dysfunctional aging family Archives ⋆ Cathy Cress

Do Holidays Open the Sibling Wound Mom Loved You Best –Treated With Lots of Alcohol?

November 9, 2018

Holidays can sometimes trigger old brother or sister hurts that never healed. Joy to the World can turn into something from Black Sabbath. Perhaps an adult child avoids midlife siblings and family Thanksgiving because there’s “bad blood” from childhood. Maybe they steer clear of Mom’s holiday dinner so you can skip seeing sisters and brothers who gouged childhood wounds. The scar has built up over decades and if they attend they dive for the alcohol which is plentiful in these ritual celebrations. What can result is nasty sibling fights over the past not Mom and Dad needing care.

Maybe there just was not enough love your rickety family nest, making siblings scramble for the few caring crumbs. Kid brothers could have slugged other siblings behind Mom’s back. Maybe a sister got the new prom dress when younger girls did Goodwill or the hand me down.

Divorce often shattered families leaving you with two houses, two beds, two sets of parents, and stepsiblings who fought for parent’s diminished love. No matter what the grievance story – holidays are when they might want to think about forgiveness because all hands are needed on deck when parents are failing with age.

The season of not so much joy brings calls to care managers from desperate adult children noticing melting down parent’s who are fixture in the family. They call a GCM for advice and the main task is often to make a family sibling team that was not a team 30 years ago.

Need help in creating that team?

Join me in my new free Webinar

5 Ways to Tame the Turbulence of Holiday Meltdown in Aging Families

During the busiest season for care management referrals-

You Will Learn:

How to give hope to frantic children who call, after seeing their aging parent struggling with the rituals
How to sell services during intake, to desperate adult child callers
How to use GCM tools to contain Holiday chaos among siblings
How to use financial forecasting to prepare for growth during the holidays
How to work with both dysfunctional and long-distance families who call during the holidays
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When Aging Mom Burns the Turkey Adult Kids Call a Care Manager

October 25, 2018

Thanksgiving is around the corner and it will have care manager’s cell phones buzzing with desperate dysfunctional aging family members calling.
The ordinary aging processes, like family rituals, are made far tougher when a family has a history of dysfunction. Aging professionals, like aging life or geriatric care managers, have their greatest challenges in working with these “difficult” families.
Dysfunctional families are not able to organize themselves effectively in the face of eldercare challenges and crises. Every holiday becomes a new crisis. They often can’t even cook the turkey or often an aging Mom just burns it. These families are under more stress as they move from long-established roles into uncharted territory.
What if they “cut off” their Dad years ago and now he had a severe stroke-what do they do?? Someone has to take over Mom or Dad’s care and these dysfunctional midlife adult kids are heavy ambivalent or just don’t want to do it.
Now that Thanksgiving marching towards us and families are making plans– they have the same attitude about attending the family Thanksgiving dinner.
Here are 3 things you can do as a care manager to help aging clients and their kids avoid acid reflux and burnt turkeys

1. Read Lynn Lynn Hackstaff’s chapter, Difficult Families: Conflict, Dependence, and Mutuality: Care Management with the Difficult Aging Family in the new Handbook of Geriatric Care Management 4th edition

2. Watch my YouTube channel Geriatric Care 1 and subscribe

3. Join me in my new Webinar

5 Ways to Tame the Turbulence of Holiday Meltdown in Aging Families
During the busiest season for care management referrals-

You Will Learn:
 How to give hope to frantic children who call, after seeing their aging parent struggling with the rituals
 How to sell services to desperate adult child callers
 How to use GCM tools to contain Holiday chaos
 How to use financial forecasting to prepare for growth during the holidays
 How to work with both dysfunctional and long-distance families who call during the holidays
• Sign Up or Find out more
•
•
•

Thanksgiving Going HayWire? Call a Care Manager

October 19, 2018

The holiday season in the aging dysfunctional family triggers amped up turmoil. Mom can’t cook the turkey, she forgets to wrap presents, Dad’s not just drunk but he’s wandering. Prepare to handle these fractured families when the adult children call a care manager for help. Revisit the Thanksgivings many of these now baby boomers lived in the 1970’s
Kids who grew up in the 70’s will soon have Thanksgiving with their 70 or 80-year-old aging parents.Will they recall the ” Ice Storm”?
In the film, it is Thanksgiving weekend in the early 70″s and a boyish Tobey Mc Guire returns home from prep school to a Thanksgiving feast that his sister starts with this prayer.
” Dear Lord, thank you for this Thanksgiving holiday. And for all the material possessions we have and enjoy. And for letting us white people kill all the Indians and steal their tribal lands. And stuff us like pigs, even though children in Asia are being napalmed.”
So we begin the descent down the cusp of the 1970’s as the nearly normal family shapeshifts into dysfunctional in Ang Lee’s brilliant film The Ice Storm.
Lee’s Thanksgiving classic is the perfect reflection of some family’s plunge into the early 70’s season of hell.
If you’re in your 40’s and grew up with parents have gone haywire through 70’s social change, you will remember the ice storm.
Divorce imploded the family, as we knew it. If you were a parent then you may recall, Nixon resigning, key parties, (swinging couples affairs), Watergate, Deep Throat and self-help books or hear David Bowie who did the soundtrack to the film.

With Lou Reed you can loop back to his fabulous song of that spins the period Walk on the Wild Side and maybe recall the template for it the entire era the -book, Open Marriage.

Children of this social tumult may now share another Thanksgiving with the aging parents who put them through hell. What will they do when they find they have to care for those same parents who did not care for them? When they return to Thanksgiving they may call an aging life or geriatric care manager. Are you ready?
Learn more about what you can do for dysfunctional families and give them hope when they call desperately call this holiday.

Join me in my new Webinar November 14 2PM PST

10 Steps Tame the Turbulence of Holiday Meltdown in Aging Families

During the busiest season for care management referrals-

You Will Learn:

How to give hope to frantic children who call, after seeing their aging parent struggling with the rituals
How to sell services to desperate adult child callers
How to use GCM tools to contain Holiday chaos
How to use financial forecasting to prepare for growth during the holidays
How to work with both dysfunctional and long-distance families who call during the holidays
- Sign Up

Watch my YouTube Channel Geriatric Care 1 and learn how to work with the dysfunctional family who will desperately call around the holidays

10 Steps to Market to & Serve Wealthy, Demanding Long Term Aging Clients Like Donald Trump

September 6, 2018

How Do You Deliver Your Value Proposition of serving long-term clients from the top 10% financially- who can offer sustainable financial growth to your Aging Life or GCM company?

You offer superior professional Concierge Service to Client and Family- Care they demand when you need it

You offer preventative care to avoids Crisis -Helps Keep Clients Out of E room and nursing homes and Keep them at home where they wish to be

You write or rewrite your business plan that has a value proposition that includes your marketing plan to reach your target markets o concierge clients in the upper 10% and the third parties who in many cases serve them as well, like elderlaw attorneys and upscale assisted living.

You Use the value proposition from your business plan – leading to one-time/long term client engagements – How

Deliver concierge service
Offer confidential services that clients and families can trust
Adjust your plan of care as professionally needed for family & client
Serve whole aging family
Provide a GPS through health care needs so that best care is delivered seamlessly
Have a full GCM toolbox and know all community resources –to change tools as client change and age safely in place
Refer or provide skilled background checked home care aides who meet the need of entitled clients
Be willing and skilled enough to accept difficult entitled clients who are narcissistic, demanding and unreasonable like Donald Trump , Sumner Redstone, Huguette Clark
Have someone on your staff who has a clinical background in dysfunctional aging families, and psychodynamic diagnosis
Have upscale resources in your resource database like private drivers, private chefs, car services, upscale golf clubs that cater to older clients, and upscale assisted living

Find out more about a value proposition and subscribe to my Youtube channel Geriatric Care 1 to find out more about marketing Aging Life or Geriatric Care Management.

10 Steps to Take to Serve Wealthy, Demanding Long Term Aging Clients Like Donald Trump

August 11, 2017

How Do You Deliver Your Value Proposition of serving long term clients from the top 10% financially- who can offer sustainable financial growth to your Aging Life or GCM company?

You offer superior professional Concierge Service to Client and Family- Care they demand when you need it

You offer preventative care to avoids Crisis -Helps Keep Clients Out of E room and nursing homes and Keep them at home where they wish to be

You Use the value proposition – leading to one-time/long term client engagements – How

Deliver concierge service
Offer confidential services that clients and families can trust
Adjust your plan of care as professionally needed for family & client
Serve whole aging family
Provide a GPS through health care needs so that best care is delivered seamlessly
Have a full GCM toolbox and know all community resources –to change tools as client change and age safely in place
Refer or provide skilled background checked home care aides who meet the need of entitled clients
Be willing and skilled enough to accept difficult entitled clients who are narcissistic, demanding and unreasonable like Donald Trump , Sumner Redstone, Huguette Clark
Have someone on your staff who has a clinical background in dysfunctional aging families, and psychodynamic diagnosis
Have upscale resources in your resource data base like private drivers, private chefs, car services, upscale golf clubs that cater to older clients, or upscale assisted living

Sign up for my latest free webinar

Cathy Cress MSW, Author of Handbook of Geriatric Care Management- 4th edition. Webinar Series
Upcoming Webinar
Learn The 5 Steps to Reach the Concierge Client
August 23, 2017 11:00 -12:00 PST
Discover how to transform your GCM entrepreneurial dream into a profitable reality with 5 key marketing steps learn more and get the details
Overcome the double bind of your caring model and learn how to care and make money
Create a marketing strategy and messages that attract concierge clients
Reach this target audience
Design products that exactly meet Concierge Clients needs
Obtain adult children’s buy-in
Use words that will make them choose you
Get care staff they will like and not fire
Get the contract signed with ease

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