10 Do’s &Don’ts Doing the Dysfunctional Family Calls Post Holidays

September 5, 2023

Most Calls for Care Managers Post Holidays

More than half of the aging families who call you inquiring about services will be dysfunctional families post-holidays. The great majority of calls will come from adult children. If you want to make the sale during the inquiry you have to know how to handle these dysfunctional family members on the phone and give them enough trust in you to sign your contract and give you a deposit for your services.

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How Do You Get Them To Trust You Enough to Sign Contract with Dysfunctional family Post holidays?

Do Be Objective
Do Use Active Listening
Do Give them Hope you can solve their family problem
Do a two-part inquiry and have the problem defined in the first part done by a skilled administrative Assistant
Do study the problem before you do the second call and have exactly how you would solve the problem ready in a planned elevator speech
Do a complimentary 30-minute consultation
Do not give away the store but outline how you are an expert at solving the problems (moving, keeping at home, Alzheimer’s wandering and a bare outline of your solution
Do not criticize dysfunctional family post-holidays
Do not blame,
Do not take sides if several family members points of view and express them

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Calls From Aging Dysfunctional Families-Handling the Entitled Type

August 15, 2023

Calls From Aging Dysfunctional Families-Types of aging dysfunctional families who can call you over the summer vacation

Narcissistic-Entitled Families

Calls from aging dysfunctional families’ adult children or Narcissistic Entited Families’ adult kids will happen during the summer. These VIP Clinet’s adult children call you desperately for private care over the summer visit. Their problems usually develop from a specific kind of “not good enough parenting” where the parents themselves struggle with personality disorders, like narcissistic borderline personality. Families who can afford geriatric care management and home care long-term can do so because they are VIP clients. These narcissistic families, who can afford care-managed home care are often headed by a scion with a narcissistic borderline personality. Watch Succession, Yellowstone, or reruns of BIG Hair 89’s Dallas- award-winning shows you stream and you know who these Scions are. We love to hate them but binge on their evil ways. These VIP Clients have the financial resources, to pay 4-6K for home care and long-term geriatric care management which is usually over a million dollars in assets. When gathering with their adult children during the summer vacation at the family summer house or a family reunion they see the seams shredding in their parent’s minds or bodies and call you for help because they did not have those good enough parents and have no model to care for them as the parents usually did not care for the adult children as kids. They often have no interest in caring for the parents themselves, as they themselves are entitled. You need clinical skills to work with these families because of the diagnosis of narcissism, which can tear a country or family apart. Part of this is drawn from Claudia Fine and Nick Newcombe’s excellent chapter “Entitlement in the Aging Family”, Care Managers Working With the Aging Family, Jones and Bartlett)

Calls From Aging Dysfunctional families-Real & TV Narcissistic-Entitled Families:

Calls from aging dysfunctional families will come this summer- with adult children looking for help. They may see their parents faltering and face caring for them, which they have no plans to do. They will hire you like the private chef or the gardener, a service to carry out their wishes. Entitlement in their family causes the adult children to at times be as difficult and nasty as the parents. These VIP families usually develop from a specific kind of “not good enough parenting” in which the parents themselves have struggled with personality disorders, most typically, in this type of family, narcissistic borderline personality (for example Former President Trump)They struggled with a borderline personality that went undiagnosed or was formally diagnosed and untreated. We can also see this Narcissistic entitled family head in Brian Cox who in Secession plays the beloved Scion to Love and Hate Logan Roy based on real-life narcissist Rupert Murdock. The adult children will call over the summer when they notice their aging parents’ confusion often because they still fear their aging, more confused will be a perhaps more fierce parent, and the adult kids have no nerve to approach telling them they care. You need clinical skills to deal with them because they are not on TV but asking for your help in real life and narcissism and borderline personalities take the kind of clinical skills Claudia Fine and Nick Newcombe’s excellent chapter “Entitlement in the Aging Family”, Care Managers Working With the Aging Family, Jones and Bartlett) gives you if you read it. But if you watch HBO Succession you see them in a series that can be an instructive clinical accompaniment.

Calls from Aging Dysfunctional families-Sumner Redstone’s VIP Family Struggles

Calls from aging dysfunctional families like Sumner Redstone’s is another example of this type of narcissistic borderline personality in heading a VIP family. He was a Media Magnate who founded CBS Viacom with a net worth of 500 billion. His narcissistic borderline personality created a long-term struggle with his family over inheritance and control after he developed dementia. Mr Redstone was conserved by his daughter

These families call you often because they see you as a way to get control of their parents and their parent’s money. These are tricky situations where you must face conservatorship and real war with both parents and adult siblings fighting against each other for power and money, a replacement for the love they never received in the nest. So clinical skills are critical to handling them of all entitled families – they are Tyrannosaurus of dysfunctional families.

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11 Vital Clinical Tools For Dysfunctional Families

Thursday, September 19

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Give frantic adult children hope when they desperately call after this summer after they see their failing parent.

Join me and learn to clinically rescue concierge dysfunctional families made a summer visit to floundering Mom or Dad.

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Ten Warning Signs You Are Working With a Dysfunctional Family

August 8, 2023

Ten Warning Signs you are Working with Dysfunctional Family represents critical information to share with long-distance caregivers before their holiday visit. Do you know them? They include contentiousness, anger, and cut off and all are listed below. These clinical issues give the visiting caregiver signs that they need to call a care manager and you the care manager the most challenging job of an aging professional. What you have to know is family system theory and be clinically skilled in entering this treacherous family system – to get care for an older person

1. Contentiousness – Old fights erupt; the siblings and parents get into arguments with one another about an old issue

2. Anger – Siblings and family members express physical anger, emotional abuse, financial abuse

3. Distancing & cut off – Some siblings or parents have nothing to do with family and may not speak to parents or siblings for long periods of time.

Ten Warning Signs You are Working with the Dysfunctional Family – Fusion, Denial, Triangulation, Entitlement

4. Fusion – Siblings and family members, such as the mother and eldest daughter, blend into one another, For example, the daughter sounds, acts, and has the same prejudices as the mother. . Think of the media’s portrayal of Lindsay Lohan and her mother.

5. Denial – Adult siblings do not see a decline in a parent, do not face reality, and do not take care of parent if he or she needs care.

6. Triangulation – Tension between two family members or siblings causes one to enlist a third family member or sibling to avoid change For example, two adult sibling object to the cost of care of an aging parent. They gang up on the third adult sibling who thinks the cost of care is reasonable and justified.

7. Sense of Entitlement – Siblings who are accustomed to purchasing services need not personally solve their own, children’s siblings or parents’ problems. This lack of engagement leaves them, unprepared and unwilling in getting involved in solving family tribulations.

Ten Warning Signs You Are Working with a Dysfunctional Family – Narcissism, Needy Adult Siblings, Substance Abuse, and Cut Off

8. Narcissism – One or more siblings has an “it’s all about me” attitude and

other siblings resent this. The self-absorbed sibling either does not participate

9. Needy Adult Siblings – These adult siblings feel starved for affection and often seek affection from professionals and other people in their lives for compensation for the care they didn’t receive as children.

10 . Substance and Other Abuse – The family and siblings have a history of drug, alcohol, and/or child abuse.

If this fits you you and your aging parent needs care may need to contact a geriatric care manager.

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

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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

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

Know The Ten Warning Signs you are working with a dysfunctional family and 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
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Cathy Cress MSW author of the Handbook of Geriatric Care

Management

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Dysfunctional Families Facing Death Wreak Havoc at End of Life

August 3, 2023

What do Dysfunctional Families do at the End of Life?

Dysfunctional families facing death and dying have flawed fractured family conversations. Often they do not communicate at all or engage in destructive accusations lobbed at others. They see one another as enemies. They demonize one another!

Dysfunctional families facing death are feuding families, escalating the pain of death to a chaotic war room. They blame each other instead of locking arms in a crisis.

Dysfunctional families facing death sabotage resolution.

Facing Fractured Family Communication

What are some of the struggles that these aging dysfunctional families facing death with fractured family communication can face?

Aging parents who lack the capacity to make decisions have no advance directives, DPOA

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 then dysfunctional families facing death the adult children and/or spouse disagree

Pain management Dysfunctiona families facing death adult children and/or spouses disagree.

Answer to Fractured Family at End of Life – Mediation.

Mediation is a tool that fractured families can be a good resource for dysfunctional families at the end of life. It can help with these difficult families facing the death of a parent without fracturing the entire family. It can allow an older person to die without pain inflicted by their own aging dysfunctional families.

Understand the Dysfunctional Aging Family System you must enter to get care for elders in aging dysfunctional families
Understand 11 Warning Signs You Are Working with Dysfunctional Family

Master 10 Clinical Tools Professionals Must learn before they work with These Difficult Families
Learn how to solve dysfunctional family problems like End of Life family chaos after you master these tools for aging dysfunctional families
Get care for aging family members when the dysfunctional family members resist
Learn how to work with characters like Rupert Murdock & Logan Roy

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Should You Use Features vs Benefits of Care Management?

July 5, 2023

HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN WHAT GERIATRIC CARE MANAGEMENT DOES?

What are the features vs benefits of care management? Actually, what are features vs benefits? Think about your last few marketing campaigns. Look over some of the emails you sent to prospective customers or the social media updates you made promoting your brand-new product or service. Read over some of the blog posts you published.

How much of your promotional content is focused on how your product benefits the caller? How much of your sales pitch described what your products do???

TWO MARKETING APPROACHES

FEATURES

When it comes to marketing, there are two primary approaches you can take with features vs benefits. The first focuses on what your product or service is or does – including all the shiny bells and whistles you’ve worked so hard to develop. The other focuses on how your product or service will improve users’ lives. Features tell the customer “what” and benefits tell the customer “why”

Which of these approaches do you think is more effective for the adult children or seniors you market to?

Take a look at the list of features below, taken directly from current advertising and marketing materials.

American Lifetime Self-setting clock for seniors with dementia It is the only one of its kind to include 5 multi-function alarms, with the option to set reminders to take medications throughout the day.

Jitterbug Senior Smart Phone 2 with Large 5.5″ screen, easy to see, and 5 Urgent Response button

umbrella that opens and closes with a button

Each is a feature-a factual statement about the product or service being promoted. But features aren’t what entice customers, ( adult children you market to), to buy your product. That’s where benefits come in. A benefit answers the question “What’s in it for me? or what will help my parent or me the caregiver”. This means the feature provides the customer/client with something of value to them. As a result, this is where most businesses go wrong.

Benefits

The feature of a self-setting clock is that it automatically resets itself & reminds the person with dementia to take their meds. The clock’s self-setting feature stops the dementia client from resetting it then forgetting needed medications & times. The benefit is the dementia patient will take meds on time, will be healthier and the caregiver less stressed.

The feature is the Jitterbug phone is that seniors with diminishing eyesight and memory have a hard time reading text on phones or recalling phone numbers. As a result, medical emergencies, are very dangerous. The important feature of jitterbugs is a large easy-to-see response button that gets them one person who will help the senior even if they forgot the number. This is just like the operator they used to get on the phone. The benefit of Jitterbug is it makes the older person much safer and the family members confident they can reach for help if they need it

The benefit of an umbrella that opens with one button is -you stay dryer in the rain as seniors often have arthritis that can make it difficult to push open an umbrella quickly, to keep dry in the rain.

The best way to understand the true benefit of your product or service or to answer the “What’s in it for me?” A customer’s perception of each feature’s results is what attracts him or her to a particular product or service.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF GERIATRIC CARE MANAGEMENT?

What are the features vs benefits of care management? What if you are selling geriatric care

management to a long-distance son and explain the feature of care management is an assessment? As a result, he has no idea what that is, not being a social worker or an RN. He is just a desperate long-distance son. He wants to know, what’s in it for him. What’s his benefit?

You could say you have a product called “Safe at Home” that will make sure his Mom is getting all the support and care she needs and ( 1st benefit) he will not get midnight panic calls or have to scramble to make emergency flights to solve a crisis, like a hospitalization. Plus you will make sure any problems are solved (2nd benefit) before they turn into a crisis that he has to solve from far away, always keeping him informed (3rd benefit)so he can go back to just being a son. This feature vs benefit sales pitch take a huge weight off his shoulder- answering his ” what’s in it for me”

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A feature is a fact A benefit tells your customer the advantages of those facts

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The difference between selling features vs benefits

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How Benefits make your sale to wealth managers, elder law attorneys, and concierge physicians to get referrals for new clients

The Benefits that make your sale to upscale Assisted Living, accountants, financial planners, Hospice

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