Holidays Archives ⋆ Cathy Cress

How to Help Avoid a Cat and Dog fight Among the Dysfunctional Family On Holidays

November 1, 2022

Sparring Cats and Dogs AKA Siblings

Learn how to calm the chaos of the dysfunctional family on the holiday. During the coming holiday season, especially after some liquid cheer, sour step-parents, angry step-siblings, and mid-life adult kids who grew -up in a dysfunctional family can spin into sparring cats and dogs with teeth bared at Thanksgiving Hannaka, Christmas dinner. Sign -up for my holiday webinar

Why Their Stocking is Full of Coal

As if COVID has not made the holidays hard enough for family gatherings, the ordinary

aging processes are made far tougher when a family has a history of dysfunction. The holidays are red meat for a dysfunctional family. Aging professionals, like geriatric care managers, have their greatest challenges in working with these “difficult” families.

Dysfunctional families are not able to organize themselves

They effectively face gut-wrenching eldercare challenges and crises. These families are under more stress as they move from long-established roles into uncharted territory. the dysfunctional family on holidays like Thanksgiving can face an emotional detonation then an explosion with siblings laying into each other not the turkey.

Why Cut-OFF Ruins the Celebration 4The Dysfunctional family on holidays

The dysfunctional family on the holidays faces shunning or cutoff. What if adult kids “ cut off” their Dad years ago and now he had a severe stroke- what do they do when caught between I hate you and now I love you. 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.

Now that the holidays are soon arriving – they have the same attitude about attending the family Thanksgiving dinner.

SIGN UP FOR MY FREE HOLIDAY WEBINAR –

WEDNESDAY, November 16th, 2022, FROM 2 PM – 3:30 PM PST

Learn how to create marketing to alert adult children you are there

Pre-Holiday Social media campaigns to reach worried caregivers
Pre- Holiday-Materials about the warning signs that a parent needs help
Pre-Holiday e-newsletters, podcasts, speakers bureau, blogs-to market

Learn clinical skills to covert and tools to serve frantic adult children and their declining, resistant parents and the dysfunctional family on the holiday

How to sell services to desperate post-holiday callers from Normal dysfunctional & long-distance family
How to use tools to contain sibling holiday chaos & arrange care in festive family fright
How to move the family to New Year’s stability

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 the dysfunctional family or nearly normal family during the holidays
Featuring

Cathy Cress MSW author of the Handbook of Geriatric Care

Management

Dysfunctional family on holidays

SIGN UP FOR MY FREE HOLIDAY WEBINAR –

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

Are You Ready for Thanksgiving Calls From Stressed Long Distance Caregivers ?

October 27, 2022

Long Distance Caregivers Stressed by Distance

Stressed long-distance caregivers are getting ready for holiday travel. So care managers -get ready for the holiday rush -when these long-distance caregivers call you. Many have often been flying or driving to both visit and care for aging family members for a while and have been exhausted for a long time. These usually understand that their parents are deteriorating with age and are savvy enough to have researched options and already found you on the web ( a reason to have a great website).

The Holiday Push Over The Edge

When Long distance family gathers with aging parents on Thanksgiving and everyone sees problems with an older person- the long-distance family may agree to call for help. The brutal stress of the holiday season on top of caring for an aging parent long-distance may push the long-distance care providers over the edge to join the Holiday Rush for care and call you. Are you ready for that holiday rush??

Signs That a Parent Needs Care

Unpaid bills litter Dad’s desk. He refuses to go to church when he was a devoted churchgoer all his life.

He’s drinking too much at the local pub. When the daughter puts the post-turkey leftovers in the refrigerator she finds moldy food on every shelf. When asked about the bills and the moldy food, Dad gets really angry at them when he was an easygoing guy all his life. This is the holiday push where they pick up the phone and scream 911 to a care manager.

Call made to 911- to the GCM from stressed long-distance providers

At that point, the daughter may feel panicked by holiday push and pull out her phone and call an aging life or geriatric care manager because she cannot fly home without getting help. Are you ready for these desperate calls you will be in this holiday rush?

You -Care Manager Gets Call From Stressed long distance care providers- Are You Ready?

Give frantic adult children hope when they frantically call this holiday.

So be prepared for their inquiry and know the needs of long-distance caregivers plus the resources in your area you can use in this holiday rush with long-distance caregivers when they call you. Do not give away the store in your call but let

them know that you are an expert in the needs of long-distance care providers and an ace navigator in your area that can find services and choices that are perfect to end their holiday pu

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
Get ready for the holiday rush

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

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
Featuring Speaker

Cathy Cress MSW author of the Handbook of Geriatric Care Management

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

Reminiscence on Memorial Day- Serve it to Elders Along With Hamburgers

May 26, 2022

What is Reminiscence- It isn’t new-It’s how history was recorded-

Oral storytellers gave us the Odyssey and other valiant tales. Ulysses and Penelope may be coming to your Memorial Day Barbecue this coming weekend.

But storytelling only works if the teller remembers the lines. Family history has to be captured when the older person still remembers. So holiday events are a perfect time to tap into that font before it flickers.

Tips to Capture Elders’s Stories

Here are some tips to use if they want to capture these family tales during Memorial Day weekend with aging parents—a perfect time to do this. If you are gathering at a memorial day barbeque, ask, older family members how they celebrated the holiday that begins supper, when they were young.

Then use empathetic listening.What is empathetic listening? Make all the messages you are giving the older person— tone, how fast you speak, how they are sitting- say, “I want to listen to you

What is Reminiscence-Asking questions that prompt the story

But don’t make judgments. If there are going to record the family tale, do it in a way that doesn’t distract or stop the older person from talking.

Start somewhere. If the elder isn’t going to tell stories on his or her own, start the story.

See if they will follow along.” Did you go to Memorial Day parades when you were a kid or march in one after the war ( pick his war)?” Did your parents have barbecues to start the summer ?”. “What was it like being drafted? Where did you serve?

Music is just next to memory in the brain.

Alive Inside can be used for elders with dementia. So 50’s Rock and Roll, Little Richard, Bill Haley, and if they are older the Four Freshman. Play elder’s music at your event and ask older vets or their wives or widows for stories of the Vietnam War, Korean War, or Iraq.

Two technology tools to help you with Reminiscence for your older client

Story Worth

Story Worth is a legacy-building tool that can help families create a book of memories through weekly easy prompts of questions to ask the older person to create a weekly story about their life resulting in a book after one Year. My daughter gifted it to her Dad and he and the whole family loved the legacy book that was created

Quick Voice Recorder to catch the memory on your phone and used Dictation to transcribe the memories into written word to print.

Check out my Book Handbook of Geriatric Care Management with more tools for legacy building written by David Lindeman Director Of the Center for Technology at UC Berkeley and Julie Menack of 21 st Care Solutions

CONNECT WITH CATHY CRESS MSW

Subscribe to my YouTube channel, Geriatric Care Management
Subscribe to my blog
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Visit my website
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Explore my GCM Business Class
Check my GCM Operation Manual Class with 15 GCM Services for Clients

New Years Resolutions To Help Aging Parents

December 30, 2021

Adult child worried about aging parents during holidays visit

Do you make New Year’s resolutions? Here are some RESOLUTIONS TO HELP AGING PARENTS. It’s not “go on a diet,” because you ate some much holiday fare but what you should do after the holiday when you spotted red flags that made you worry about your aging mom or dad. Here is the entire list of New Year’s resolutions to help your aging parents you might make for January as an adult child worried about aging parents after the holiday visit.

Adult child worried about aging parents after holidays visit

RESOLUTIONS TO HELP AGING PARENTS

Adult Child Helping Senior aging mom with Finances

➢ Accompany the elderly person to the doctor, and talk to the doctor in person.

➢ Gather legal financial and insurance paperwork, and meet with professionals.
➢ Have all mail forwarded to yourself or another relative who will manage it
➢ Contact and meet with old and present friends.
➢ If your older family members are in a facility, make contact with staff that cares for them, and the ombudsman.
➢ Meet with your elderly relative’s support network.

➢ Meet with a geriatric care manager who can do all this for you
DO YOU THINK THIS RESOLUTION TO HELP AGING PARENTS IS TOO EXPENSIVE?

TEN REASONS YOU CAN AFFORD A GERIATRIC CARE MANAGER

The Top Ten Reasons Why You Can Afford A Geriatric Care Manager by Phyllis Brostoff

10. We can do in 2 hours what it would take you 2 weeks to do.

9. We know how to get around that “I’m saving for a rainy day” syndrome when your folks are drowning in their problems.

8. We’re much cheaper than the cost of plane fare if you have to fly into town when your parents say “everything is fine” but you know it isn’t.

7. We can give you the scoop on which nursing home is really right for your parents.

6. We can make your parents hear what you have said over and over again, but they refuse to listen to them, you are still a child.

5. We can tell you’re annoying siblings to shut up, but graciously.

4. We’ve helped hundreds of families a lot worse than yours.

3. Your dad can’t push our buttons.

2. Next time you want to hang up on your mother, you can tell her to call us.

1. We’re available 24/7, so you don’t have to be. Just find us here

If you are a care manager check out my latest free webinar on clinical skills to solve aging family problems post-holidays

4 Dysfunctional Family Markers Clinicians Can Face In New Years

December 27, 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

The dysfunctional family has 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

In each dysfunctional family 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 is 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 concierge 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” portray 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 concierge 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

In the dysfunctional 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 January Webinar on Working With the Dysfunctional Family

11 Clinical Steps to Work with Dysfunctional Families-Post Holidays –

Thursday, January 6, 2021, 2:00-3:30 PM

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 stockings.

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

Contact

Connect with Cathy

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

Sparring Cats and Dogs AKA Siblings

Why Their Stocking is Full of Coal

Dysfunctional families are not able to organize themselves

Why Cut-OFF Ruins the Celebration 4The Dysfunctional family on holidays

Now that the holidays are soon arriving – they have the same attitude about attending the family Thanksgiving dinner.

SIGN UP FOR MY FREE HOLIDAY WEBINAR –

WEDNESDAY, November 16th, 2022, FROM 2 PM – 3:30 PM PST

Learn how to create marketing to alert adult children you are there

Learn clinical skills to covert and tools to serve frantic adult children and their declining, resistant parents and the dysfunctional family on the holiday

SIGN UP FOR MY FREE HOLIDAY WEBINAR –

Long Distance Caregivers Stressed by Distance

The Holiday Push Over The Edge

Signs That a Parent Needs Care

Call made to 911- to the GCM from stressed long-distance providers

You -Care Manager Gets Call From Stressed long distance care providers- Are You Ready?

Get Ready for the Holiday Rush

Featuring Speaker

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

What is Reminiscence- It isn’t new-It’s how history was recorded-

Oral storytellers gave us the Odyssey and other valiant tales. Ulysses and Penelope may be coming to your Memorial Day Barbecue this coming weekend.

Tips to Capture Elders’s Stories

What is Reminiscence-Asking questions that prompt the story

Music is just next to memory in the brain.

Two technology tools to help you with Reminiscence for your older client

CONNECT WITH CATHY CRESS MSW

RESOLUTIONS TO HELP AGING PARENTS

➢ Meet with a geriatric care manager who can do all this for youDO YOU THINK THIS RESOLUTION TO HELP AGING PARENTS IS TOO EXPENSIVE?

TEN REASONS YOU CAN AFFORD A GERIATRIC CARE MANAGER

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

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 5th edition

Contact

Connect with Cathy

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

➢ Meet with a geriatric care manager who can do all this for you
DO YOU THINK THIS RESOLUTION TO HELP AGING PARENTS IS TOO EXPENSIVE?