Cathy Cress

Expert in Aging Life and Geriatric Care Management

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Dysfunctional Aging Families Can Wreak Havoc at End of Life

February 18, 2021

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

 

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 caregiver 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

Sign Up 

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

Filed Under: Advanced Directives, Advanced Directives and Covid-19, Aging, aging life care manager, Benefits of ALCA to Hospice, Death and Dying, Death and Dying Care Management, Dysfunctional aging family, Dysfunctional Family Mediation, End of Life, End of Life Care manager, End of life documents, estranged elder parents and adult kids, estranged siblings, Families, FREE WEBINAR, GCM COACHING SKILLS, Geriatric Care Management Business, Geriatric Care Manager, geriatric social worker, Good Death, Hospice Care, mediation, Mediation End of Life, nurse advocate, nurse care manager Tagged With: adult sibling, aging family, aging parent care, aging parent crisis, care planning, caregiver burnout, conservator, death, dysfunctional aging family, dysfunctional family, dysfuntional family, elder care crisis, end of life, end of life family meeting, estranged siblings, families fretting at end of life, fretting at end of life, geraitric assessment, geriatric care management, geriatric care manager, geriatric care managers, mediation, mediator, My Geriatric Care Management Operations Manual, no advanced directive, no DPOA, no health care proxy, withdraw of life support

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.

T

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

Geriatric Care Management Tools 1, “Whole Family Approach”

June 1, 2017

Aging is a family affair.  The aging process does not only affect the older adult, but it ping-pongs through the entire family system.    Family members, friends, neighbors, involved professionals, as well as the community at large are all affected.  Family caregivers take the brunt of the stress of managing the needs of an aging senior.  A substantial body of research shows that family members who provide care to individuals with chronic or disabling conditions are themselves at risk. Emotional, mental, and physical health problems arise from complex caregiving situations and the strains of caring for frail or disabled relatives.

The whole family approach…  As Steve Barlam and Bunni Dybnis say in their chapter, Tools to Support the Family Caregiver in the book  Care Manager’s Working With the Aging Family,  if a stone is thrown into the center of a pond, ripples would emanate from the point where the stone first touched the water.  Consider that touch spot as the senior with care needs.  The perceived ripples are the effects of those care needs on the family caregivers close to the center all the way to the greater society towards the edge of the pond.  From the onset, investing in understanding the impact of the senior’s needs on the family affords the care manager the ability to create more sustainable plans that help balance the needs of the senior and family caregivers. That is why a care manager needs to take a whole family approach to care management.

Care managers need to understand the changing needs of the older client as they impact those of the family.  With this understanding, care managers can use care management tools to create successful interventions to help not only the senior but the entire family system.

But to work with the entire aging family, the care manager must have tools and great expertise to use those tools.These tools include assessment of the older client and assessment of the caregiver, care planning. implemneting a care plan using CORE skills,  and resources from the local continuum of care, without these tools and the expertise to use them like a skilled carpenter, you cannot remodel an aging family to get care for an older person.

Bunni Dybnis MA, LMFT, CMC Director of Professional Services LivHome, LA
and Steve Barlam Chief Professional Officer, Co-Founder LivHome
MSW, LCSW, CMC
, both highly expert care managers, created a seminal chapter on the Tools that a care manager or geriatric social worker need to work with aging families in my book Care Manager’s Working With the Aging Family.  they cover these CORE skills in that chapter.

This is the only textbook out that focuses on care management tools needed to work with the aging family. The text addresses the unmet needs of care managers working with aging clients as well as the client’s entire family. With its in-depth focus on the “ aging family system,” this book fills a gap for medical case managers and geriatric care managers, giving them tools to better meet the treatment goals of aging clients and their families, as the older clients move through the continuum of care in institutional based settings or community-based settings.It is now available for a reduced price through Jones and Publisher

 

 

 

 

 

Geriatric care management tools or an aging professional’s tools  fill up an entire toolbox. They are like tools in a carpenter’s tool box- a hammer, drill, saw and architectural plans. One of those tools, a very potent one that will make your care plan hold up, is the  “Whole Family Approach”. Learn more on this YouTube from my Geriatric Care Management channel.

Filed Under: Aging, Aging Life Care, aging life care manager, Blog, Care Plan, case manager, Families, Geriatric Care Management Business, Geriatric Care Manager, geriatric social worker, nurse care manager Tagged With: adult sibling, Adult sibling with special needs, aging family, aging family Whole Family Approach, Aging In Place, aging life care manager, aging parent, care manager, case manager geriatric social worker, core skills for geriatric care, geriatric care manager, nurse advocate, nurse care manager

What Skills Do you need to Coach a Family Caregiver

August 16, 2014

PDF-Cover-of-11-10-12My-Geriatric-Care-Management-Agency.jpg

Circle of Care

One resource that a GCM can bring to a caregiving family is ,what Gail Sheehy calls a “circle of care” .This circle may be broken. To create this supportive connection, the GCM needs to use her or his GCMcoaching skills and  put together  a support system  around the perhaps isolated and unsupported family caregiver. The care manager needs to reorganize the family, so adult siblings can share in the care of the older client .You the GCM  are 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 parent.



 

 

Filed Under: Aging Tagged With: adult sibling, Circle of Care, coaching families, family caregiver, geriatric care manager

Whole Family Approach 2- Being the Lifeguard

June 5, 2013

PDF-Cover-of-11-10-12My-Geriatric-Care-Management-Agency.jpg

 

 

What is the “Whole Family Approach”? It is seeing the connections or strings that connect -all the people in the family. Are they weak or strong? A family is like a pond. Adult children, grandchildren, extended family and  the older person swim in the water. When the older person has an aging crisis and starts to drown, the ripples move out over the whole family. What a geriatric care manager or aging professional does is use the whole family approach to assess the needs of the whole family – what are those strings -especially the family caregiver- to solve the crisis .The assessment finds the formal and informal supports and uses the continuum of care as tools to pinpoint the supports for everyone and create a plan that meets the needs of the whole family.Watch the You Tube below to discover more.

Filed Under: Aging Tagged With: adult sibling, Adult sibling with special needs, aging family, Aging In Place, aging parent

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