What was the moment that changed the course of your career and led you toward dementia care?

The moment that changed my career was a conversation with a son whose father had been hospitalized with end-stage dementia.

His father had been living with dementia for years, but the son didn't realize that was what was happening. He had been caring for his dad all that time, and many of their interactions had ended in frustration, disconnection, and arguments.

As we talked, I asked him to describe the changes he had seen over the past several years. Then I asked three simple questions: What diagnosis do you think explains those changes? Where do you think your father is in his health journey? What do you think comes next?

He couldn't answer any of them.

In that moment, I realized how profoundly the medical system was failing families. Dementia becomes a caregiving journey years before the healthcare system fully recognizes it as one. Even when families finally receive a diagnosis—often after years of advocacy and struggle—that diagnosis is frequently where the support ends.

I founded Better Dementia because families deserve more than a diagnosis. They deserve a roadmap.

My mission is to help caregivers recognize where their loved one is in the dementia journey, understand what changes are likely to come next, and navigate each stage with confidence. Most importantly, I teach practical tools that help families preserve their loved one's dignity—and in doing so, preserve the relationship itself—no matter where they are on the journey.

You founded the first comprehensive dementia care program in Wyoming. What did you learn there that ultimately shaped Better Dementia?

A defining moment came after I founded the first comprehensive dementia care program in the state of Wyoming.

As I began seeing more families, I realized something that bothered me deeply: the traditional medical model often asks families to describe every area of a person's decline while that person is sitting in the room listening.

Imagine hearing your spouse or children list all the things you've forgotten, all the mistakes you've made, all the ways you've changed, while you sit there unable to fully understand or defend yourself.

I believed there had to be a better way.

I advocated for a model that separated the patient visit from the family caregiving visit, allowing me to preserve the dignity of the person living with dementia while giving caregivers the freedom to speak honestly about the challenges they were facing. Unfortunately, the hospital's billing structure wouldn't support that approach.

That experience made something very clear to me: if I wanted to practice dementia medicine the way I believed it should be practiced, I would have to build it myself.

Better Dementia was created around that philosophy. By separating patient care from caregiver education and support, families can have the honest conversations they desperately need without sacrificing the dignity of the person they love.

What gap were you trying to fill when you built Better Dementia?

I built Better Dementia because there was an enormous gap between diagnosis and daily life.

Medicine has become very good at talking about biomarkers, medications, and imaging. But families don't wake up wondering about tau proteins.

They wake up wondering:
"Why is Mom accusing me of stealing?"
"How do I get Dad to shower?"
"Should I correct him?"
"What do I do when she wants to go home?"

Those are the questions that determine whether a family survives caregiving.

I wanted to create practical, compassionate education that translates neuroscience into everyday caregiving strategies families can actually use.

How do you help caregivers understand what's actually happening in the brain of someone living with dementia?

Most of us move through life with an internal model of how the human brain works. It's a model that serves us well because it works with most adults, most of the time. We expect people to remember what we told them yesterday, understand cause and effect, recognize our perspective, solve problems, and respond logically to new information.

Then dementia enters the picture.

Suddenly, the very ways we've always connected with someone we love begin to fall apart. Conversations end in arguments. Reality no longer seems shared. Behaviors become unpredictable, and it feels impossible to see eye to eye.

The problem isn't that caregivers don't care enough or aren't trying hard enough. It's that they're using a model of the brain that no longer fits the brain in front of them.

My work is centered on teaching caregivers an updated model of the brain—one that explains why memory fails, why reasoning changes, why behavior becomes unpredictable, and why communication breaks down. Once caregivers understand how dementia changes the way the brain processes the world, the disease begins to make sense.

That's why I don't spend my time giving families endless lists of "do's and don'ts." Those lists only work in the situations they were written for.

Instead, I teach caregivers how to think. When they understand the brain behind the behavior, they can respond to new situations with confidence, creativity, and compassion—without memorizing a script.

That's when caregiving becomes intuitive.

What's the biggest misconception families hold about the behaviors they're seeing?

The biggest misconception is that behaviors are intentional.

Families often think their loved one is being stubborn, manipulative, lazy, difficult, or choosing not to cooperate.

Most of the time, those behaviors are symptoms of a brain that can no longer process the world the way it once did.

When caregivers stop asking, "Why are they doing this to me?" and start asking, "What is their brain no longer able to do?" everything changes.

You often use the image of a backpack to describe what caregivers carry. Can you explain that?

I often tell caregivers to imagine they're carrying a backpack.

When they first begin the dementia journey, that backpack starts filling with heavy bricks: grief, resentment, guilt, shame, embarrassment, anger, frustration, loneliness, and loss. Over time, the weight becomes exhausting.

What's fascinating is that many of those bricks aren't created by the disease itself—they're created by the explanations we use to make sense of the disease.

When a caregiver doesn't understand why their loved one insists something happened that didn't, they may conclude, "He's lying to me."

When someone refuses help or accuses a family member of stealing, the explanation often becomes, "She's being manipulative."

When someone repeats the same question over and over, caregivers may believe they're doing it to be difficult or to get attention.

Imagine how heavy it would feel to care every day for someone you believed was intentionally lying to you, manipulating you, or making your life harder on purpose.

At Better Dementia, one of my goals is to help caregivers put down those bricks.

When we understand how dementia changes the brain, behavior stops feeling so personal. The mystery begins to disappear. We no longer have to assume bad intentions because we finally understand what's happening neurologically.

Knowledge doesn't remove the grief of caregiving, but it does lighten the emotional load. And when caregivers are carrying less weight, they have more capacity for patience, compassion, and connection with the person they love.

You teach caregivers to see behavior differently. What does that shift look like in practice?

One of the most important shifts I teach caregivers is to stop asking, "How do I stop this behavior?" and start asking, "What is this behavior telling me?"

Behavior gives us clues about how someone is experiencing the world. It tells us something about what's happening inside—but interpreting those clues isn't always straightforward.

Is the brain misprocessing the situation because of dementia?
Is there an underlying neurochemical imbalance, such as depression, anxiety, psychosis, or severe agitation?
Is there an untreated medical problem like pain, infection, constipation, or dehydration?
Or is the person reacting to a loss of dignity, independence, or control?

Each of these possibilities can produce similar behaviors, but they require very different responses. If we assume every behavior has the same cause, we're likely to choose the wrong intervention.

That's why I teach caregivers to become curious instead of reactive.

Rather than seeing behaviors as problems to eliminate, we learn to see them as information to interpret. Sometimes the answer is changing the environment. Sometimes it's changing the way we communicate. Sometimes it's recognizing a medical issue that needs attention. And sometimes it's understanding that the brain can no longer process the situation the way it once did.

Untreated psychiatric symptoms are a form of suffering. Fear, anxiety, depression, paranoia, hallucinations, and agitation are not simply "dementia behaviors" to be endured—they often represent profound emotional distress that deserves thoughtful assessment and compassionate treatment. My role is to help families distinguish what they're seeing so they can respond in ways that reduce suffering, improve well-being, and preserve the dignity of the person they love.