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Making a Successful Move to a Senior Community: Managing Separation Anxiety

Newtown Square Friends & Neighbors, May 2022

Moving into any senior community — whether it’s Assisted Living, a Personal Care Home or a Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC) — is a dynamic process marked by an array of transitions and unknowns. This transition can be stressful and sometimes traumatic for all involved if it happens abruptly. Family members are separating themselves from a loved one, and the senior is starting a new chapter of their lives.

Some amount of separation anxiety is normal, although it becomes problematic when it disrupts a person’s life. When excessive displays of fear, worry or distress are seen, it can have additional negative effects on emotional function, family life
and even the physical health of those involved.

Strategies are available to manage separation anxieties. In addition to pharmaceutical interventions (prescription medications to help a person through their most acute symptoms) and support groups (to help provide alternative thinking and experiences from those in similar situations), there are also more targeted management strategies to ease separation anxiety.

Some family-centered actions to take include:
• Treat the anxiety seriously and react with understanding and patience.
• Stay calm, matter-of-fact and sympathetic. Acknowledge the stress for everyone and that these feelings are normal.
• Practice short-term separations. Schedule visits where the individual spends a day within the eldercare community, letting everyone involved experience the separation. These scheduled visits can include respite stays and/or joining resident activities within the community.
• Prepare the senior for the separation by reassuring them the family will be communicating with them and seeing them regularly.

The senior must develop an adequate sense of safety and trust in the new environment and with the new care team outside of the family. Family members need to maintain control over their own anxieties. If the senior senses distress, it may signal doubt and increase anxiety.

Separation anxiety is a potential issue for anyone in a family’s social network. It can be a stress point that contributes
to a delay in making decisions, or worse, inaction at critical junctures. Failure to anticipate separation anxiety during the transition can create financial or emotional burdens for the family, while putting the senior’s health and well-being at risk. Having frank conversations based on facts and not hearsay, along with reliance on experts for assistance, are sound ways for managing separation anxiety.