Cathy Cress

Expert in Aging Life and Geriatric Care Management

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Sign Up for My Free January Webinar on Dysfunctional Aging Family

January 14, 2021

5 Vital Clinical Tools to Help Aging Dysfunctional Families-Post Horrid Holidays- 

  Thursday, January 21, 2021

              2:00 3:20 Pacific Standard Time

  Give frantic adult children hope when they desperately call after the holiday

 Join me and learn how to come to the rescue of concierge dysfunctional families who found only coal in their stocking.

Learn how to!

  • Understand the Dysfunctional Aging Family System you must enter to get care for elders
  • Understand 11 Warning Signs You Are Working with Dysfunctional Family 
  • Master Vital Clinical Tools, you to solve client problems
  • Take Six Steps Professional Must Take to Work with These Difficult Families
  • Get care for aging family members when the dysfunctional family members resist

 SIGN UP NOW

Filed Under: abusive aging parents, adult child physical abuse, Adult children, adult emotional abuse, Aging, Aging Alcohol Abuse, Aging Family, aging family and COVID, aging family crisis, aging family system, aging life business, Aging Life Care, Aging Life Care Assocaition, aging life care manager, Aging Mother, Aging therapist, Blog, Borderline narcissistic family, Caregiver Burn Out, Clinical Tools Dysfunctional families, Concierge aging clients, Dysfunctional aging family, Dysfunctional Family & Holidays, Dysfunctional Family System, elder mediator, Families, Filial Crisis, GCM Webinar, Geriatric Care Management Business, Geriatric Care Manager, geriatric care manager, Holiday Meltdown in Aging Family, Holiday Sibling Rivalry, Move Management, narcissistic client, Narcissistic Personality, nurse care manager, POST HOLIDAY SEASON, Post holidays aging dysfunctional family, Sibling Strife Christmas, Sibling Strife Holidays, Siblings, Stepmonster, Symptoms Dysfunctional Family, Webinar, Webinar ALCA GCM Tagged With: aging dysfunctional family, aging life care manager, aging parent care, aging parent crisis, boundaries dysfunctional families, care manager, Clinical Tools Dysfunctional Holiday, dysfunctional family roles, geriatric care manager, help with dysfunctional family, nurse care manager, Tools with Dysfunctional families

Why Do Adult Children Hate and Love Parents in Aging Dysfunctional Family?

January 11, 2021

ed6855aa32d877d7fc1ef9ee757e0f17-98.jpg

The aging dysfunctional family takes an expert to tackle because violence can break out at any time. In the film version of Tracy Letts  August in Osage County. Julia Roberts (the eldest daughter) attacks Meryl Streep (the pill-popping aging mother) at a ritual family gathering- the elder Dad’s funeral after he commits suicide.

 In the dysfunctional family, there have been symptoms of problems such as alcohol abuse, drug abuse, child abuse, or emotional abuse, like the demeaning mother the character Meryl Streep plays in August in Osage County. These dysfunctions usually create barriers to nurturing and this affects everyone in the family system.

The family system is also marked by ambivalence and all adults and children live in a love-hate relationship with other family members. (Julia Roberts character and all the daughter both love and revile their mother ).

 As systems resist change, it is even more difficult for members of the dysfunctional family to move to make changes when their parent needs care, like Meryl Streep does in August in Osage County. Julia Roberts and none of the daughters will care for their despised mother.

 The nearly normal system is shaken to its core by the parent being dependent. However, a care manager can guide the family members into reorganizing their family roles when the parent can no longer act as head of the family, while acknowledging the shift and changes they need to make both emotionally and practically. 

The members of the dysfunctional family who may have experienced a lack of nurturing by their parent and have no role model of caring. They are angry and resentful at caring for the parent, and thus will find it difficult to provide the practical and emotional care that their aging parent needs. The challenge to the adult child of the dysfunctional family is how to meet the dependency needs of the here and now old-old parent when the parent did not meet them dependency needs as a child.  That is why they need a highly experienced Geriatric Care Manager who can work with dysfunctional aging families.

 The challenge to the care manager is to bring the adult child of the dysfunctional family into the here and now and see their parents for who they are- an aging dependent person, flawed and imperfect, but a human being who needs their love, support and nurturing.

 

 

Sign Up for My Free January Webinar  

             Thursday, January 21, 2021

  Give frantic adult children hope when they desperately call after the holiday  

 Join me and learn how to come to the rescue of concierge dysfunctional families who found coal in their stocking.      

Learn how to!

  • Understand the Dysfunctional Aging Family System you must enter to get care for elders
  • Understand 11 Warning Signs You Are Working with Dysfunctional Family
  • Master Vital Clinical Tools you to solve client problems
  • Take Six Steps Professional Must Take to Work with These Difficult Families
  • Get care for aging family members when the dysfunctional family members resist

 SIGN UP NOW

 

 

Find out more on my YouTube Channel:  Geriatric Care 1 

 

 

 

Filed Under: adult child physical abuse, adult emotional abuse, Aging, aging family crisis, aging family system, aging life business, Aging Life Care, Aging Life Care Assocaition, aging life care manager, Aging Mother, Aging therapist, Blog, Dysfunctional Aging Familu, Dysfunctional aging family, Dysfunctional Family & Holidays, Dysfunctional Family Inquiry, Dysfunctional Family System, estranged siblings, Families, fiscal abuse, Fiscal Elder Abuse, GCM Webinar, Geriatric Care Management Business, Geriatric Care Manager, Holiday Rituals in Aging Family, Long Distance Care, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, POST HOLIDAY CALLS, Siblings, Sign Up Dysfunctional Aging Family, Webinar, Webinar ALCA GCM Tagged With: aging dysfunctional family, aging life and geriatric care management, aging life care management, aging life care manager, aging parent, aging parent crisis, care manager, caregiver assessment, case manager, Clinical Tools Dysfunctional Holiday, dysfunctional aging family, geriatric care manager, Holidays with midlife siblings, nurse care manager, Tools with Dysfunctional families, Violence Dysfunctional Family, Working With Dysfunctional family

Take This Test -Can You Take A Dysfunctional Family Case Over the Holidays ?

December 18, 2020

Do You Have the Clinical Skills to Give Hope to  The  Dysfunctional  Family Calling Desperately On the Holidays –

What does it Take?

    1. Do you know the right caseload mix so you have the intense time to handle these very heavy care families?
    1. Do you have 5 years of geriatric care management practice, a master’s degree to understand and work with them??
    2. Do you have care managers who can work with these complex aging dysfunctional families?
    3. Do you have the business model to realign your caseload for many of these time-intensive cases?
    4. Do you know aging family dynamics or do you have a staff member who does?

    5. Can you increase your staff to do this?
    6. Do You Know How to do a two call intake and complimentary consultation?
    7. Do You know how to make the sale to dysfunctional aging clients?
    8. Are you ready to be fired and have account receivable problems that come with these cases?
    9.  Do you know how to answer the challenge the dysfunctional, needy demanding adult children face and the client’s needs at the same time?
    10. Do you know how to hold an impromptu family Dysfunctional meeting with adult children, over the hectic holiday to plan care for aging parents?
    11. Can you work with narcissistic entitled older clients who are very demanding?
    12. Can you  emotionally handle the demeaning, blaming attitude of narcissistic old and new monied clients
  1. SIGN UP FOR MY WEBINAR To Find Out Clinical Tools to

  2. Work With These 

  3. Families 

  4.  

      Sign Up for My January Webinar  

     Working with Aging Dysfunctional Families- January and February-Long Day’s Journey into Night- 

                 Thursday, January 21, 2021

      Give frantic adult children hope when they desperately call after the holiday   Join me and learn how to come to the rescue of concierge dysfunctional  families who found coal in their stocking.      Learn how to:family-charis1-226x300.jpg Understand the Dysfunctional Aging Family System you must enter to get care for elders   Understand 11 Warning Signs You Are Working with Dysfunctional Family    Master the 5 Clinical Tools – you need – to solve these problems with your clients   Learn Six Steps Professional Must Take to Work with These Difficult Families    

     

     

     

    Find out more in the YouTube for My YouTube, Channel  Geriatric Care 1

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  1.  

Filed Under: Aging, Aging Family, Aging Life Care, aging life care manager, Blog, care manager, case manager, Clinical Tools Dysfunctional families, Concierge Senior, Dysfunctional Aging Familu, Dysfunctional aging family, Dysfunctional Family & Holidays, elder care manager, estranged siblings, Families, Filial Crisis, FREE WEBINAR, Geriatric Care Management Business, Geriatric Care Manager, geriatric care manager, geriatric social worker, Holiday Meltdown in Aging Family, Holiday Rituals in Aging Family, Long Distance Care, Narcissistic Personality, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, Quality of Life for elders, sibling rivalry, Sibling Strife Christmas, Sibling Strife Holidays, Siblings, Spoiled Holiday Rituals, Therapist Specializing in Aging, Webinar Tagged With: aging dysfunctional family, aging family, aging life care manager, aging parent, aging parent care, care management, care manager, case manager, dysfunctional family, geriatric care manager, nurse care manager

I’ll be Home For Christmas in Spite of COVID if my Sibling’s Not there

December 6, 2020

      

 Holiday Films Can Be About Ruptured Relationships        

For many of us, the road home for the holidays is rutty especially this year with rampant COVID. For some, the path has gaping potholes. It can remind us of childhood conflicts between siblings that ruptured our relationship. Adult children who would still gather with elderly parents and siblings may be glad we all should not travel on the holiday this year due to the pandemic, as they avoid the awful holiday with an estranged sibling.

A great film to watch for nasty sibling rivalry with the comic brilliance of Vince Vaughn and  Paul Giamatti is Fred Claus. Fred neglected by Mrs. Claus by favorite son St Nick, who takes all his presents, turns to life as a repo man to get even. It sounds like a dumb film and is a little dumb but has a stellar cast in Kathy Bates, Miranda Richardson, Kevin Spacey, and Rachel Weisz. 

Adult Sibling Rivalry Usually Starts in Childhood

Serious sibling rivalry happens when the damage was done by a sister or brother years ago, leaving a  never healing gash in our mind. In fact, that old wound from a sibling may still fester and ooze enough to lead us to say we believe we don’t want to see the family on the holidays.

We feel we hate our siblings for many different reasons. The chief complaint that lurks in our mind is that Mom or Dad favored them over us. She got the new prom dress for her high school celebration, and a few years later we ended up with her hand-me-down. Dad sent him to a great four-year college, and we were sent to a community college near home. She was the baby so got to grow up with late curfews and loose rules, when Mom and Dad were unbearably strict with the rest of us. He was the oldest and Mom needed him to take care of the bunch of us, so she let him boss us around. He was the stepsibling who moved in and took over half our room.

Sibling Rivalry Can Stop Adult Children FRom Helping Aging Parents Stay Safe From COVID

That can all come back again if adult children do travel back for the holidays, against all CDC and State warnings. Just traveling back could give the adult child or worse, the elderly parent, the unwanted gift, like lethal coal in their stocking,  COVID. But if the siblings do journey all back to the family celebration, they all can open Pandora’s box of the past, picking favorite siblings or parental slights. Whatever happened in their childhood, can flashback like holiday PTSD. If the aging parents are struggling they may look for a GCM, so make sure that skill is on your website and be very sure you have skills in working with sibling rivalry.  My book Care Managers Working with The Aging Family has a chapter in it with tools to work with adult siblings.

Siblings Need TO Work Together to Keep Aging Parents Safe From Pandemic

This is a time when adult parents need adult siblings to work together as a team to ensure aging parents’ safety during COVID. This means not even going home to risk COVID. Adult children staying home also means one sibling setting up a virtual family

meeting to create a family plan to increase aging parents quality of life while sheltering in place alone with rising loneliness and isolation, It means making sure they have and are using all safety precautions against getting the virus and having a family plan if they are hospitalized, then discharged to recover or even to recovering with no hospitalizations if hospitals are full and turn patients away. . A geriatric care manager can offer that to the family.

Start a Coaching COVID Service for AGING Families

So pre Holiday, add Coaching Adult Children  and marketing this skill  to Help their older relatives with COVID risks and use your knowledge of helping adult sibling strife to help them help their

parents as a family team

 

 

Filed Under: Aging, Blog, COVID & HOLIDAY SEASON, Covid Holiday Remote Visit, COVID-19 & Care Management, COVID-19 &Shelter in Place Plan, COVID-19 Emergency Plan, Cut-Off, Dysfunctional aging family, Families, Geriatric Care Management Business, Holiday Meltdown in Aging Family, Holiday Rituals in Aging Family, Holiday season, Holiday Sibling Rivalry, HolidaySeason and COVID, Senior Isolation, Senior Loneliness, sibling rivalry, sibling sharing care, Sibling Strife Christmas, Sibling Strife COCID, Sibling Strife COVID, Sibling Strife Holidays, Siblings, Virtual Family Meeting, Virtual Family meeting COVID Tagged With: aging family, aging life care manager, care manager, case manager, estranged midlife sibling, geriatric care manager, nurse care manager

When “Cut Off” in The Family is a ” Phantom Limb” at Thanksgiving

November 26, 2020

The Dysfunctional Family’s Worst Time of The Year

Thanksgiving can be the gateway to the dysfunctional family’s worst time of year- the holidays. You face family across the table you despise or just both love and hate. Or there is that empty seat- the uninvited guest- the brother-sister, aunt, son, daughter who you never invite- the cut off-family member. 

Families Phantom Limb

But since this leaves the family with that “phantom limb”- like the awful sensation that an amputated or missing limb is still attached and where it was is pulsating in pain- families reach out for someone to fix it.

The ordinary aging processes are made far tougher when a family has a history of dysfunction. Aging professionals, like geriatric care managers, have their greatest challenges in working with these “difficult” families around this time of year.

 Dysfunctional Families Fail Eldercare

Dysfunctional families are not able to organize themselves effectively in the face of eldercare challenges and crises. These families are under more stress as they move from long-established roles into uncharted territory.

Family” Cut” off  faces Phantom Limb at Thanksgivingimages_20141216-184443_1.jpg

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 the holidays are arriving – they have the same attitude about attending the family Thanksgiving dinner.

My favorite aging dysfunctional family  ” cut off ” Thanksgiving film is  Pieces of April  Made as a comedy in 2003, it touches death and dying, sibling rivalry, mother-daughter estrangement, interracial love- and Alzheimer’s all fueled by deep family fault lines and how to cook a turkey on a broken stove. The film manages to make the old theme of fraught family Thanksgiving, crisp, funny, and ultra worth watching.I ordered it from Netflix but you  can watch on YOUTUBE 

 Shot in 3 weeks for a measly $350 K, it received a Sundance Film award and accolades for its pedigree cast including 21-year-old Katie Holmes as the grunge Goth daughter who her family has ” Cut Off”, Patricia Clarkson as the dying  Mom who distains then forgives her rebellious eldest child and Alice Drummond as the demented grandmother who comes along and plays the most rational person in the film in her obliviousness to the family holiday freak-out.

SIGN UP FOR MY WEBINAR

 

8 Ways to Tame the Turmoil of the Holidays & Twindemic in the Aging Family

 Learn how!

  • How to sell services to the desperate Aging Family during the holiday surge
  • How to give hope to frantic children who call when their aging parent struggling with Loneliness and isolation on the holidays
  • How to help the Aging Family make holiday visits remotely or safely in person
  • How to counsel the Aging Family to track aging decline &Twindemic risk in loved ones
  • How to work with both dysfunctional and long-distance families who call during the holidays
  • How to use GCM tools to contain Holiday chaos
  • How to use financial forecasting to prepare for business growth during the holidaysed6855aa32d877d7fc1ef9ee757e0f17-98.jpg

Sidestep the Many Care Managers Who Do not know how to work with Dysfunctional family or do COVID Coaching of Aging Families so the client chooses you

THIS FREE WEBINAR IS Thursday, December 3, 2020, FROM 2 PM – 3:30 PM PST

Sign Up Now

 

 

Find out more about Holiday Adult Child Freak out- in the YouTube for My YouTube, Channel  Geriatric Care 1

 

 

Subscribe to my YouTube Channel Geriatric Care 1

 

Filed Under: Adult children, Aging, Aging Alcohol Abuse, Aging Family, aging family crisis, aging life business, Aging Life Care, Aging Life Care Assocaition, aging life care manager, Aging therapist, Blog, care manager, case manager, Cut Off, Dysfunctional aging family, elder care manager, Families, Geriatric Care Management Business, Geriatric Care Manager, geriatric care manager, geriatric social worker, Holiday Meltdown in Aging Family, Holiday Rituals in Aging Family, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, Siblings, Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving Parent crisis, Therapist Specializing in Aging Tagged With: aging family, aging family Thanksgiving, aging life care manager, aging parent crisis, aging parent Thanksgiving, care manager, case manager, cut -off, dysfunctional family holidays, geriatric care manager, Katie Holmes, Marriage and Family Therapist, nurse care manager, Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving with aging parents, Thanksgiving with dysfunctional family, Therapist in Aging

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