This is the second post of a series that provides insights into the behaviors we often see in our loved ones as they – and we as caregivers along side them – walk through the journey of dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease.

In the first post in the series, we discussed how our loved ones’ life experiences factor into a lot of the behaviors we see as they travel the road through dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease.

In this post, we’ll take a look at how personality, quirks, foibles, and flaws thread their way through a lot of the behaviors we see in our loved ones with dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease. 

It’s important to understand this and to be able to recognize this because it can help us respond both more accurately and more compassionately and gently to the often baffling and frustrating behaviors that emerge as these neurological diseases progress. In other words, it gives us a context to both understand the behaviors and to minimize or eliminate, in some cases, the effects of the behaviors.

I group personality, quirks, foibles and flaws together because they’re so intertwined in what makes each of us the unique person that we are that to separate them would be like looking at a single piece of a puzzle instead of the whole puzzle.

They also represent both the positive and the negative, the humorous and not-so-humorous, the normal and the eccentric (spoiler alert: there is not a human being on the planet who doesn’t have eccentricities – some of us just hide them better than others), the sane and the not-so-sane aspects that make each of us human and each of us unique. 

All of these get exaggerated in one way or another with dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease.

Sometimes that’s okay. Sometimes that’s not.

If an endearing aspect of these gets more endearing, we tend not to appreciate it as much as we should.

However, if an annoying or obnoxious aspect of these gets more annoying or more obnoxious, we as caregivers will, at times, wonder if we will survive the journey we’re sharing with our loved ones intact and in one piece mentally and emotionally.

Personality is generally defined as the unique way each of us consistently thinks, feels, and behaves throughout the course of our lives.

Some aspects of our personalities are dynamic to some degree, changing as we mature and age or because the things we experience and encounter through the course of our lives, but the core of our personalities – the nuts and bolts of who we are at a stripped-down level – tend to be static.

Some of this core personality is genetic – nature – and some of it is early (first five years) environment/experience – nuture.

And this is the part that identifies us uniquely throughout our lives, because it is always there regardless of where we are, what what we’re doing, or who we are with.

Some of our core personality traits can be very good. If we tend to altruistic, optimistic, and malleable, those traits show up early and last even through the journey of dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease.

But even these positive personality traits can be a liability as neurological decline progresses.

If our loved ones tend to be generous and always doing for and giving to others, they very often might give away a lot of money or very valuable things to other people without understanding the financial hardship these losses may incur – and which are often unrectifiable – which may affect their own care. 

Additionally, these kind of traits can make our loved ones easy prey for unscrupulous people to take advantage of them and perhaps wipe them out financially.

Other of our core personality traits may present challenges to those around us all our lives. If we tend to be angry, stubborn, and self-centered, for example, these traits also get worse with the progression of dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease.

Unfortunately, it seems that most of us humans – and I will include myself in this (I’ve always said that if I ever develop dementia, they just need to put me down right after the diagnosis because I will be a gazillion times worse than any of the worst horror stories I have heard along the way about the negative side of dementia, and I don’t want anybody to have to deal with that) – have more negative core personality traits than we do positive.

When we have our full cognitive abilities, we have the ability – if we’re aware of these negative core traits and we don’t want them to have a detrimental impact on our relationships – to mute or override them in our interactions with other people.

However, once cognitive decline has progressed far enough to be seen behaviorally, the filters that we used to mute/override these negative core personality traits disappear as does the ability to know that we need to moderate them. And all bets are off.

Some of our core personality traits are so much a part of us that they are us. In other words, we can’t step back objectively and in clarity and self-awareness see them and remove or change them.

This is, in my opinion, just default programming (it may genetic  or environmental or both), but no matter how much we try – and some people don’t try (I am always trying to consciously avoid my own, but a lot of mine is already in play before I even know that I’m supposed to be avoiding it – it is one of the things about myself that drives me crazy) because they don’t know and/or they don’t care – it’s there anyway.

These things get exaggerated with the progression of dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease and they can be the some of the most taxing things we as caregivers can deal with because we don’t have the ability to neutralize them in our loved ones with logic, reason, and rational thinking. 

I have a very good friend whose father has vascular dementia. He is very demanding, always right, often the misunderstood victim, as obstinate as the day is long, and fighting against anything that takes away any of his independence.

My friend’s dad lost his driver’s license over two years ago when he was pulled over on the interstate for driving against traffic during the day. Fortunately, the police got him off the road before anything bad happened, but my friend’s dad has obsessed angrily about losing his license and not being able to drive since then.

His obsession with being allowed to drive ranges from conspiracy theories – the police, doctors, and his daughter have conspired unjustly against him to keep him from driving – to getting a new glasses prescription (“now they’ll give my license back”) to the humorously absurd (“everybody drives the wrong way down the interstate at least once”).

Additionally, because not being able to drive has made him more dependent on others, including his only daughter (who has a large and dependent family of her own), he expects everyone to drop everything they’re doing and take him where he wants to go when he wants to go and gets very angry if they can’t or won’t.

As his daughter and I were talking about his behavior, she said that her dad had always been narcissistic and demanding, even before any signs of cognitive decline. The world had always revolved around him so dementia has made this aspect of his core personality even worse as he loses ground neurologically.

Foibles, quirks, and flaws are, in many ways, extensions of personality.

The things that make us just slightly off-kilter (quirks) and perhaps are even “cute” or teasingly tolerated can really go off the rails quickly as dementias progress.

Foibles, which are inherent minor weaknesses, like the tendency to laugh at inappropriate times or to chatter incessantly, also become exaggerated during the journey through dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease. These also can be real testing points of our patience as caregivers because there are no boundaries around them for our loved ones as there were when there was no cognitive impairment.

And flaws (examples would be things like argumentativeness, impatience, quick temperedness, aggression, etc.) also become more exaggerated as the journey through dementias and Alzheimer’s disease progresses and there are fewer and fewer inherent abilities for our loved ones to use to practice restraint.

Flaws are perhaps the most scary and the most dangerous aspects of personality that we as caregivers may have to deal with. Because the executive functions of reason and rational thinking are absent in our loved ones, so too is the absence of the understanding of consequences of actions (behavior), which is a restraint in normal cognitive functioning.

Therefore, for example, if our loved one has the flaw of being quick-tempered (which has the emotional component of lashing out either physically or verbally or both if not restrained), there is real possibility of physical injury or death (especially if anything that could be used as a weapon is within reach) by our loved one because they are only able to be in the moment and cannot foresee or even understand the long-term consequences of their actions.

This is why having the insight into the personalities, quirks, foibles, and flaws of our loved ones and how those are manifested in their behavior is so important for us as caregivers.

We can mitigate the possibilities of really tragic outcomes in the worst-case scenarios and we can also come up with effective strategies for neutralizing – it will be temporary at best and we’ll have to do it over and over (this can be a very frustrating part for us) – the behaviors in the moment to make them less disruptive for both our loved ones and for those of us around them.