Naomi Feil was only 8 years old when she moved into what was then known as a home for the aged, where her parents worked. Living there until she left for college, she learned firsthand, by trial and error, how to comfort and communicate with older adults.
When she died at 91 on Dec. 24 at her home in Jasper, Ore., she had devoted her entire career to finding ways to comfort disoriented older people and their caregivers.
Her daughter Vicki de Klerk-Rubin said she died of cancer.
Mrs. Feil was a 24-year-old social worker, convening a group of patients diagnosed as “senile psychotic,” when a staff psychologist at the Montefiore Home for the Aged in Cleveland laid the foundation for what would become the method she called validation therapy.
“He taught us when feelings are ‘validated’ they are relieved,” Mrs. Feil explained on the website of her nonprofit Validation Training Institute in Pleasant Hill, Ore. “‘You are validating your residents, helping them release their pain.’ When social work students asked me what I was doing, I answered: ‘Validation.’ And so a new way of relating was formed.”
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