Ten Warning Signs you are Working with Dysfunctional Family represents critical information to share with long-distance caregivers before their holiday visit. Do you know them? They include contentiousness, anger, and cut off and all are listed below. These clinical issues give the visiting caregiver signs that they need to call a care manager and you the care manager 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 parents 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.
Ten Warning Signs You are Working with the 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 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 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 need not personally solve their own, children’s siblings or parents’ problems. This lack of engagement leaves them, unprepared and unwilling in getting involved in solving family tribulations.
Ten Warning Signs You Are Working with a 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 HOLIDAY WEBINAR –
Get Ready for the Holiday Rush
WEDNESDAY, November 16th, 2022, FROM 2 PM – 3:30 PM PST
Learn how to create!
- Pre-Holiday Social media campaigns to reach worried caregivers
- Pre- Holiday-Materials about the warning signs that a parent needs help
- Pre-Holiday Marketing to help you sign up families who might face a serious decline in aging parents
- 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
- Know The Ten Warning Signs you are working with a dysfunctional family and position Your Agency ahead of Care Managers who do not have great pre-holiday 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
Cathy Cress MSW author of the Handbook of Geriatric Care
Management
Find Out More
- Find out more in the YouTube for My YouTube, Channel Geriatric Care 1
One sibling has taken over Mom or Dad’s care and her/his dysfunctional midlife adult siblings just don’t want her to do this. It only takes a few drinks at dinner and snarky remarks start a fracas that leads to cut-off, which leads to them not sharing in Mom’s care, overloading the sibling caregiver, and endangering Mom’s care, through this shunning.
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 
