For the last 18 months I have been legal caregiver for my failing 87-year-old aunt. Last year she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Her condition has recently worsened to the point where, against her protestations, I have moved her to a home specifically designed to care for patients like her. Her situation is eye opening, poignant, sad and exhausting to her, me and other family members lending support
But all of this is a proverbial “walk through the park” when compared to our daily challenges with interpersonal communication. On a recent day, when my aunt chastised me for failing to replace the batteries in her slippers (trust me these are slippers without batteries), I sought some support group assistance. There the group leader introduced me to “therapeutic lying”.
Controversial even within mental health treatment and eldercare circles, therapeutic lying literally instructs well-intended caregivers to consider untruthfulness as a frequent communications management tactic. It’s part of an overall approach I’m now learning, which stresses redirection of Alzheimer patient questions, oversimplified talking points, a minimum of questions to the patient and the burying of linear logic and conventional reasoning in framing dialogue. As an example, if a caregiver is asked by the patient why her long-deceased parents are not visiting her one might reply, “Because they are at a place where they can’t come to see you right now.”
I am slowly warming to this tactic. My resistance has not been so much existential angst to “lying” as it is has been in adopting a 180-degree shift in the way I have long rolled as a marketing and communications professional. In my core work here at WordWrite in helping to develop StoryCraftingSM, my focus has been to create PR, marketing and business communication approaches which steer away from the traditional “sleight of hand” techniques that have long dominated our industries. I’ve relied heavily on my core professional competencies of market researcher and armchair social scientist to make these left-brained contributions. I have consistently advocated for these approaches — in both professional practice and how we informally communicate with one another. And now, all of this is hampering me in surviving my daily care-giving challenges.
It also forces me to revisit the never-ending internal struggle to separate ourselves from our work. But communication (even for communication professionals) is not just about work. It is about how we think, learn about ourselves, interact with the external world, and express our thought. And now (as my aunt’s thinking is riddled by a sad, organic disease), I must change my own form of thought expression to communicate with her. I will, and along the way, I hope to become educated about the special cases where inauthenticity (“therapeutic lying”) is needed. But I think I’ll hold fast to the idea that professional PR practice is not one of those special cases.
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John Durante is senior marketing associate for WordWrite Communications.
