Why Does Love Still Feel Radical in Dementia Care?
I recently attended a training afternoon led by Professor David Sheard (Institute for Health and Care Improvement at York St John University) exploring emotional intelligence in care, something he describes as a ‘new social revolution.’
“Emotional intelligence has been defined as the ability to perceive, use, understand, manage and handle emotions.”
www.emotional-intelligence.care
David has been a pioneering advocate of a ‘feelings philosophy’ being at the centre of person-centred practice, developing the ‘Butterfly Approach’ in the early 1990’s - a culture change model continued today through the work of Meaningful Care Matters.
For decades David has pushed the sector to embrace something that many of us already feel in our bones when working alongside people living with dementia that emotional connection is not an optional extra, it is where it all begins.
After the training, I was left with a few questions that have stayed with me ever since:
Why does love and genuine human connection still feel radical in dementia care?
If we know relationships matter, why do relationship-centred cultures still feel exceptional rather than ordinary?
My own practice was profoundly influenced by training and mentoring with Sally Knocker, consultant with Meaningful Care Matters.
Like many people working in arts and dementia, I initially came to the work through creativity. What Sally's mentoring offered was something deeper, it challenged me to think not only about what activities we do but how we are - it was a new way of seeing that has shaped my practice ever since. Work alongside Sally guided Spark and Dare to Imagine which go beyond activities that we ‘do’ together to valuing ‘being’ together.
One of the crucial elements of the Butterfly Approach is that it’s not just professional development for individuals, it’s a culture change model. It recognises that emotional intelligence is shaped by leadership, organisational values, environments, and systems. It asks what would happen if we genuinely organised care around the principle that feelings matter most, from senior management through every level of an oganisation.
Yet for those of us working outside of ‘Butterfly Homes,’ relationship-centred practice can feel surprisingly lonely. You know what is possible because you have seen another way of working but you are not always in a position to change the culture around you.
I suspect many people working in dementia care, community arts and health settings will recognise this feeling. We attend training, develop our practice and deepen our understanding of what good support can look like. Then we return to settings navigating staffing pressures, funding constraints, inspections, targets and competing priorities - the result can be a gap between what we know is possible and what feels achievable.
Alongside questions of culture and systems, I wonder whether there is another reason love continues to feel radical - professionalism.
Many of us have been taught, either explicitly or implicitly, that being professional means maintaining a degree of distance, empathetic but not emotionally involved.
Of course, boundaries matter, good boundaries protect both practitioners and the people they support. But I sometimes wonder whether, in our attempts to define professionalism, we have become uncomfortable with the very thing that often sits at the heart of meaningful human relationships.
Love - the kind of love expressed through attention, presence, curiosity and genuine care for another person's wellbeing. The kind of love that says: You matter.
In dementia care, I have often witnessed moments of profound connection, a care professional stopping everything to dance and sing with the room, a volunteer remembering a small detail that everyone else had forgotten, a participant reaching out to comfort someone they had only met a few weeks earlier.
These moments rarely appear in reports, outcome frameworks or commissioning documents, yet they are often the moments people remember. Perhaps one of the tensions within health, social care and arts practice is that we want the outcomes of love without always feeling comfortable naming it.
We want connection, trust, belonging and emotional safety but we sometimes hesitate to acknowledge that these things are often rooted in relationships that contain elements of love.
One of the things I appreciate about David Sheard's work is that it challenges the assumption that professionalism requires emotional detachment. Instead, it asks us to consider whether authentic relationships are not a threat to good practice but an essential part of it.
The challenge is finding ways to hold both professional boundaries and genuine connection, accountability and humanity, expertise and vulnerability. Perhaps professionalism should not be defined by how distant we remain from one another, but by how responsibly and ethically we use our capacity to connect.
This thinking led to more questions:
When we talk about emotional intelligence, where do we locate responsibility for making care more human?
Is it the responsibility of individual practitioners?
Or is it the responsibility of governments and the big decision-makers that shape the world we have to navigate, to create the conditions in which humanity can thrive?
This feels particularly relevant within arts and health as many of the project managers, artists, facilitators and community practitioners I know already bring extraordinary emotional intelligence to their work. They create spaces where people feel seen and valued and they hold stories, emotions and relationships every day.
Often, the challenge is not a lack of emotional intelligence, the challenge is sustaining that work within systems that are increasingly stretched. Many arts charities operate with limited resources and small teams and in these circumstances, conversations about emotional intelligence can sometimes feel uncomfortable. Not because emotional intelligence isn't important but because the people being asked to be more vulnerable, more reflective and more emotionally available are often already carrying significant emotional labour.
The risk is that we individualise what are often systemic problems - love may be expressed between individuals, but the conditions that allow love to flourish are structural. They are shaped by policy, leadership decisions, funding priorities, organisational cultures and societal values.
For me, one of the most important lessons from a decade in arts, health and community work is that any individual, any group of people are not problems to be solved, they are human beings to be encountered.
Encounters that require presence, genuine curiosity and often, require love. The challenge is not convincing practitioners of that truth, many already know it. The challenge is creating systems that make it possible to live out that truth every day.
Perhaps the real question is not why love still feels radical, perhaps it is why, despite everything we know, it still feels radical at all.
To find out more about Professor David Sheard’s work visit http://www.emotional-intelligence.care
To find out more about the Butterfly Approach visit https://meaningfulcarematters.com/
