Dementia & Holidays Archives ⋆ Cathy Cress

What Happens When Mom High Priestess of the Holidays Falls off her Throne?

December 20, 2020

Holidays have traditionally been women’s job.

Mothers are the high priestess of the ritual- like Queen Elizabeth without servants. The UK estimated the there are 25 to do’s women have on the holiday. It takes years to accumulate objects ritual dishes and religious objects used. It takes the left side of your brain executive skills, plans and organize, remember details, does things based on your experience.

Holidays are often done on autopilot

Women–recalling all the jobs that must be done year after year. It also takes IADLs- (Instrumental Activities of Daily Living) meal planning, shopping, plus ambulation. Then add depression – widowhood, loss and you have the challenges of aging in managing this entire titanic ritual. Many times the aging Mom can no longer balance all these plates and the holidays shatter with the crashing dishes.

At some point when Mom cannot do all the maybe 75 subsets of holiday preparation

Then the torch has to be passed and an adult child (usually an adult daughter must take over. This is like secession, – Princess Elizabeth taking over for her Dad, King George, (who hated it and had a lifelong stutter) made famous in The King’s Speech who was handed the throne by his brother Edward who quit being king.

Mom needs to Pass the Torch- Baby Boomers Kids Shocked

Baby boomer- adult children and the aging parents are unprepared by their own culture for this new developmental phase of passing the torch. They do not expect it, like they did the nights of the crying newborn or the rebellious teen, and are thrown off balance by the sometimes sudden and usually unexpected loss of their anchoring aging parents, like when they find Elderly Mom is unable to pull off running the holidays Indeed, what must happen in this new developmental phase is that the adult child must evolve beyond the needy child, (I will still have Mom pull of the holiday as she always did) he or she has been, depending on his or her parents for that fiscal, emotional, social support and ritual organizing parents, like managing of officiating over the Christmas or Hanukkah celebration.

Geriatric Care Manager to the Rescue

In the normal healthy family system this filial crisis of Holiday rituals can be overcome and the adult children with the brief help of an aging life or geriatric care manager so they can let go of their former dependent roles and confront their parent’s loss by organizing and providing care. They can take over Christmas and Hanukkah by stepping in and grabbing that torch.

Dysfunctional Family Do Not Want to Take Over for Mom

In the dysfunctional aging family, this filial crisis is incredibly hard to trounce from both the parents and the adult child’s point of view. The really need a geriatric care manager’s services

SIGN UP FOR MY WEBINAR To Find Out Clinical Tools to
Work With These
Families
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: 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
t

SUBSCRIBE TO MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL GERIATRIC CARE 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFp628rQosw&list=PLUJcFcSOVOC7tOF9l5fYNzzUwHFm6Hw1j

Dysfunctional Family Holiday Mayhem – Mom Can’t 4 Manage the Ritual any Longer

December 4, 2020

What is the Normal Family vs Dysfunctional?

The normal family is the hand grenade compared to the nuclear bomb of the dysfunctional family. When both are faced with a filial crisis with an aging parent being dependent and the adult child needs to take over they cower or explode.

Dysfunctional families have many characteristics.

They lack the ability to resolve conflicts and have frequent psycho-social blockages that prevent the family from growing emotionally. They fail miserably at moving through all family stages and orchestrating family rituals.

Most life transitions in the family, like birth, adolescence, and marriage have been very difficult to make, marked by a lack of support from the parents. Every holiday might have been drunkenly ruined. The parental figures are usually not in charge, nurturing, or able to establish establishes clear rules. They have never created an excel spreadsheet on tasks to do to orchestrate a holiday. Like a disease spreading down generations, they never knew how themselves, as their parents wrecked the holidays too.

Bad or just NO Family Leader

There are murky roles for everyone in the dysfunctional family with the chief role of the parent characterized by a lack of leadership of the family and the ability to nurture the children. Mom rarely became the high priestess on Hanukkah or Christmas, the family members generally do not believe the parent is there for them and can be depended upon. The dysfunctional family is colored by bloody strained relationships and unresolved conflicts and drunken ruined Christmas memories

Dysfunction Families Inspiration For Great Literature

is the inspiration for great literature. O’Neil’s wrenching plays A Long Day’s Journey into Night” portrays the most miserable of dysfunctional families. Alcohol, secrets that have been kept by all for generations splatter the pages of this great play like it does in all the ruined holiday’s children of dysfunctional families recall with horror. Prince of Tides a tale of a southern dysfunctional family gives us timelier glimpses of a family whose center can never hold together and whose blood oozes all over everyone from one generation to the next. Award-winning plays and films, like Tracey Letts August in Osage County about a ruined ritual funeral from hell when Julia Roberts tries to beat up drug-addled, drunk presiding mother Meryl Streep.

Burnt Latkes or the Christmas cookies-inflame the family

When Mom does not make the very small things she was able to pull off like the latkes or the Christmas cookies- she always made every Hanukkah and Christmas, or burns them to a crisp- someone else has got to be the cook, and resentments skyrocket – tempers flare – and the torch just might never get passed.

Someone must take over the holiday rituals

The family is again thrown into crisis. That means someone must take over and the dysfunctional family has no model or spreadsheet to pull off the holidays while caring for a parent who did not care for them.

Can Blue Blue Christmas and Hanukkah Come From Dementia ?

December 2, 2020

As Elvis Predicted

Many families have a Blue Blue Christmas-or Hanukkah. Why does an aging crisis occur so often during the holidays? How can so many desperate adult children get care managers on the phone and howl about Mom or Dad in December? There are a million bad reasons, – too much alcohol, too many folks who do not get along and drink that alcohol. But the physical basis for all of this misery in an elder is often a loss of executive function and IADL’s and ADL’s

Why ADL’s and IADL’s.

It takes IADLs- (Instrumental Activities of Daily Living) shopping for gifts, cooking ritual meals and ADL’s walking to shopping

, decorate serve a ritual meal, climbing ( getting all those decorations out of the attic), grooming ( Mom can be found – in a “messy ensemble” at the feast) by the older person in charge of the holiday to pull it off. Then add depression to the aging stew – widowhood, loneliness and you have the challenges to an elder, usually the woman in the family, in managing this entire titanic ritual.

Crash of Executive Skills

The holidays in aging families can be a disaster for another neurological reason. Mom or Dad’s Executive Skills have crashed just like a computer.

Executive functioning involves the ability to organize, plan, and carry out a set of tasks in an efficient manner. It also includes the ability to self-monitor and control our behaviors and multiple other cognitive functions and to perform the goal-directed behavior. It can be described as high-level thinking skills that control and direct lower levels of cognitive functioning.

Planning for the holidays takes those high-level thinking skills -to execute and carry out 25 different major tasks according to a study in the UK- Just think, planning a

specific holiday ritual menu,( brisket and latkes or popovers and beef prime rib )- then shopping for it cooking it, planning the ritual items in the celebration – a menorah and

Hanukkah bush, Christmas tree, and creche buying them or getting them out of storage on and on.

Why we may end up with burned brisket or turkey.

This is a massive task event/ planning job taken on by one woman usually and as executive functioning power down in her brain- the computer-, which is our aging brain starts to crash- the result- the family freaks out because Mom forgot the ritual steps.

That’s why we need aging life or geriatric care managers to help divide the tasks when Mom cannot do this any longer

Subscribe to my YouTube Channel to learn More- Geriatric Care 1

SIGN UP FOR MY HOLIDAY WEBINAR

FINAL DAY TO SIGN UP!

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 holidays

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

Contact

Connect with Cathy

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