Yowei Shaw

The diamonds are the things that can't be changed.

Like for Sally, it says, sudden death of husband.

And then the circles, these represent the things that can be addressed, maybe in therapy.

For instance, Sally feeling like she's the only one, that everyone has to rely on her, when in fact there are other family members who could step up.

Finally, the squares.

These are the potential effects of this challenging situation.

For example, that Sally is burned out or that her mom feels guilty about not being able to care for her husband.

Claudia and Sally will constantly return to this map.

updating it and seeing what they can try to change to improve the situation.

It's a lot of information and the process can take months, even years, and really only scratching the surface.

But these are the first steps of acceptance and commitment therapy, Claudia's version of it.

And Claudia says early studies of this therapy have been promising.

They're showing it can actually help with dementia, caregiver burnout and depression.

Oh, interesting.

Claudia walks us through how ACT could help Brian.

She says a lot of the time caregivers can get stuck in a specific situation because there's some feeling they have that they don't pause to investigate.

They're just reacting.

And it can prevent them from implementing a possibly really obvious fix.

Not wanting to take off the cupboard door could sound like a small thing.

Just setting a tiny boundary.