Dysfunctional Aging Families Can Wreak Havoc at End of Life

December 6, 2022

What do Feuding families do at the end of life?

When a family member is facing death and dying dysfunctional families have flawed conversations. Often they do not communicate at all or engage in destructive banter. They see one another as enemies. They demonize one another.

Feuding families are what I call dysfunctional families. They blame each other instead of locking arms in a crisis.

They sabotage resolution.

They actively compound already difficult decisions with intractable, interpersonal conflict. They create problems independent of the underlying issues.

Facing Fractured Communication

What are some of the struggles that these aging dysfunctional families with fractured communication can face?

Aging parents who lack the capacity to make decisions have no advance directives, DPOA and a

health-care proxy, and adult siblings, who must make end of life decisions, can’t agree

Withdrawal of life support with no designated health care agent and adult children and/or spouse disagree

Pain management adult children and/or and spouse disagree.

Answer to Fractured Family at End of Life – Mediation.

Mediation is a tool that can be a good resource for dysfunctional families at the end of life. It can help with these difficult families face the death of a parent without fracturing the entire family. It can allow an older person to die without pain inflicted by their own family.

Deliver a Good End of Life- Add Death and Dying to Your Care Management Agency

Serve Your Client Until Death Do You Part

Upcoming Free Webinar

Deliver a Good End of Life 9 Steps to Death &Dying

Jan 24, 2023 02:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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Deliver a Good End of Life- 9 Steps to Add Death and Dying to Your Care Management Agency
Serve Your Client until Death Do You Part
Join me on January 24 2023 and learn why End of Life Services re a perfect new service for care managers
Learn to guide the patient/family through the five stages of death. Understand how to help clients be active participants in their care. Give the family caregivers tools to manage care. Find out how to provide family-centered care to caregivers and family. Learn to choose the right support services for the client through all stages of death.
Introduce Hospice and Palliative care to the client earlier and work with their team.
Find out how Use COVID -19 family coaching for GCM. Discover the role of Death Doula at end of life.

Time

Jan 24, 2023 02:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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Join me Thursday, March 11, and learn why End of Life Services Are a perfect new service for care managers

In this 1 ½ -hour webinar you will learn how to

1. Transition the patient/family through the five stages of death

2. Help clients be active participants in their care

3. Give the family/caregiver tools to manage care

4. Provide family center care to caregivers and family

5. Choose the right support services through all stages of death

6. Introduce Hospice and Palliative care and work with their team

7. Use ALCA End-of-Life Benefits During COVID

8.Use COVID -19 Family Coaching for GCM

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If you really want to add End of Life to your care management business sign up for this webinar now

Ten Warning Signs You Are Working With a Dysfunctional Family

November 3, 2022

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

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Find out more in the YouTube for 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.

Using Telehealth During Covid? Learn to Market GCM COVID -19 Coaching

January 28, 2021

COVID-19 Coaching Service for Aging Families

If you have designed COVID -19 coaching services for your agency or attended my last webinar to learn how to create one using telehealth coaching ( If you missed it click on this link to watch )

Take the next step

Take the next step and learn to market COVID coaching and sign up new clients for your Aging COVID-19 coaching services, for both long-distance and local- adult children. These services need to be based on science and sound public health policies. Help family care providers faced with a pandemic, support aging love ones through a COVID Hospitalization and recovering at home.

Mixed Messaging by Feds creates Chaos 4 Aging Families

Be able to offer care management COVID services that help fill the gap that the new administration is attempting to recalibrate from the last administrations bungled in the federal government, state, county, cities, and CDC‘s mixed messaging, leaving family caregivers confused and frustrated, with no clear path to safety from the raging pandemic,

Gain new customers and help aging families stay safe from COVID using care management’s most potent tool – navigation- through the potholed path they have to safety right now.

Subscribe to my YouTube channel , Geriatric Care Management, to learn more about marketing geriatric care management

Trump’s COVID Mixed Messages Push-Up-Deaths So No CLear Path for AGING Families

September 6, 2020

The World Health Chief warned that in a Pandemic mixed messages coming from national leaders give their people no clear path to follow to keep themselves safe from COVID. This is esspecially true of aging family members who are trying to protect the most vulnerable to coronavirus- older people.

In US Federal Government and US Scientist Point to two Different to paths to” Safety”

In the US Federal officials, like the TRUMP administration offers a murky path to stay safe -while top scientists like the CDC and Dr. Fauci offer science-based recommendations. It is like a signpost is a tsunami zone with two different directions to higher ground. State governors who have been left in charge of protecting American citizens, rather than the federal governments and all have different messages. Some states are closed down, while others do not allow masks in spite of the massive spread of the virus. People do not know what to do, as the Feds, the states, the counties, and cities all have different guidelines and laws about how to stay protected from the worst pandemic since 1918.

President Woodrow Wilson Pointed the Wrong Direction is 1918 Pandemic

It is not new. President Wilson lied to the American public about the 1918 pandemic as he had declared war with Germany and wanted the US war machine to go full throttle. So soldiers in camps in the US died by the thousands and sailed to Europe spreading the 1918 plague, while Wilson never uttered a word, except to say it was like the common cold. He contracted COVID in France, trying to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles, subsequently had a stroke kept secret,(stroke being a side effect of COVID we now know ) and his wife effectively ran the county.

Science is being Maligned and Sidelined in COVID-19

What happens these when confusing messages are given by so many leaders who are not scientists but politicians with their own agenda? Scientists like Dr. Fauci are both maligned and sidelined. .The CDC once the most prestigious health agency in the world is forced to give false scientific information by the TRUMP administration.

One terrifying result is COVID cases are soaring in the US As of September 3, we had 6.1 M cases and 189 K deaths. Younger people and even older residents are celebrating summer and now Labor Day with no masks no social distancing as if there was no COVID. We now celebrate Labor day with people gathering with no masks, college opening with the spread of the virus, and children used as guinea pigs in some states mandated to return the schools that have no federal money to make their classrooms safe

Aging families, who want to keep their loved ones safe need aging professionals to offer clear paths to safety. Can you be that navigator to safety?

5 Steps to Successfully Market Your GCM COVID 19 Telehealth Coaching Service

If you have designed COVID -19 services yourself or attended my last webinar to learn how to coach COVID-19 services or coaching ( If you missed it click on this link to watch )

TAKE THE NEXT STEP MARKET

Learn to market COVID COACHING and sign up new clients for your Aging COVID-19 coaching services for, both long-distance and local- adult children, based on science step and sound public health policies. Help family care providers faced with a pandemic, support aging love ones through a COVID Hospitalization, and recovering at home.

FILL THE GAP LEFT BY FEDS.

Be able to sell care management COVID services that fill the gap created by the federal government, state, county, cities and CDC‘s mixed messaging has created, leaving family caregivers confused frustrated, with no clear path to safety from the raging pandemic,

Gain new customers and help aging families stay safe from COVID using care management’s most potent tool – navigation- through the potholed path to safety from the deadly coronavirus they have right now.

You will learn

How to create an e-newsletter with the right copy, to get out the word about your COVID 19 services

How to use social media to alert aging family caregivers to the clear path your GCM agency provides to safety from the accelerating virus in the US

Be able to set up a Zoom webinar to teach local aging agencies and caregivers about your COVID coaching services and other local resources to assist caregivers in the community

Get local media coverage of your COVID -19 Coaching Services with radio and TV coverage plus pick local newspapers where adds may pay off to sell your COVID Products

How to generate word of mouth customers for your COVID -19 service using your continuum of care in your community

Contact

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