During the last few years of Dad’s dementia, when Mum and I would visit him in the Aged Care centre, there was a consistent pattern to the conversations we had.
Dad would tell a story and Mum would say, ‘Don’t be silly’.
At first, I assumed that Mum was simply correcting him. She knew the facts and that Dad’s story didn’t match what had actually happened.
But after hearing many of these conversations over many months, it dawned on me that maybe something else was happening.
Dad wasn’t telling lies. He wasn’t trying to deceive us. He was simply describing the world as he experienced it through his dementia. To him, his stories made sense.
For Mum, she had spent almost 60 years married to the same man and during this time she learnt that when he told a story, it was accurate for what happened.
But, now he was sitting in front of her and saying things that weren’t true.
On the surface, it looked like she was simply correcting a faulty sentence. Yet, from another perspective, I could see that she was trying to hold together the shared world they lived in for most of their lives.
I found this surprising because I related to Dad’s stories in a different way.
I wasn’t asking myself ‘is this true?’ Instead, I saw it as a window into the world in which Dad was living. I had been trained as a coach to become curious about what people say.
One example of this was Dad’s story about the bus ride he’d been on. He mentioned that one of my football coaches was on the bus and that they’d seen a new-born tiger.
Mum corrected him, ‘that bus trip didn’t happen’, whereas I asked him questions about the weather and the others things he saw on that day.
I thought about that conversation for weeks before I realised there weren’t just three people in the room. There were also three different histories, three different experiences and three different ways of seeing the exact same moment.
We assume people disagree with us because they have different opinions. But often they disagree because they’re living in a different experience.
My Dad’s experience shaped the reality he lived. Mum’s experience shaped how she understood him. And my coaching experience shaped how I related to both of them.
It left me wondering whether understanding another person begins, not by asking whether they’re right, but by asking: What has their experience taught them to see?
More Field Notes
This is Field Note #10. Field Notes are observations from my ongoing enquiry into experience. To learn more about how to make the most of your experience, read these posts next:
- What Dementia taught me about Experience
- What a Rambo taught me about Experience
- What the Socceroos taught me about Experience
