A New Way to Care: Navigating Change When Your Loved One Moves Into Senior Living

You’re not stepping away from care. You’re stepping into a new way to care.

The moment your loved one moves into senior living, everything changes—except no one tells you how. In A New Way to Care, senior living expert and relational care educator Deborah Bakti offers the book she wished she had: a practical and deeply human companion for one of life’s most disorienting transitions that offers a stronger, more sustainable way forward.

Moving a loved one into seniors’ care is not just a logistical shift—it is an identity shift. The role you have been living as primary caregiver, coordinator, and decision-maker has changed overnight, and no one handed you a new job description. Grief, guilt, and uncertainty rush in, along with a quieter fear: Am I still doing enough? Am I still a good spouse, son, daughter, partner? Drawing on two decades of work experience in senior living, and her own experience moving three family members into different levels of care, Bakti offers a powerful reframe: You’re not stepping away from care. You’re stepping into a new role—from primary caregiver to care partner.

Through her Relational Approach™ framework, you will learn how to navigate the emotional complexity of this transition, how to build a trusting relationship with the team now caring for your person, and how to step into a new role that is still caring, still connected, and far more sustainable. Woven throughout, Care Leader Reflections give administrators and care team directors—those who shape senior living culture—the language and tools to build stronger family partnerships from day one.

Warm, honest, and grounded in lived experience, A New Way to Care by Deborah Bakti gives families the clarity and confidence to move from overwhelmed to grounded, from crisis mode to care partner, and to walk this unexpected path with intention, connection, and care.