Holiday Sibling Rivalry Archives ⋆ Cathy Cress

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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

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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.

Sign Up for My Free January Webinar

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

Thursday, January 21, 2021

2:00-3:30 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

SIGN UP NOW

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

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

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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
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I’ll be Home For Christmas in Spite of COVID if my Sibling’s Not there

December 6, 2020

Holiday Films Can Be About Ruptured Relationships

For many of us, the road home for the holidays is rutty especially this year with rampant COVID. For some, the path has gaping potholes. It can remind us of childhood conflicts between siblings that ruptured our relationship. Adult children who would still gather with elderly parents and siblings may be glad we all should not travel on the holiday this year due to the pandemic, as they avoid the awful holiday with an estranged sibling.

A great film to watch for nasty sibling rivalry with the comic brilliance of Vince Vaughn and Paul Giamatti is Fred Claus. Fred neglected by Mrs. Claus by favorite son St Nick, who takes all his presents, turns to life as a repo man to get even. It sounds like a dumb film and is a little dumb but has a stellar cast in Kathy Bates, Miranda Richardson, Kevin Spacey, and Rachel Weisz.

Adult Sibling Rivalry Usually Starts in Childhood

Serious sibling rivalry happens when the damage was done by a sister or brother years ago, leaving a never healing gash in our mind. In fact, that old wound from a sibling may still fester and ooze enough to lead us to say we believe we don’t want to see the family on the holidays.

We feel we hate our siblings for many different reasons. The chief complaint that lurks in our mind is that Mom or Dad favored them over us. She got the new prom dress for her high school celebration, and a few years later we ended up with her hand-me-down. Dad sent him to a great four-year college, and we were sent to a community college near home. She was the baby so got to grow up with late curfews and loose rules, when Mom and Dad were unbearably strict with the rest of us. He was the oldest and Mom needed him to take care of the bunch of us, so she let him boss us around. He was the stepsibling who moved in and took over half our room.

Sibling Rivalry Can Stop Adult Children FRom Helping Aging Parents Stay Safe From COVID

That can all come back again if adult children do travel back for the holidays, against all CDC and State warnings. Just traveling back could give the adult child or worse, the elderly parent, the unwanted gift, like lethal coal in their stocking, COVID. But if the siblings do journey all back to the family celebration, they all can open Pandora’s box of the past, picking favorite siblings or parental slights. Whatever happened in their childhood, can flashback like holiday PTSD. If the aging parents are struggling they may look for a GCM, so make sure that skill is on your website and be very sure you have skills in working with sibling rivalry. My book Care Managers Working with The Aging Family has a chapter in it with tools to work with adult siblings.

Siblings Need TO Work Together to Keep Aging Parents Safe From Pandemic

This is a time when adult parents need adult siblings to work together as a team to ensure aging parents’ safety during COVID. This means not even going home to risk COVID. Adult children staying home also means one sibling setting up a virtual family

meeting to create a family plan to increase aging parents quality of life while sheltering in place alone with rising loneliness and isolation, It means making sure they have and are using all safety precautions against getting the virus and having a family plan if they are hospitalized, then discharged to recover or even to recovering with no hospitalizations if hospitals are full and turn patients away. . A geriatric care manager can offer that to the family.

Start a Coaching COVID Service for AGING Families

So pre Holiday, add Coaching Adult Children and marketing this skill to Help their older relatives with COVID risks and use your knowledge of helping adult sibling strife to help them help their

parents as a family team

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.

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”

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

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

2. They Cannot make Life transitions

3. There are murky roles in the family

4. They inspire great literature

Rituals Bring Out the Worst in this family

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

Thursday, January 21, 2021

2:00-3:30 PM Pacific Standard Time

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

Holidays have traditionally been women’s job.

Holidays are often done on autopilot

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

Mom needs to Pass the Torch- Baby Boomers Kids Shocked

Geriatric Care Manager to the Rescue

Dysfunctional Family Do Not Want to Take Over for Mom

Working with Aging Dysfunctional Families- January and February-Long Day’s Journey into Night-

Thursday, January 21, 2021

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

Holiday Films Can Be About Ruptured Relationships

Adult Sibling Rivalry Usually Starts in Childhood

Sibling Rivalry Can Stop Adult Children FRom Helping Aging Parents Stay Safe From COVID

Siblings Need TO Work Together to Keep Aging Parents Safe From Pandemic

Start a Coaching COVID Service for AGING Families

So pre Holiday, add Coaching Adult Children and marketing this skill to Help their older relatives with COVID risks and use your knowledge of helping adult sibling strife to help them help their

parents as a family team

What is the Normal Family vs Dysfunctional?

Dysfunctional families have many characteristics.

Bad or just NO Family Leader

Dysfunction Families Inspiration For Great Literature

Burnt Latkes or the Christmas cookies-inflame the family

Someone must take over the holiday rituals

Contact

Connect with Cathy

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