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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.

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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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Why Do Adult Children Hate and Love Parents in Aging Dysfunctional Family?

January 11, 2021

The aging dysfunctional family takes an expert to tackle because violence can break out at any time. In the film version of Tracy Letts August in Osage County. Julia Roberts (the eldest daughter) attacks Meryl Streep (the pill-popping aging mother) at a ritual family gathering- the elder Dad’s funeral after he commits suicide.

In the dysfunctional family, there have been symptoms of problems such as alcohol abuse, drug abuse, child abuse, or emotional abuse, like the demeaning mother the character Meryl Streep plays in August in Osage County. These dysfunctions usually create barriers to nurturing and this affects everyone in the family system.

The family system is also marked by ambivalence and all adults and children live in a love-hate relationship with other family members. (Julia Roberts character and all the daughter both love and revile their mother ).

As systems resist change, it is even more difficult for members of the dysfunctional family to move to make changes when their parent needs care, like Meryl Streep does in August in Osage County. Julia Roberts and none of the daughters will care for their despised mother.

The nearly normal system is shaken to its core by the parent being dependent. However, a care manager can guide the family members into reorganizing their family roles when the parent can no longer act as head of the family, while acknowledging the shift and changes they need to make both emotionally and practically.

The members of the dysfunctional family who may have experienced a lack of nurturing by their parent and have no role model of caring. They are angry and resentful at caring for the parent, and thus will find it difficult to provide the practical and emotional care that their aging parent needs. The challenge to the adult child of the dysfunctional family is how to meet the dependency needs of the here and now old-old parent when the parent did not meet them dependency needs as a child. That is why they need a highly experienced Geriatric Care Manager who can work with dysfunctional aging families.

The challenge to the care manager is to bring the adult child of the dysfunctional family into the here and now and see their parents for who they are- an aging dependent person, flawed and imperfect, but a human being who needs their love, support and nurturing.

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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

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Find out more on 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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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

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

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 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

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

10 Ways to Capture Family Stories in The New Year

December 31, 2020

Tips to capture family tales of aging parents or clients in the New Year

Have you lost an aging parent and wished you had asked them more questions about their past, your family history, and your childhood. Have you dabbled in ancestry and realized that you could have just listened closely to the stories your deceased parents told you and maybe written them down. Do not look back! Make this New Year the year you collect the stories in your own family plus assist your aging clients by using 10 reminiscence tools, technology, and techniques.

1. Use empathetic listening. This means to make all the messages you are are giving the older person— tone, how fast you speak, how they are sitting- all saying, “I want to listen to them.”

2. Ask 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.

3. Start somewhere. If the elder isn’t going to tell stories on his or her own, start the story and see if they will follow along.”What was a New Years Resolution that you made and kept” ” Do you remember your favorite doll ” What was your first day of school like”

4. Music is just next to memory in the brain shown by Alive Inside So use Alexa, Spotify, to play 40’s 50’s music or especially the music of the era when they were teens Simple ways to spark reminiscence when you visit older family members :
5. Look at old photos together. Photos trigger memory even with dementia. Choose ones from a period of time the person currently remembers, which could be the person as a young adult, teenager, or even a young child.
6.Play music from their teenage years. It is the background to the most emotional period of anyone’s life and deeply lined into memory.
7. Enjoy food they like or food that is a family tradition or specialty, particularly ones that have an element of memory attached from family celebrations. like Mom’s Briscut, Dad’s Sunday Supper lasagna, or “Aunt Helen’s Lemon Cake”.

8. Story Worth was started by Nick Baum, a tecky who was, and in a way, a long-distance care provider for his parents in Sweden. He was curious about their past and invented the app based on his own need to gather his family history. My husband is a teller of past tales as a California Highway patrolman, then Hippiedom, then as top marketing director for Pacific Cookie Company, the best cookies here is the west.

Our daughter Kali gave him Story Worth as a holiday gift a year ago. In the past 12 months of the plague, he recorded 40 stories or memories from his past. They are being published by Story Worth Book, saving in print the precious reminiscence that would have been lost but now saved in a book that will be given to our adult children and then generations to come.

This is a brilliant way to capture reminiscence and I recommend it to adult children who want to enshrine personal memories in print that otherwise would be lost when they reach back for them..

9. Life Bio- provides an online template of biography and autobiography questions that have been carefully crafted

10. Quick Voice Recorder to catch the memory on your phone

Use reminiscence a part of a whole new domain in aging called quality of life or attending to the older person’s need for joy through activities that stimulate the mind. Reminiscence does that- so find out more about how you can increase the quality of life of older people after the holidays and all year long by building a quality of life reminiscence program like Lifespan’s Well Being program in Santa Cruz, Ca.

Sign Up for My Free January Webinar on Dysfunctional Aging Family

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

10 Ways to Capture Family Stories in The New Year

Tips to capture family tales of aging parents or clients in the New Year

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