Cathy Cress

Expert in Aging Life and Geriatric Care Management

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Sign Up for My Free January Webinar on Dysfunctional Aging Family

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

 SIGN UP NOW

Filed Under: abusive aging parents, adult child physical abuse, Adult children, adult emotional abuse, Aging, Aging Alcohol Abuse, Aging Family, aging family and COVID, aging family crisis, aging family system, aging life business, Aging Life Care, Aging Life Care Assocaition, aging life care manager, Aging Mother, Aging therapist, Blog, Borderline narcissistic family, Caregiver Burn Out, Clinical Tools Dysfunctional families, Concierge aging clients, Dysfunctional aging family, Dysfunctional Family & Holidays, Dysfunctional Family System, elder mediator, Families, Filial Crisis, GCM Webinar, Geriatric Care Management Business, Geriatric Care Manager, geriatric care manager, Holiday Meltdown in Aging Family, Holiday Sibling Rivalry, Move Management, narcissistic client, Narcissistic Personality, nurse care manager, POST HOLIDAY SEASON, Post holidays aging dysfunctional family, Sibling Strife Christmas, Sibling Strife Holidays, Siblings, Stepmonster, Symptoms Dysfunctional Family, Webinar, Webinar ALCA GCM Tagged With: aging dysfunctional family, aging life care manager, aging parent care, aging parent crisis, boundaries dysfunctional families, care manager, Clinical Tools Dysfunctional Holiday, dysfunctional family roles, geriatric care manager, help with dysfunctional family, nurse care manager, Tools with Dysfunctional families

Take This Test -Can You Take A Dysfunctional Family Case Over the Holidays ?

December 18, 2020

Do You Have the Clinical Skills to Give Hope to  The  Dysfunctional  Family Calling Desperately On the Holidays –

What does it Take?

    1. Do you know the right caseload mix so you have the intense time to handle these very heavy care families?
    1. Do you have 5 years of geriatric care management practice, a master’s degree to understand and work with them??
    2. Do you have care managers who can work with these complex aging dysfunctional families?
    3. Do you have the business model to realign your caseload for many of these time-intensive cases?
    4. Do you know aging family dynamics or do you have a staff member who does?

    5. Can you increase your staff to do this?
    6. Do You Know How to do a two call intake and complimentary consultation?
    7. Do You know how to make the sale to dysfunctional aging clients?
    8. Are you ready to be fired and have account receivable problems that come with these cases?
    9.  Do you know how to answer the challenge the dysfunctional, needy demanding adult children face and the client’s needs at the same time?
    10. Do you know how to hold an impromptu family Dysfunctional meeting with adult children, over the hectic holiday to plan care for aging parents?
    11. Can you work with narcissistic entitled older clients who are very demanding?
    12. Can you  emotionally handle the demeaning, blaming attitude of narcissistic old and new monied clients
  1. SIGN UP FOR MY WEBINAR To Find Out Clinical Tools to

  2. Work With These 

  3. Families 

  4.  

      Sign Up for My January Webinar  

     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:family-charis1-226x300.jpg 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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  1.  

Filed Under: Aging, Aging Family, Aging Life Care, aging life care manager, Blog, care manager, case manager, Clinical Tools Dysfunctional families, Concierge Senior, Dysfunctional Aging Familu, Dysfunctional aging family, Dysfunctional Family & Holidays, elder care manager, estranged siblings, Families, Filial Crisis, FREE WEBINAR, Geriatric Care Management Business, Geriatric Care Manager, geriatric care manager, geriatric social worker, Holiday Meltdown in Aging Family, Holiday Rituals in Aging Family, Long Distance Care, Narcissistic Personality, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, Quality of Life for elders, sibling rivalry, Sibling Strife Christmas, Sibling Strife Holidays, Siblings, Spoiled Holiday Rituals, Therapist Specializing in Aging, Webinar Tagged With: aging dysfunctional family, aging family, aging life care manager, aging parent, aging parent care, care management, care manager, case manager, dysfunctional family, geriatric care manager, nurse care manager

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

 

 

Filed Under: Aging, Blog, COVID & HOLIDAY SEASON, Covid Holiday Remote Visit, COVID-19 & Care Management, COVID-19 &Shelter in Place Plan, COVID-19 Emergency Plan, Cut-Off, Dysfunctional aging family, Families, Geriatric Care Management Business, Holiday Meltdown in Aging Family, Holiday Rituals in Aging Family, Holiday season, Holiday Sibling Rivalry, HolidaySeason and COVID, Senior Isolation, Senior Loneliness, sibling rivalry, sibling sharing care, Sibling Strife Christmas, Sibling Strife COCID, Sibling Strife COVID, Sibling Strife Holidays, Siblings, Virtual Family Meeting, Virtual Family meeting COVID Tagged With: aging family, aging life care manager, care manager, case manager, estranged midlife sibling, geriatric care manager, nurse care manager

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”  ed6855aa32d877d7fc1ef9ee757e0f17-98.jpgportrays 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.

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Aging, Aging Life Care, Blog, Dementia & Holidays, Dysfunctional Aging Familu, Dysfunctional aging family, Dysfunctional Family & Holidays, elder abuse, estranged siblings, Families, Filial Crisis, Geriatric Care Management Business, Geriatric Care Manager, geriatric social worker, Holiday Meltdown in Aging Family, Holiday Rituals in Aging Family, Holiday Sibling Rivalry, Nearly Normal Aging Family, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, parent care, Sibling Strife Holidays, Spoiled Holiday Rituals Tagged With: aging dysfunctional family, aging life and geriatric care management, aging life care manager, aging parent care, aging parent crisis, alzheimers & holidays, care manager, case manager, dysfunctional family on the holiday, geriatric care manager, Holiday Meltdown in Aging Family, Holidays Crisis in aging family, holidays rituals, Long Days Journey Into Night, nurse care manager

Adult Sibling Rivalry at Thanksgiving- Where To Get Help?

November 14, 2020

Siblings are The Biggest Source Of Stress Between Human Being

At family rituals, like Thanksgiving next week, adult siblings often are often brought back together. If you are one- will it be a happy feast?

As Gail Sheehy says in her book, Passages in Caregiving, we think that siblings will automatically support each other when aging parents fall apart. Sheehy quotes sociologists, Karl Pillemer and J. Jill Suitor, in a study they did conclude that siblings are inherent rivals and the biggest source of stress between human beings.

If you are a midlife sibling, perhaps you have a brother or sister to whom you hardly speak. Maybe you are about to see your siblings at the coming Thanksgiving feast, even on zoom during COVID, and anticipate largely ignoring him or her or doing chitchat as you seethe the inside. If you fit this description, you are in the same lurching boat as uncounted baby boomer siblings all over the world.

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Childhood Wound Ripped Open

That wound from childhood may still ache enough to keep you on the furrowed path your family followed when you were young. Now, however, you and adult siblings, nearing or at retirement age, may need to come together again to be part of a niece or

 

nephew’s wedding or christening, help plan a parent’s anniversary dinner or, most important, oversee the increasing care of elderly family members.

Best Thanksgiving Sibling War Film

I suggest you watch Pieces of April, a fabulous Thanksgiving film ( lead Katy Holmes debuts in a standout performance) where the film’s dysfunctional family revolves around adult sibling rivalry. The film is also, in the end. around a catastrophic illness of the aging parent, where the siblings need to resolve their differences.

If you recognize this problem in your own family, seek counseling before coming the holidays engulfs you. Contact the Aging Life Care Association to find help before a parental crisis.

SIGN UP FOR MY WEBINAR

 

8 Ways to Tame the Turmoil of the Holidays & Twindemic in the Aging Family

 Learn how!

  • How to sell services to the desperate Aging Family during the holiday surge
  • How to give hope to frantic children who call when their aging parent struggling with Loneliness and isolation on the holidays
  • How to help the Aging Family make holiday visits remotely or safely in person
  • How to counsel the Aging Family to track aging decline &Twindemic risk in loved ones
  • How to work with both dysfunctional and long-distance families who call during the holidays
  • How to use GCM tools to contain Holiday chaos
  • How to use financial forecasting to prepare for business growth during the holidays

Sidestep the Many Care Managers Who Do not know how to work with Dysfunctional family or do COVID Coaching of Aging Families so the client chooses you

THIS FREE WEBINAR IS Thursday, December 3, 2020, FROM 2 PM – 3:30 PM PST

Sign Up Now

 

 

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

 

 

Filed Under: ADULT SIBling, Aging, Aging Life Care, aging life care manager, Aging therapist, Blog, Cut Off, Dysfunctional aging family, Dysfunctional Family & Holidays, Families, Filial Crisis, FREE WEBINAR, Geriatric Care Management Business, geriatric social worker, Holiday Meltdown in Aging Family, Holiday Sibling Rivalry, HolidaySeason and COVID, nurse care manager, SIBLING, sibling rivalry, Sibling Strife Holidays, Sibling Strife Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving & dysfunctional family, THANKSGIVING BLOG, Thanksgiving Parent crisis, Thanksgving visits during COVID, Therapist Specializing in Aging Tagged With: adult sibling, adult sibling conflict, adult sibling estrangement, Aging siblings, celebrations with siblings, cut-off sibling, Holidays with midlife siblings, irate siblings, sibling conflict, siblingd

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