What If the Person Inside the Diagnosis Is Still There?
If you are caring for someone with Alzheimer’s disease, you already know the moment I’m about to describe.
You are sitting in the room with someone you have loved your entire life. Your parent. Your spouse. Your lifelong friend. The person who once knew your name before you said it, who could read your mood from across the room, who carried a lifetime of shared history in the space between you.
And that far away look in their eyes makes you feel as though they are not present in your world anymore.
That moment is one of the loneliest experiences a human being can have. The grief of losing someone who is still physically present. The quiet devastation of a room that holds a body but not the person you came to see.
I have spent nearly forty years as a healer and a minister. My wife Judee has spent her career as a gerontological social worker and dementia care specialist, working directly with Alzheimer’s patients on memory care units. Between us, we have sat with this moment more times than we can count.
And we have come to believe — based on peer-reviewed science, decades of clinical observation, and the results of our own investigation — that the moment may not be telling you the whole truth.
What the Research Actually Shows
In 2014, researchers at the University of Iowa published a study that should have changed how the world thinks about Alzheimer’s disease. They showed patients with severe memory loss clips of happy and sad films. The patients forgot the films within minutes. Some forgot they had watched anything at all.
But the emotions the films produced did not disappear with the memories.
The patients who watched sad films continued to feel sad long after they had forgotten what made them sad. The patients who watched happy films continued to feel elevated long after the memory was gone. And here is the finding that stopped us in our tracks — the less a patient remembered, the longer the emotional state persisted.
The feeling outlasted the memory. In every case.
The researchers stated their conclusion plainly: the emotional life of an Alzheimer’s patient is alive and well.
What This Means for the Person You Love
If the emotional life is intact — if the person inside the diagnosis is still feeling, still responding, still carrying the accumulated emotional weight of a long and complicated life — then two things follow that matter enormously for how we think about their care.
First, they are not gone. Not in the way that the blank stare and the lost recognition suggest. The cognitive architecture has been damaged. The emotional self has not. They are still in there — feeling everything, unable to tell you about it, carrying things they can no longer name or manage on their own.
Second, if they are still carrying emotional weight — the unresolved grief from decades ago, the inherited anxiety from a lineage that survived things that were never spoken about, the accumulated stress of a lifetime that was managed and contained until the disease removed the filter — then the behavioral storms you are witnessing may not be random.
The agitation. The sundowning. The terror that arrives every afternoon without explanation. The resistance to care that seems so out of proportion to what is actually happening in the room.
These may not be the disease misfiring. They may be a person finally broadcasting, at full volume, something very old and very specific that has been waiting a very long time to be heard.
The Question That Changed Everything for Us
My wife Judee observed this pattern for years on the memory care floor — patients whose emotional responses seemed to reference a history that no one in the caregiving team fully knew. A woman who searched the halls every afternoon calling the name of a son who had drowned sixty years earlier. A man whose sundowning episodes included a military vigilance that belonged to a different decade entirely.
These were not random neurological events. They were specific. They were patterned. And they pointed to something beneath the surface that conventional medicine had no tools to reach.
The question we asked was simple: what if there was a way to reach it?
That question became an investigation. And that investigation became a book.
What We Found
Through a series of proxy Emotion Code® sessions with an Alzheimer’s patient in the sundowning phase — sessions conducted at a distance of over two thousand miles — we confirmed that the subconscious of the patient responded with the same clarity and specificity as any cognitively healthy client. Trapped emotions were identified and released. The ages at which those emotions were originally created were pinpointed through the patient’s own subconscious. Inherited emotional patterns from previous generations were found and addressed.
The emotional body was not only present. It was accessible. And it was ready to let go of what it had been carrying.
If This Speaks to You
If you are a caregiver who has been watching someone you love disappear and wondering if anything is still reaching them — something is.
If you are an energy healing practitioner wondering whether your work can extend to one of the most underserved populations in healthcare — the door is open.
If you are simply someone who has always sensed that there is more happening inside a person with dementia than the diagnosis suggests — trust that instinct.
We wrote Hidden Memories — An Investigation into the Emotional Life That Dementia Cannot Erase to document what we found, what the science supports, and what we believe is possible for the millions of families walking this road.
The person inside the diagnosis is still there.
And now, someone finally knows how to reach them.
Hidden Memories is available now on Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions. Visit www.HiddenMemoriesBook.com for more information.
