Caregiving in the situation of dementia poses major challenges to family members, but the spiritual aspect of the challenge is less often addressed. Caring for a person with dementia inevitably involves unreasonable demands upon the carer. It may also become more difficult to distance oneself from previous sleights for which the dementing person can no longer make amends. In these situations any sense of forgiveness for past wrongs can be engulfed by feelings of resentment. In this presentation we discuss the Christian concept of the person in relationship and how family relationships may need to be sustained from within the larger community outside of the family as dementia increases in one of its members. We also refer to recent initiatives which have been piloted by the second author with family carers in Hampshire, U.K., which have aimed to help dementia caregivers with the essentially spiritual tasks of finding emotional release and transcending their feelings of hurt.
Coleman et al. (Tue,) studied this question.