This self-published, train-the-trainer manual can help understand how to best communicate with people who are nonverbal, whether with dementia, developmental disabilities, or autism. Using the manual can help people with dementia feel seen, heard, and valued.

Dance/movement therapists, psychologically oriented dancers, body-mind practitioners, and care providers with significant experience in both embodied practices and dementia can learn experiential structures to use to train others because people learn best through experience. Trainers may use the structures presented verbatim or adapt sequences and scripts to best suit the needs of trainers and trainees.

The manual was co-authored by myself with Dr. Meg Chang and is based on my 40+ years experience working with people who are nonverbal. It is spiral-bound, has 128 pages, and is indexed.

What people are saying:

Dr. Michael Verde of Memory Bridge: " "more than just another how-to guide in the field of dementia care, [I]t is, rather, a way-to-be-together guide. It is a perfectly timely book that animates hope, heralding a way by which life can move through our bodies to a place that dementia can never reach.”

Board-certified dance/movement therapist Pattee Russell Curry: "The Dance of Interaction . . . makes accessible to the elderly, or to any challenged population, a community of connection, compassion and relationship, when language fails. . . . {T]his book helps trainees become more in-tune with . . . how their touch conveys warmth and caring, impatience, or intolerance.... Rather than feeling invisible or ceasing to exist as the person with dementia loses verbal communication, caregivers who affirm that the person is cared for, seen and understood, validate and affirm their very existence and value. This is humane care, and the dignity that each of us hope will be ours in our later years.... The manual’s Appendix pages with clear boxes, make this a great and easy tool for the trainer of trainees.