Cathy Cress

Expert in Aging Life and Geriatric Care Management

10 Tinseled Topped Dysfunctional Family Holiday Films to Enjoy On Chrismas Day

Dysfunctional families dread rituals and Christmas or Hanakkuh is a ritual. In the dysfunctional clan, you gather, eat ritual foods and explode. That blast can be triggered by ritual infusions of alcohol, prescription drugs, long-simmering anger, and secrets.

In the film August Osage County, you get a cattle prod version of what family rituals can detonate in dysfunctional families.The ritual is a funeral and Meryl Streep plays the pill-popping mother from hell, Julia Roberts plays one of the angry family members who both hate and love this dying, drunken, 60’s, minted mother. The secret is prescription drugs. 

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In the film August Osage County, you get a cattle prod version of what family rituals can detonate in dysfunctional families.The ritual is a funeral and Meryl Streep plays the pill-popping mother from hell, Julia Roberts plays one of the angry family members who both hate and love this dying, drunken, 60’s, minted mother. The secret is prescription drugs. 

Osage County is one of the nine picks for Best Dysfunctional Family Holiday film. I also favor Katy Holmes is Pieces of April, where she shows herself to be a highly talented actress.She plays a comic- the anguished role of a goth daughter& least favorite child trying to pull off the holiday for her suburban family and dying mother  (award-winning actress Patricia Clarkson)in a drab New York walk up.  This is actually a film with a surprisingly happy ending and is a cult film that will cheer up everyone nearly normal and  dysfunctional families   Here are the other 9 

 Have a Merry Christmas- share joy and watch movies 

Oscar Winning Dysfunctional Devil Mother From Hell- East of Eden

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The holiday season is when nearly normal family- happily gather. Dysfunctional families feel uncertain dread .

They ponder -do they even want to go ? Do they really love certain family members ,like them or just hate them?. Should they take 2 Zanex to face relatives they despise or stock up on wine as a house gift to themselves ?

 Dysfunctional families have a sense of ambivalence- a love hate relationship with parents and or siblings.  Daughters and sons who had a distant, abusive Mom may still love her.  At the same time, however, these adult children recall the splintered and miserable childhoods they endured with internal strife and feelings of anger towards their older Mom or Dad. Similarly, sisters who have been abused or even molested by a brother often feel the contradictory impulses of love and loathing.

A good example of brother-to-brother ambivalence on the holidays is Cal in Steinbeck’s East of Eden , played by James Dean in the brilliant classic film. 

He both loves and hates his twin brother Aaron for being the favorite child. This ambivalence leads to him introduce Aaron to their mother ,who he also loves and loathes.A Monster, she abandoned them as babies and is now a Cruella deVil Madame at a Salinas whorehouse.

 

A remake of the film was planned  starring Jennifer Lawrence of the Hunger Games. If the film is remade she may reprise Jo Van Fleet’s Oscar winning role as Cathy ,the demon mother, who Cal both loved and despised.

When Does the Nearly Normal Family Morph to Dysfunctional?

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Nearly normal families of all types are close-knit, well inte­grated, highly functioning, and sufficiently resilient. Aging nearly normal families are the same. Aging family members can communicate well enough. They accept differences of opinion as an inevitable, normal part of deci­sion making or, in some cases, as opportunities to expand their individual thinking, thereby enabling them to make better-informed deci­sions. They lock arms they encounter a crisis.

 

However, when they face the crisis of their aging parent needing care, healthy aging family’s  become dysfunctional. Never expecting this, although they were already involved, they are stunned by the crisis and forced into action. Adult Children are caught in the vise grip of an elder’s deterioration, or supporting a progressively disabled older relative.  These baby boomers can be confronted by the exhausting overload of long-distance care. This, never-before-experienced stress forces them to work as part of a team to help the older person. They are usually a team but this new life transition is not welcomed like the birth of a baby or a wedding. They know how to move from the role of a Mom to a grandmother. But facing a role of a parent to their parent leave them in terrifying uncharted territory with no GPS.

 

Read the new chapter on care managers working with the nearly normal family in an aging crisis. Get the new Handbook of Geriatric Care Management 4th edition  now– or out in Kindle on Amazon in November (to keep up with technology)

 

 

 

What Is The Nearly Normal Aging Family? Definition

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Most aging families are “Nearly Normal”. They are healthy, not dysfunctional, still have flaws but are knocked off balance by losses sustained when older family members decline or die, caregiving takes up huge blocks of family members’ time, or significant family relationships and continuity disappear.

These losses can disrupt even a healthy family. A “nearly normal” aging family can be righted if they have historically been compatible, cohesive, productive, and stable.

Dread Memorial Day with Midlife Sibings?

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Are you dreading the Memorial Day family barbeque?  . Will your estranged brother be manning the barbeque while you drink too much beer?

Are you a midlife sibling at war with sister or brother? Worse than that, do you feel like you and all your siblings are in not only a dysfunctional family but also an aging dysfunctional family?

What’s an aging dysfunctional family? Well they are very much like a war zone. Clans remain at war with each other, like the 1980’s Serbian conflict or the Iraq war pitting the Sunni’s against the Shia.These tribal battles have gone on for centuries and have the same bloody roots of the dysfunctional family -repeated from one generation to the next.

The hallmarks of the dysfunctional aging family, are after decades as a motley clan there is still not enough love in the family. The now midlife children have to fight for what little nurturance their older parents can bring to the ancient rickety nest they built.

Nurturing is often missing in the dysfunctional aging family because the aging parents themselves probably got little nurturing themselves as kids and on and on back down the family line. Parental neglect and abuse are frequent in the history of the aging dysfunctional family.

The now older parents can suffer from serious mental health problems such as schizophrenia or are bi-polar. Health and addiction problems like alcoholism are frequent.  Family interaction and communication, -parental treatment of siblings, brother and sister treatment of each other stepparent interaction and interface of everyone in the family has wrought deep tissue damage that never healed.

These aging dysfunctional families generally negotiated all of life’s developmental phases with great difficulty. The role in the family, especially the parental one, was murky with a poor, abusive or mentally unfit leader of the family. The rules in the family were unfair ambiguous or full of double binds. There is deep-seated ambivalence. Finally the last life transition in the aging family, the care of the declining parent, implodes the family, which had little balance to begin with. They are asked to care for parents who did not care for them, thus reeking havoc on an already disorganized aging family.

So good luck at the Memorial Day family gathering and perhaps consider hiring a geriatric care manager if you sibling war is affecting not only rituals like family gatherings but also the care of your aging parents. The GCM can help you end the constant hangovers and /or acid reflux.

 

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