Walking in Their Shoes

Before You Become a Caregiver, You Need to Feel What They Feel

Published on Florence for Caregivers | For family caregivers and loved ones

There is something nobody tells you when you first start caring for an aging parent or a loved one with dementia. Nobody sits you down and says: before you do anything else, you need to understand what it actually feels like to be them.

And that missing piece, that failure of empathy, is the root cause of almost every problem that happens in a caregiving relationship.

This article is going to ask something uncomfortable of you. It's going to ask you to stop, just for a few minutes, and really imagine what your loved one is living through every single day.

Not the inconvenience of caregiving. Not your exhaustion. Theirs.

What It Feels Like to Lose Your Body

Imagine waking up one morning and discovering that the body you have lived in for 75, 80, or 85 years no longer does what you tell it to.

Your hands shake when you try to button your shirt, the shirt you have buttoned ten thousand times before. Your legs feel uncertain beneath you when you stand. The walk to the bathroom, a trip you have made automatically your entire life, now requires concentration and effort and sometimes, God forbid, assistance from another person.

That other person means well. You know they mean well. But needing them there, needing anyone there, for something so private and so basic, that is not a small thing to absorb.

That is humiliation. Not because anyone caused it. Simply because it is.

Now imagine feeling that humiliation every single day, multiple times a day, for the rest of your life. And imagine the person helping you sometimes seems impatient, or tired, or doesn't quite meet your eyes when they help you.

How would that feel?

Two of the most practical things a family caregiver can do early on are installing grab bars and providing a shower chair. A good set of grab bars such as the TAILI Suction Grab Bars can be installed without drilling and give your loved one something to hold onto safely.

A sturdy shower chair like the Drseats Swivel Shower Chair allows them to bathe safely and with dignity rather than depending entirely on someone else to hold them up. Small changes like these can restore a meaningful degree of independence, and that matters more than most families realize. Always consult your loved one's physician or physical therapist before introducing new bathroom equipment.

What It Feels Like to Lose Your Mind

Dementia is not forgetfulness. That is the first thing families get wrong, and it matters enormously.

Dementia is closer to this: imagine that your sense of time has become completely unreliable. You know that you know things, you can feel the knowledge somewhere, but you cannot always reach it. Words disappear mid-sentence. Faces you love become familiar but unnamed. You find yourself in a room with no memory of walking there.

And here is the part that breaks my heart, after 30 years of working with these patients: in the early and middle stages, they often know something is wrong. They feel the gaps. They feel themselves slipping. They reach for a word and find nothing, and they see the look on your face in that moment, the slight pause, the careful expression, and they know.

The frustration you see? The anger? The sudden outbursts from someone who was always so gentle?

That is a person fighting with everything they have left against something they cannot stop and cannot understand. That is not "behaviors." That is a human being in profound distress.

If you cannot find it in yourself to feel that, to really feel it, then caregiving will be a transactional exercise in task completion. And your loved one will feel every bit of that distance.

What It Feels Like to Need Permission for Everything

Think about your day today. The small freedoms you exercised without thinking.

You chose what to eat for breakfast. You decided when to shower. You went where you wanted, when you wanted. You handled your own money, made your own plans, contacted your own friends.

Now imagine that every single one of those decisions has been taken from your hands and placed in someone else's. Meal times are when they bring the meal. Shower time is when they have time to help. Outings happen when they can arrange them. Phone calls get monitored because of safety concerns.

Every freedom, gone. Every decision, someone else's.

Even when it is done with love, and it usually is, the experience of it, from the inside, is the experience of becoming a child again in an adult's body. With an adult's memory of independence. With an adult's pride.

Anger is a completely rational response to that situation. So is grief. So is withdrawal.

When your loved one pushes back, refuses, argues, or simply goes quiet, before you respond with frustration, ask yourself: what would I feel, in their position, right now?

This Is Not About Guilt

I want to be clear about something. None of this is meant to make you feel guilty.

Caregiving is one of the hardest things a human being can do. It is exhausting and relentless and emotionally complex in ways that are almost impossible to explain to people who haven't done it. You are allowed to be tired. You are allowed to struggle.

But empathy is not optional in this work. It is the foundation of everything else.

When you understand, truly understand, what your loved one is experiencing, something shifts. The difficult moments become less personal. The resistance makes more sense. The anger stops feeling like an attack and starts feeling like what it is, a person doing their best to hold onto dignity in an impossible situation.

And when your loved one feels that understanding from you, when they sense that you actually get it, even a little, everything becomes easier. For both of you.

A Simple Exercise Before Your Next Visit

Before you walk through the door for your next caregiving shift, or your next visit with Mom or Dad, try this:

Sit in your car for two minutes. Close your eyes. And ask yourself honestly: what has today felt like for them? Not for you. For them.

What have they been unable to do? What have they needed help with that they used to do alone? What have they lost this week, this month, this year?

Then walk through that door carrying that knowledge. Let it soften your voice. Let it slow your hands. Let it keep you patient when patience is hard.

That two minutes is worth more than any caregiving technique I can teach you.

What's Next

In our next article, we talk about something caregivers rarely expect. You're not just caring for your loved one. You're caring for the whole family. And that comes with its own set of challenges nobody prepares you for.

Florence for Caregivers provides general information for family members and laypeople caring for aging loved ones at home. This content is not a substitute for professional medical or clinical advice. Always consult qualified healthcare professionals for medical decisions.

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