There is a feeling that dementia caregivers almost never say out loud. The relief when the calls stop for a few hours. The relief on the rare day the disease is quiet. And the thought, quickly suppressed, of relief at what comes eventually.
Every caregiver who has been honest with themselves has felt some version of this. Almost none have said it out loud. This page is here to name it directly, because the silence around this feeling is one of the lonelier parts of the whole experience, and the silence does not need to be there.
Relief is not the opposite of love
Relief and love coexist in dementia caregiving constantly. You can love your parent completely and feel relief when the phone has not rung for two hours. You can grieve someone deeply and feel, in some private part of yourself, that when the journey ends a weight you have carried for years will lift. Neither of these is a verdict on your love. They are honest responses to carrying something that is genuinely heavy.
Research on the dementia caregiver experience, including peer-reviewed analysis of community discussions in r/dementia and r/Alzheimers and the consistent reports gathered in clinical settings, identifies relief as one of the most commonly felt and least expressed emotions in this community. The silence is cultural, not personal. We are taught that love and relief are opposites, so we hide one to prove the other. They are not opposites. They live in the same chest at the same time, and saying so out loud does not diminish the love. It tells the truth about what love looks like when it is being asked to do this much.
The specific relief that comes with the calls
For most caregivers the phone is one of the primary sources of the exhaustion that produces relief when it pauses. A call-free hour is an hour where you remembered that you are also a person with a body, a life, a job, a mind that is allowed to think about something other than the disease. When that hour arrives unexpectedly, what you feel first is relief. The guilt usually follows within minutes.
The guilt that follows that relief is the same guilt that follows not answering a call. It comes from the same place. You understand what the calls mean to your person and you understand the gap between that meaning and your nervous system's limits. That gap is not a character flaw. It is the predictable result of being asked to carry an unsustainable load and being human while you do it. Naming the gap is the first step in addressing it. Trying to feel it less rarely works. Changing the structure that produces it usually does.
What to do with the guilt
The guilt is information. It tells you that you love your person and that the current structure of how the calls are being handled is not sustainable. What it does not tell you is that you are a bad person, a cold daughter, an inadequate son, or any of the other things the guilt likes to whisper at three in the morning.
The most useful response to the guilt around relief is not to perform more emotional labour to feel less of it. The relief is honest. The guilt is a signal. The thing to address is the structural cause of the exhaustion, which for most families includes the volume of repetitive calls feeding the burnout cycle. Read more about that pattern in our piece on dementia caregiver burnout, which covers the research on what produces collapse and what reliably prevents it.
A structural change that helps
The calls themselves can be addressed without relying on your resilience to keep improving. The clinical framework is validation therapy combined with simulated presence therapy: ensuring every call is answered by a familiar warm voice, in a way that meets the emotional need underneath the call rather than arguing with the literal content. Validation therapy is the international standard in memory care. Simulated presence therapy has the strongest research base for repetitive calling specifically.
The most recent randomised controlled trial on simulated presence therapy for dementia, PubMed 38646703, published in the International Journal of Neuroscience, found meaningful reductions in anxiety and agitation when people with dementia received familiar voice support during periods of distress. The mechanism is straightforward. The voice arrives, the person settles, the call ends, and the family caregiver gets back the hours that used to belong to the phone. The relief that follows that change does not come with guilt because the call was answered. The need was met. Both people got what they needed.
KindredMind
Kirstin Thomas, whose mother Sharon has frontotemporal dementia, built KindredMind with co-founder Patrick Armstrong so that the calls could be answered without it always costing the caregiver. KindredMind is an voice companion for dementia families that answers calls in the family caregiver's voice, drawing on a personalized knowledge base the caregiver builds, following the Alzheimer Society of Canada's published communication guidelines for dementia care.
About 90% of calls resolve in the first conversation, because the person reaches for the phone, hears the voice they were reaching for, and gets the warmth they needed. The hours that used to be consumed by the phone can be yours again, without guilt, because she was answered.
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