Warning Sign #2 You are Working With an Aging Dysfunctional Family

January 18, 2021

Dysfunctional Families and Anger – physical anger, emotional abuse, financial abuse

Fiscal and emotional abuse are the red blinking second signs of the dysfunctional aging family. Anger occurs normally in all families. However, in dysfunctional families, anger may take the form of repeated physical or

emotional abuse. This happens not only in one generation but passed on to the next and perhaps all subsequent generations. Adult children are often getting even with their aging parents for being neglectful, perhaps physically abusive parents when these angry adult children were kids.

Fiscal abuse is a ” sleeper” form of abuse, yet a pernicious aging family problem. Adult children committed a whopping 40% of the abuse. Other family members were the next big thief’s investigated. The coming holidays create jaw-clenching stress on adult children who visit and finally see their parents decline. This means they need to care for them, which they have no idea how to do. Part of that comes from- they were never cared for as kids themselves. The holidays can be saved for a dysfunctional family, by care managers. Care managers can help them avoid abuse and support them to get the care they need for their aging parents who neglected them as children.

Financial Advisors Can be Thieves Too

President Obama’s administration attempted to protect investors, who are often people trying to plan their retirement. The so-called fiduciary rule would have required financial advisers working with retirement accounts to put the interests of their clients ahead of their own—

The Trump administration, aiding and abetting in this theft, “blocked this rule and continues to block many retiring and aging client interests – putting them second and financial advisors interest (or ) profit first. This rule was supposed to go into effect on January 1, 2018, but was blocked again by the Trump Administration.

The securities industry received an early Christmas present from Trump’s outgoing Administration when the White House hastily cleared the way for the Department of Labor to lower the standard of care of investment advice fiduciaries, and this represents a dramatic and unprecedented reversal of the intent of Congress in enacting ERISA. The Public Investors Advocate Bar Association stated that “Workers and retirees deserve far better. They deserve to have their retirement savings protected, and they should be able to rely on those they have gone to for investment advice.”

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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

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

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Find out more in my YouTube channel Geriatric Care 1

4 Dysfunctional Family Markers Clinicians Can Face In New Years

January 5, 2021

The normal family is the hand grenade compared to the nuclear bomb of the dysfunctional family

When both are faced with a filial crisis of aging parents being dependent and the adult child needs to take over they cower or explode.

How Do You Know a Dysfunctional Family

1. They lack the ability to resolve conflicts

They 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.

2. They Cannot make Life transitions

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 be drunkenly be 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 happily celebrate anything together, as their parents wrecked ritual occasions as well.

3. There are murky roles in the family

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 or any family ritual gathering, 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 ruined ritual memories.

4. They inspire great literature

The family 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, drugs, and secrets that have been kept by all for generations splatter the pages of this great play mirroring all the ruined holidays’ children of dysfunctional families recall with horror. Prince of Tides a tale of a southern dysfunctional family gives us a timelier glimpse 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.

Rituals Bring Out the Worst in this family

When an aging 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 cannot pull off big things like the daughter’s wedding someone has got to be the cook and family organizer, and resentments skyrocket – tempers flare – and the torch just might never get passed.

The family is again thrown into crisis. That means someone in the tribe has to take over -yet the dysfunctional family has no model or spreadsheet for any transition in power. They cannot pull off any ritual celebrations or even family Taco Tuesdays. Most critically when the rudderless head of the family needs care, these adult children cannot care for a parent who did not care for them.

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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.

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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

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

Learn more about how to work with the dysfunctional family in Handbook of Geriatric Care Management 4th edition

Does The Dysfunctional Aging Family Need Mediation Post The Holidays ?

January 4, 2021

If your clients ‘holiday visit from their family was miserable and you are care manager to the aging parents, a family meeting between the adult sisters and brothers and a mediatory might be needed this January. This will help you decide if you need a mediator or you can be a facilitator at the family meeting. Care Managers can do facilitation but you need very advanced training to be a mediator.

a. Compatible. Does their family generally present as a unit and lock arms together in a crisis? Do you usually work as a team?

b. Fragmented: Is their family unable to work together as a unit? Do their family members and siblings contact friends and outside professionals with their problems, while failing to confide in each other? Do family members ask other family and other

siblings, friends, and outside professionals to keep conversations secret from certain relatives? Is there a cache of family secrets that some family members do not tell others or share? Do kin pit one another against each other when trouble arises? Instead of locking arms in a crisis, does their family point fingers and blame each other?

c. Is their family productive or non-productive?

1.Productive: Are the family members able to respond to the suggestions of friends or professionals and take necessary action to create change in the family?

2.Nonproductive: Are any family members unable to mobilize when help is really needed? Do any siblings or other kin feel powerless to act? Is “victim” a term you would use for some family members and or siblings? Do family members ignore the ideas friends or professionals who are trying to transform the sibling/ family dynamics

d. Is their family stable or fragile?

1.. Stable – When family members have disagreements, do they find a way to solve their problems? Does the family have long-standing relationships and respect the differences in each other?

2. Fragile: Is there a history of emotional cut-offs or distancing on the part of one or more family members? Is there a pattern of generational divorce, remarriage?

Each family is different but if this family scores 2 out of three you should investigate bringing in a mediator

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

Thursday, January 21, 2021

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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.

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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

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Read Dana Curtis Esquire’s Mediation and Geriatric Care Management in Handbook of Geriatric Care Management 4th Edition

10 Do’s and Don’ts of Doing the Dysfunctional Family Inquiry Post Holidays

December 28, 2020

More than half of the aging families who call you inquiring about services after the holidays will be dysfunctional families. The great majority of calls will come from adult children. If you want to make the sale during the inquiry you have to know how to handle these dysfunctional family members on the phone and give them enough trust in you to sign your contract and give you a deposit for your services.

Do Be Objective
Do Use Active Listening
Do Give them Hope you can solve their family problem
Do a two-part inquiry and have the problem defined in the first part done by a skilled administrative Assistant?
Do study the problem before you do the second call and have exactly how you would solve the problem ready in a planned elevator speech
Do a complimentary 30-minute consultation
Do not give away the store but outline how you are an expert at solving the problems (moving, keeping at home, Alzheimer’s wandering and a bare outline of your solution
Do not criticize
Do not blame,
Do not take sides if several family members points of view and expressed them

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

Thursday, January 21, 2021.

2 PM -3:30 PM 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 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

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Find out more in Emily Saltz and Lynn Hackstaff’s chapter Family Conflicts, Dependence and Mutuality: Care Management and the Dysfunctional Family. Handbook of Geriatric Care Management 4th edition.Jones and Bartlett

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

Watch my Free YouTube Channel – Inquiry With Dysfunctional Aging Family After Holidays

Please Elvis – We had a Blue Christmas

December 26, 2020

A Blue Christmas or Hannakka is what the dysfunctional family always has. Elvis gets them. He sings it for this joyless broken-hearted –yet furious- family. They have a blue holiday filled with memories of ruined, -maybe drunken- giftless pain while most holiday songs warble their celebration should be white.

And when those blue snowflakes start falling
That’s when those blue memories start calling
You’ll be doin’ all right with your Christmas of white
But I’ll have a blue, blue, blue, blue Christmas

You can’t be Elvis but here are some more steps a geriatric care manager can transform these families after they call on the holiday.

Identify intergenerational roles and conflicts: The GCM must ” get” existing power dynamics within the family, redefine responsibilities to move to generational maturity, and realign roles and tasks for each family member.

The GCM should encourage a new two-way nurturing relationship between the adult child and the aging parent that never existed. At the same time, the GCM must enable the adult child as a caregiver to set limits that are appropriate to a mature relationship (a very hard redo) The GCM shapeshifts the adult child to identify and remove himself or herself from triangulated, fused, or other destructive family patterns that blue, blue Christmas

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

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