“When Repetition Speaks: Rethinking Looping in Dementia”

If you’ve spent any time around someone living with dementia, you’ve probably experienced looping — those moments when a question is asked again and again, or a single story is told on repeat. It can be one of the most quietly exhausting and emotional things for carers. You might answer gently the first few times, then less so, and eventually find yourself counting the number of repetitions and wondering when it will stop, unable to stop resignation or irritation creeping into your voice.

I used to feel that too. But over time, I came to see looping not as a symptom to be endured, but as a form of connection. A kind of reaching out. I imagined a world where everything was in confusion and I didn’t remember very much, but there was someone with me — and it didn’t take much of a leap to realise that I would try and reach out to that person, whether I knew them or not. I could try to engage and connect with them, and they might anchor me to the now for a while. And once I saw it that way, everything changed.

Dementia takes away so much — especially shared memory. And when those shared touchpoints begin to erode, so too does the scaffolding of our relationship with the person. We start to feel like strangers. But in those loops — those fragments a person can still access and choose to share — they are offering us something: the parts of themselves still intact. They are giving us what they can.

I began to think of looping not as being “stuck,” but as reaching for connection. A memory or idea returned to again and again because it still felt familiar, still felt true. It became clear that my father wasn’t repeating himself to frustrate me — he was using the tools he still had to initiate connection. And in a world that had become disorienting and unpredictable, those loops were his anchors.

So I stopped trying to break the loop — or thinking only of its effect on me. I started to meet him inside it.

Instead of saying, “You’ve already told me that,” I said, “Tell me again.” Instead of changing the subject, I joined it — asked questions, brought in gentle detail, lingered there with him. And sometimes, the loop gently widened. Other times it didn’t. But either way, he wasn’t alone inside it.

We talk a lot about person-led care, but sometimes forget that the person isn’t a memory of who they were — it’s who they are right now, even if that means cycling through a single familiar moment over and over again. And when we join them there, we’re not just being kind. We’re accepting the gift they’re offering.

Looping is connection. And like so much in dementia care, it asks us to slow down, soften, and see differently.