How to Help Avoid a Cat and Dog fight at a Dysfunctional Family Holiday -Thanksgiving

November 10, 2021

Sparring Cats and Dogs AKA Siblings

The Dysfunctional family on a holiday especially after some holiday liquid cheer, sour step-parents, angry step-siblings, and mid-life adult kids who have grown up in a dysfunctional family can turn into sparring cats and dogs with teeth bared and claws dug in flesh, at Thanksgiving dinner.

Why Their Stocking Full of Coal

As if COVID has not made the holidays hard enough for family gatherings, the ordinary

aging processes are made far tougher when a family has a history of dysfunction. and the worst occasions happen with a dysfunctional family on holidays Aging professionals, like geriatric care managers, have their greatest challenges in working with these “difficult” families.

Dysfunctional families are not able to organize themselves

They effectively face gut-wrenching eldercare challenges and crises. These families are under more stress as they move from long-established roles into uncharted territory. the dysfunctional family on holidays like Thanksgiving can face an emotional detonation then an explosion with siblings laying into each other not the turkey.

Why Cut-OFF Ruins Holidays

The dysfunctional family on Thanksgiving faces shunning or cutoff. What if adult kids “ 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. They are caught between “ I love you” and “ I hate you” and it only takes a few drinks and snarky remarks to start a fracas.

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

SIGN UP FOR MY HOLIDAY WEBINAR –

Get Ready for the Holiday Rush

Tuesday, November 16th, 2021, FROM 2 PM – 3:30 PM PST

Learn how!

Pre-Holiday Social media campaigns to reach worried caregivers
Pre- Holiday-Materials about the warning signs that a parent needs help
Pre-Holiday Technology to help you move people from discovery to signing on the dotted line

How to sell services to desperate post-holiday callers from Normal &dysfunctional & long-distance family
How to use tools to contain Holiday chaos & arrange care in festive family fright
How to move the family to New Year’s stability

Position Your Agency ahead of Care Managers who do not have great preholiday marketing campaigns and lack the clinical skills how to work with Adult Children and families during the chaotic aging family holiday visit when adult kids find their aging parents need care
Featuring Speakers & ALCA Corporate Partners

Cathy Cress MSW author of the Handbook of Geriatric Care

Management

Natasha Beauchamp- MSc, Webmaster and Research Scientist at Elder Pages Online, LLC

Find Out More

THIS FREE WEBINAR IS Tuesday, November 16th, 2021, FROM 2 PM – 3:30 PM PST

Sign Up Now

So what to do if you are an aging professional, geriatric care manager, nurse care manager- before the holiday to avoid the scene below.

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

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

November 7, 2021

The Dysfunctional Family’s Worst Time of The Year

Thanksgiving, coming up soon, is the gateway to the dysfunctional family’s worst time of year- the holidays. Families face each other across the table they despise or just both love and hate. Or there is that empty seat- the uninvited guest- the brother-sister, aunt, son, daughter who is never invited- 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 care managers, have their greatest challenges in working with these “difficult” families around the holidays.

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 Thanksgiving

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 HOLIDAY WEBINAR –

Get Ready for the Holiday Rush

Tuesday, November 16th, 2021, FROM 2 PM – 3:30 PM PST

Learn how!

How to sell services to desperate post-holiday callers from Normal dysfunctional &long-distance family
How to use tools to contain Holiday chaos & arrange care in festive family fright
How to move the family to New Year’s stability

Pre-Holiday Social media campaigns to reach worried caregivers
Pre- Holiday-Materials about the warning signs that a parent needs help
Pre-Holiday Technology to help you move people from discovery to signing on the dotted line
Position Your Agency ahead of Care Managers who do not have great preholiday marketing campaigns and lack the clinical skills how to work with Adult Children and families during the chaotic aging family holiday visit when adult kids find their aging parents need care

Featuring Speakers

Cathy Cress MSW author of the Handbook of Geriatric Care Management

Natasha Beauchamp- MSc, Webmaster and Research Scientist at Elder Pages Online, LLC

THIS FREE WEBINAR IS Tuesday, November 16th, 2021, 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

Caregiver Assessment- What Does It Takes Professionally ?

March 30, 2021

Doing TWO Assessments

To meet the needs of the whole aging family, the care receiver, and the caregivers, GCMs need to begin assessing the caregiver as well as the care receiver. There is a synergy between the caregiver and client – they are interdependent. If the caregiver is stressed or weak the client does not receive good care. They both suffer without supports that a care manager can give them.

A caregiver assessment helps the GCM see this faltering interdependence by using a caregiver assessment. The National Center on Caregiving at the Family Caregiver Alliance calls this a process gathering information describing the caregiving situation and identifying the family caregivers’ particular problems, needs, resources, and strengths. This means that the care manager can see issues from a caregiver’s perspective and can focus on what supports they need to give them the best care. The GCM compares this to the client’s assessment of needs. The result of doing two assessments is discovering both the client/ care receiver needs and restore health and well-being, prevent poor care, client injury or illness, caregiver burnout, trauma or quiting, and unnecessary placement in a nursing home.

Create a Circle of Care

One resource that a GCM can bring to a caregiving family is what Gail Sheehy calls a circle of care. To create this supportive connection, the GCM needs to take her or his coaching skills and put together a support system around the formerly isolated, solitary family caregiver. The GCM can coach the family caregiver to ask for help so the GCM can assist in reorganizing the family so adult siblings can share in the care of the older client with the identified family caregiver. The GCM is what Sheehy calls a compassionate coach who can help the beleaguered caregiver attract and assemble a platform to keep on giving the care she or he wants to give the aging person.

Caregiver Resources

A circle of care includes emotional resources for the direct family caregiver. These emotional resources could and should include adult siblings. Reconnecting midlife brothers and sisters, through the circle of care, is an important GCM task, as siblings are the longest and deepest relationships in any person’s life. The GCM may have to depend on his or her clinical skills in helping siblings with forgiveness or reconnecting siblings who live long distances apart to add them to a circle of care. Midlife siblings have often spent the last 30 years tending to their own families, so the point of reconnection of midlife brothers and sisters often happens when they are in middle age in the midst of a crisis in parent care. This is where the GCM needs to employ clinical skills in midlife sibling work or to find the resources for the family to help with this healing sibling reconnection.

Ten Warning Signs That You Are Working With in a Dysfunctional Family

January 16, 2021

Warning Signs of Aging Dysfunctional Family – Contentiouness, Anger, and Cut Off

Do you know the 10 clinical manifestations that you are working with the dysfunctional family, the most challenging job of an aging professional. What you have to know is family system theory and be clinically skilled in entering this treacherous family system – to get care for an older person

1. Contentiousness – Old fights erupt; the siblings and parent get into arguments with one another about an old issue

2. Anger – Siblings and family members express physical anger, emotional abuse, financial abuse

3. Distancing & cut off – Some siblings or parents have nothing to do with family and may not speak to parents or siblings for long periods of time.

Warning Signs of Aging Dysfunctional Family – Fusion, Denial, Triangulation, Entitlement

4. Fusion – Siblings and family members, such as the mother and eldest daughter, blend into one another, For example, the daughter’s sounds, acts, and has the same prejudices as the mother. . Think of the media’s portrayal of Lindsay Lohan and her mother.

5. Denial – Adult siblings do not see a decline in a parent, do not face reality, and do not take care of the parent if he or she needs care.

6. Triangulation – Tension between two family members or siblings causes one to enlist a third family member or sibling to avoid change For example, two adult sibling object to the cost of care of an aging parent. They gang up on the third adult sibling who thinks the cost of care is reasonable and justified.

7. Sense of Entitlement – Siblings who are accustomed to purchasing services they need not personally solving their own, children’s sibling or parents’ problems. This lack of engagement leaves them, unprepared and unwilling in getting involved in solving family tribulations.

Warning Signs of Aging Dysfunctional Family – Narcissism, Needy Adult Siblings, Substance Abuse and Cut Off

8. Narcissism – One or more siblings has an “it’s all about me” attitude and

other siblings resent this. The self-absorbed sibling either does not participate

9. Needy Adult Siblings – These adult siblings feel starved for affection and often seek affection from professionals and other people in their lives for compensation for the care they didn’t receive as children.

10 . Substance and Other Abuse – The family and siblings have a history of drug, alcohol, and/or child abuse.

If this fits you you and your aging parent needs care may need to contact a geriatric care manager.

Sign Up for My Free January Webinar

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

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 in the YouTube for My YouTube, Channel Geriatric Care 1

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

Ten Warning Signs That You Are Working With in a Dysfunctional Family

Warning Signs of Aging Dysfunctional Family – Contentiouness, Anger, and Cut Off

Warning Signs of Aging Dysfunctional Family – Fusion, Denial, Triangulation, Entitlement

Warning Signs of Aging Dysfunctional Family – Narcissism, Needy Adult Siblings, Substance Abuse and Cut Off

If this fits you you and your aging parent needs care may need to contact a geriatric care manager.

Sign Up for My Free January Webinar

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

Thursday, January 21, 2021

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

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

Sign Up for My Free January Webinar on Dysfunctional Aging Family

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

Contact

Connect with Cathy

Get Cathy’s “10 Critical Success Steps to a Profitable Aging Life or GCM Business”

Sparring Cats and Dogs AKA Siblings

Why Their Stocking Full of Coal

Dysfunctional families are not able to organize themselves

Why Cut-OFF Ruins Holidays

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

SIGN UP FOR MY HOLIDAY WEBINAR –

Get Ready for the Holiday Rush

Tuesday, November 16th, 2021, FROM 2 PM – 3:30 PM PST

Featuring Speakers & ALCA Corporate Partners

So what to do if you are an aging professional, geriatric care manager, nurse care manager- before the holiday to avoid the scene below.

The Dysfunctional Family’s Worst Time of The Year

Families Phantom Limb

Dysfunctional Families Fail Eldercare

Family” Cut” off faces Phantom Limb at Thanksgiving

Subscribe to my YouTube Channel Geriatric Care 1

Doing TWO Assessments

Create a Circle of Care

Caregiver Resources

Warning Signs of Aging Dysfunctional Family – Contentiouness, Anger, and Cut Off

Warning Signs of Aging Dysfunctional Family – Fusion, Denial, Triangulation, Entitlement

Warning Signs of Aging Dysfunctional Family – Narcissism, Needy Adult Siblings, Substance Abuse and Cut Off

If this fits you you and your aging parent needs care may need to contact a geriatric care manager.

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

Thursday, January 21, 2021

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

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

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

Contact

Connect with Cathy

Get Cathy’s “10 Critical Success Steps to a Profitable Aging Life or GCM Business”