.

Cultivating Competence and Compassion in Dementia Care: It’s More than What you Know, It’s How you Show It.

Description

As dementia continues to rise in epidemic numbers, so too, does the challenge of providing competent care to those most impacted. It is therefore vital to understand the implications this disease has on grief, loss, and relationships, and how to compassionately support people living with dementia and their care partners. Being aware of the role that palliative care can play in supporting people living with dementia and their families is another important aspect that this workshop will address.

The Dance of Caregiving: Building Resilience for the Long Haul

Description

Discover how to balance the internal and external stressors of being a care partner while navigating the shifting roles in a relationship due to illness and caregiving. Learn how to traverse the difficult emotional terrain that you face as a dementia care partner, and how to build resilience in the face of adversity. Understand the importance of asking for and accepting help for the long haul of caregiving, as well as for maintaining one’s own health and well-being as a care partner.

Dementia in Healthcare: What to Know, What to Do, and How to Help

Description

This workshop provides an in-depth view of the most common brain changes that are caused by dementia and how they directly impact the person living with this challenging disease in terms of changes in memory, vision, communication, functional abilities, independence, and self-care. It also highlights the role of professionals in recognizing symptoms of dementia in the clients they care for and how to support family care partners in the home.

Dementia: What Most People Don’t Know, but Should

Description

This workshop provides a brief overview of what dementia is and the most common kinds of dementias that impact the majority of people who have a dementia diagnosis. It discusses the role of anticipatory grief and ambiguous loss in dementia care, the profound impact that this disease can have on relationships, and how to support caregivers in your community.

Drinking Deeply From the Well: Powerful Lessons on Life for the Living

Description
In this “signature talk,” Kay shares 3 powerful lessons about what it means to have hope amidst the darkest of times, to heal even if you can’t be cured, and to drink deeply from the well of humanity when we most thirst for love and connection. Kay brings these compelling stories to life from her award-winning book, Bedside Witness: Stories of Hope, Healing, and Humanity, as she thoughtfully and humorously explores how a positive attitude, the ability to forget our differences, and the practice of forgiveness can change all of our lives and relationships in profound ways.

Keys to Understanding Apathy and Depression in Parkinson’s Disease and Dementia

Description

Understand the difference between apathy and depression in people living with Parkinson’s disease or Lewy Body dementia. Learn the three types of apathy associated with Parkinson’s and how apathy caused by dementia presents itself in older adults. Recognize the red flags of caregiver stress to watch out for while navigating the inherent challenges of supporting those who are impacted by apathy or depression.

Memory Changes and the Aging Brain: Warning Signs & What to Do

Description

Learn the difference between normal aging and dementia, the 10 warning signs of Alzheimer’s disease, and the specific brain and functional changes that occur when someone is living with dementia. Understand the profound impact that dementia can have on our closest relationships, the grief and loss involved, and the symptoms of caregiver stress to watch out for to prevent burnout. Gain tips to promote brain health so that you can avoid getting dementia yourself.

Mending Fences:  A Person-Centered Approach to Facilitating Hope and Healing

Description

This workshop will enable participants to recognize the role of family systems theory as it pertains to counseling individuals and families who are facing life-limiting illnesses, and learn how to apply a person-centered approach to people living with dementia in order to facilitate hope and healing in relationships. The workshop will also identify ways to support individuals impacted by dementia so that they can “make meaning” in their lives while they are still able to  participate in the process in a relevant way.

Moving Towards the Storm: Creating Meaning, Mastery, and Resilience Through Palliative Care.

Description

Drawing on over twenty years of experience working with patients and families facing a wide variety of life-limiting illnesses, this workshop will address how hospice and palliative care professionals are uniquely trained and positioned to provide timely and compassionate services to people living with dementia and their families. It will discuss how the knowledge and expertise that we develop through our specialized work not only benefits the people we serve, but also enables us to become more resilient people in the process. The presentation will help to explore the valuable lessons that we can all glean from people living with dementia in order to become more tolerant, accepting, and mindful human being ourselves.

The Stories We Tell:  Creative Ways to Apply Narrative Therapy, Story Telling, and Improv into Social Work Practice

Description

Understand how to apply the therapeutic skill of story-telling with patients and families while identifying ways in which utilizing narrative therapy can be a therapeutic benefit for hospice and palliative care social workers or other helping professionals. Learn to apply the five core techniques of improvisational comedy to working with people living with dementia, and have FUN while you’re learning!

Timing is Everything: The Importance of Advance Care Planning, Decisional Capacity, and Supporting People Living with Dementia and Their Families.

Description

This workshop addresses the critical importance of timing in Advance Care Planning when working with people living with dementia and their families. Advance care planning (ACP) is an ongoing process in which patients, their families, and their health care providers reflect on the patient’s goals, values, and beliefs, and discuss how they should inform current and future medical care.

Advance care planning is the vitally important process by which patients make decisions that can guide their future health care, if they become unable to speak for themselves. This program also reviews and describes the most common forms of dementias, builds skills for recognizing decision making capacity, and discusses the red flags involved in that process.

Wading in Emotional Quicksand: The Powerful Role of Anticipatory Grief and Ambiguous Loss in Dementia Care

Description

This workshop delves into the world of anticipatory grief & ambiguous loss– what it looks like, what it is, and how it applies to providing care to people living with dementia. The workshop helps identify coping strategies to effectively deal with caregiving challenges, stages of grief, and common behavioral expressions and unmet needs of people living with dementia. It also explores ways to get out of emotional quicksand once you start sinking, with guidelines to help care partners not just survive, but thrive on their caregiving journeys.

While There’s Still Time: Facilitating Emotional Healing and Closure Among People Living with Dementia.

Description

This workshop is built around a case study which explores the importance of timely psychosocial interventions among people living with dementia and other life-limiting illnesses. The content allows for deep discussion about complex family dynamics that can take place, and how to facilitate meaning-making and emotional healing for cognitively impaired individuals while they can still actively participate in the process.