How to Talk With Your Elders

David Solie, MS, PA
November 10, 2004

David Solie, who was trained in developmental psychology and medicine, is an insurance broker specializing in the needs of the elderly. In the course of his work he's been confronted by repeated episodes of "elder frustration", which results from the inability of professionals to interact effectively with this age group. He has developed considerable insight into the problem, and distilled this into a book: "How to Say It to Seniors". With his permission, we reproduce here some excerpts. Robert Griffith, Editor.

Introduction

There is widespread feeling among my age group that somehow we've failed at trying to communicate with older people, especially our parents. There is a nagging concern that very little of what the generations say to each other sparks real connection. This book shows us why we feel this way and what we can do about it. Nothing in the Aging sections of bookstores and libraries addresses these concerns from an age-based, or developmental, perspective. Most of the available references are what I call the "peppy papers" on how to stay perky despite aging, or the "existential papers" on the grim life of loneliness, uselessness, and boredom that awaits the aged. There are also books on how we can manage the unmanageable older adult. But no book provides a psychological profile that defines what others and I experience in our daily interactions with the elderly. I offer these strategies in an accessible format useful to my fellow baby boomers and colleagues. I believe this is the first book to connect communication difficulties with previously unappreciated developmental conflicts that senior adults must work through as they near the end of their lives.

This book is meant to be both enlightening and practical. The first part presents my thinking about what causes the exasperating verbal and nonverbal behaviors we observe in our elders. Later sections offer practical skills for bridging communication gaps that result from these difficult behaviors. I encourage you to turn first to those sections or chapters that most directly apply to your situation with your elderly relative, colleague, client, or friend, then return to the more theoretical underpinnings of the advice you read.

The goal of How to Say It to Seniors is to help readers improve their relationships with this elderly generation that deserves our best efforts in facilitating their compelling end-of-life tasks. By doing so, we have the privilege of retrieving a world that might be lost to us forever and enriching our lives in ways we can't imagine.

[Now here is David Solie's first example]

The Driving Test

I was sitting next to an elderly couple and their 50-something son early one Sunday morning in a quiet café. From the moment they were seated it was clear the son was irritated with his parents. He tried to hurry their breakfast order, balked at his father's attempt to make small talk with the server, and brushed off his mother's suggestions to let his father "have some fun." His mood made it clear that this family gathering was not about fun. Once they placed their food order, he launched into a discussion of a "family problem" involving his father.

The father, who appeared to be in his eighties, was scheduled to take a written driving test in order to renew his license. The problem, from the son's perspective, was his father's inadequate preparation for the test. The father tried to explain what he was doing to prepare by offering his ideas on test-taking in general. He even wanted to discuss how much the "rules of the road" had changed since he was a boy. His son would have no part of that discussion. He hammered home the message that his dad "just didn't get it." He repeatedly interrupted his parents to point out the lameness of the content of their conversation. "Here is what you need to know," the son insisted, "to pass the test."

Sitting there and listening to this exchange I heard two distinct voices. From the son I heard a steady flow of anxiety, scolding, sarcasm, impatience, and lecturing, tinged with frustration and anger. From the parents I heard embarrassment, puzzlement, shame, guilt, and inadequacy, also fraught with frustration and anger. Their collective resentment soon filled the room. Their food got cold. The bill came none too soon.

The "Secret Mission" of Older Adults

What we as a culture have failed to recognize in the theories about personality development is, simply, that it is a lifelong event: These crises continue well into old age. We have become quite good at understanding the personality drivers of children and younger adults; however, we often fail to appreciate what happens when we get old. Why? We've all been two years old, and most of us have raised children who are traveling through various stages on the road to adulthood. But no middle-aged person knows how it feels to be 70. Without firsthand experience, how can we effectively nurture the elderly? We can't possibly provide them with support for their end-of-life tasks if we don't know what those tasks are.

If personality development is a lifelong process, then at the end of life, the elderly face a developmental conflict they have trouble expressing but must resolve. Seniors' developmental tasks compel them to maintain control over their lives in the face of almost daily losses, and simultaneously to discover their legacy, or that which will live on after them. I describe this conflict as needing to hang on tight while also needing to let go and discover the meaning of their lives.

Trying to resolve this conflict sometimes produces a "difficult" communication style. The elderly will wander from subject to subject, repeat stories we've heard dozens of times, postpone decisions, go off on tangents, or describe something in endless detail. We look in depth at these unique communication styles - and how to respond to them - in a later chapter.

Such verbal behavior can be frustrating to us, because we haven't learned to appreciate the tasks on their agendas. After all, we're at the top of our game. We need to load up the fax machine, whip out that Palm Pilot, make endless lists, and cross off as many items as possible every single day. That process makes the middle-aged feel powerful and in control, as indeed we are. When we encounter these older adults, who move at a snail's pace, we get frustrated and blame them for their supposed infirmities.

That frustration is the crux of our difficulties with senior adults. I call it the clash of two different age-based agendas. We need to slay those dragons and achieve as much as we can, but elderly people have a very different motivators. Control is slipping from their grasp daily, as their health fails and their peer group fades away. Control isn't an issue for the middle aged - we have it, we know it, and we use it - but for a seventy-year-old in failing health, it's a huge issue, because when it begins to slip away, many elderly people feel the need to hang on to everything they can. Rather than see old people as diminished, we need to understand that their drivers do a different job: resolve the conflict between the need for control and the need for reflection in order to discover legacy.

This conflict between hanging on and letting go produces a communication style that we see as diminished or difficult, but the way our elders communicate contains clues to the urgency they feel in trying to resolve these items on their agendas. Only by understanding these behaviors can we begin to improve our relationships with this generation and help them complete their compelling end-of-life tasks.

Handling the Crisis

Now that we understand the dynamics of aging in a totally different way, let's again consider the breakfast meeting that opened this chapter.

How different would the discussion have been had their son realized that passing the written test was not the issue for these eighty-something parents. What was important to them was remaining in control of the process, pass or fail. Had the son known about these developmental tasks, he might have responded in the following way:

How to Say It: "Tell me, Dad, how have the 'rules of the road' changed since you first got your license?"

I guarantee he would have had a more meaningful and productive conversation with his father if he had.

We plan to post further extracts from David Solie's book "How to Say It to Seniors" on HealthandAge.com. You can buy his book at Amazon.com; click here

Source

• David Solie, MS, PA. How to Say It to Seniors: Closing the Communications Gap with our Elders. (2004) Prentice Hall Press, New York.

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