My 85 year old mother has always been opinionated - but in recent years, at the same time as she is cognitively declining, she has become more opinionated, and now stubborn, difficult. She’s not bad all the time, but she can be and I’m sure the staff in her started living find her a pain sometimes.
I bear to can’t think about her getting more difficult….
Is there any chance she might mellow as she gets older? Does this happen?
She might become more difficult.
If she is in Assisted Living that is a traditional AL where she can come and go she should probably be in a Memory Care unit.
The staff in MC are usually better trained to help with personality changes.
If you do not have regular Care Meetings with the staff it might be time to make sure those are scheduled so that you are not blindsided with changes that they can not manage. If a resident becomes difficult a facility can ask that you find another place that can manage the resident.
Dementia breaks a person's brain and they lose their ability to use their reason and logic skills; they lose empathy for everyone including people closes to them; their social filters become weaker and weaker. You learn how to redirect conversations or distract or sometimes even to just walk away. Therapeutic fibs are essential. And then there are the medications, which many seniors require because they can no longer bring their own minds to a place of peace and contentment due to the above and memory loss. The beginning of dementia is often the end of happiness for them.
At the end of the day, everyone is different and one person's experience is not the same as another.
Did that change?
Check out meds that can help her. It's not at all unusual for memory care patients to take anti-anxiety meds, and it's a pretty good guess that your mom copes with anxiety by being difficult.