When Sad Turns Dangerous: Drawing the Line in Dementia Care

 

You Don’t Owe Blind Loyalty to a Memory
For caregivers facing the hard line between sadness and danger.

There’s a difference between distress and destruction. Confusion, paranoia, or emotional outbursts can be painful — but this post speaks to something more: when behavior becomes unsafe.

Dementia is heartbreaking. Losing someone to confusion, memory loss, and withdrawal can feel like mourning the living. That’s sad — and many caregivers endure it with love, devotion, and tolerance.

But sometimes, what comes through isn’t just confusion or forgetfulness. It’s destruction. It’s danger.

Dementia can unmask traits that were always buried — cruelty, control, entitlement. Or it can twist someone into a person they never were: aggressive, volatile, sexually inappropriate.

That can look like:

• Relentless verbal abuse or threats
• Destroying furniture, breaking objects, punching walls
• Inappropriate grooming behaviors toward family members
• Physical violence, stalking, or delusional accusations
• Unwanted sexual attention directed at adult family members, caregivers —
  or in rare and disturbing cases, even pets
  This can include delusions of romance or fixation

Let’s put dementia and its associated brain damage off to the side. If someone had a traumatic brain injury or schizophrenia and started behaving this way, we wouldn’t say, “That’s just the illness.” We’d say, “This isn’t safe.” We’d get help. We’d demand sedation. We’d draw a line.

Dementia should be treated the same way.

You don’t owe blind loyalty to a memory — to who someone used to be. Love doesn’t mean accepting harm — no matter the cause. It means recognizing when care becomes self-erasure.

Protect yourself. Protect others. Grieve if you must — but don’t excuse what’s become dangerous. This isn’t abandonment. It’s survival. Not just for yourself, but for others. Your tolerance and acceptance should never outweigh the risk to others. Expecting them to accept it — assuming they will understand — is not only intolerable, it is criminal.

And yet — before it turned, you gave what few can: love to someone who may not have known you at all. You fed them, held their hand, wiped their face, waited patiently for a name that never came. You remembered them when they forgot you. That matters. That is love.

But love does not require you to vanish. And when what remains begins to harm, you are allowed to say — this is no longer them. And I am still me.