Cathy Cress

Expert in Aging Life and Geriatric Care Management

Ten Warning Signs You Are Working With a Dysfunctional Family

Working with Dysfunctional Family

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.

SIGN UP FOR MY HOLIDAY WEBINAR –

 

Get Ready for the Holiday Rush

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
  • 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
  • Featuring

 Cathy Cress MSW author of the Handbook of Geriatric Care

Management     

Find Out More 

 

 

 

 

 

Dread Memorial Day with Midlife Sibings?

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Are you dreading the Memorial Day family barbeque?  . Will your estranged brother be manning the barbeque while you drink too much beer?

Are you a midlife sibling at war with sister or brother? Worse than that, do you feel like you and all your siblings are in not only a dysfunctional family but also an aging dysfunctional family?

What’s an aging dysfunctional family? Well they are very much like a war zone. Clans remain at war with each other, like the 1980’s Serbian conflict or the Iraq war pitting the Sunni’s against the Shia.These tribal battles have gone on for centuries and have the same bloody roots of the dysfunctional family -repeated from one generation to the next.

The hallmarks of the dysfunctional aging family, are after decades as a motley clan there is still not enough love in the family. The now midlife children have to fight for what little nurturance their older parents can bring to the ancient rickety nest they built.

Nurturing is often missing in the dysfunctional aging family because the aging parents themselves probably got little nurturing themselves as kids and on and on back down the family line. Parental neglect and abuse are frequent in the history of the aging dysfunctional family.

The now older parents can suffer from serious mental health problems such as schizophrenia or are bi-polar. Health and addiction problems like alcoholism are frequent.  Family interaction and communication, -parental treatment of siblings, brother and sister treatment of each other stepparent interaction and interface of everyone in the family has wrought deep tissue damage that never healed.

These aging dysfunctional families generally negotiated all of life’s developmental phases with great difficulty. The role in the family, especially the parental one, was murky with a poor, abusive or mentally unfit leader of the family. The rules in the family were unfair ambiguous or full of double binds. There is deep-seated ambivalence. Finally the last life transition in the aging family, the care of the declining parent, implodes the family, which had little balance to begin with. They are asked to care for parents who did not care for them, thus reeking havoc on an already disorganized aging family.

So good luck at the Memorial Day family gathering and perhaps consider hiring a geriatric care manager if you sibling war is affecting not only rituals like family gatherings but also the care of your aging parents. The GCM can help you end the constant hangovers and /or acid reflux.

 

Undue Influence- New York Times

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New York Times article -Undue influence – perhaps -committed on  a renowned painter Merton D. Simpson and major  collector of African art . Mr. Simpson is dead and housed in funeral home until someone pays for funeral. Aging professionals-  you just never have seen it all.

Solve Adult Sibling Problems Cathy Cress on WHBC Radio Tomorrow

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Tomorrow morning I will be on radio show Wriggling in the Middle , 8 AM EST ,speaking with Dr. Merle Griff and DeLores Pressley Wriggling In The Middle hosts  on how adult sibling relationships affect the caregiving process in the aging family. This is especially important when an older person needs care or home modification.

Tune in

 

Radio- Wriggling In The Middle

News Talk 1480

WHBC Radio in Canton, OH.

the show is broadcasted live from WHBC.

Senior Care Management Workshop on Midlife Siblings- Lawrenceville, NJ

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Coming Up on October 17th, I will be presenting a workshop

How to Help Midlife Siblings Move Towards Forgiveness to Form a Team to Care for Elderly Parents .

The Workshop location is :

Morris Hall
1 Bishops Dr, Lawrenceville, NJ 08648

Sponsored By Senior Care Management http://www.seniorcaremgt.com

Contact

Senior Care Management

(609) 882- 0322

Why should you attend ?

1) Build a better knowledge base of the aging family

system

2) Identify ‘nearly’ normal family systems where midlife

crisis with aging parent is present and create

interventions to assist midlife siblings reach filial maturity

3) Identify midlife sibling dysfunction and understand forgiveness

tools to enhance therapeutic interventions and get aging parents better

care


Course Outline

9-10.Adult- Siblings – Types, Roles, Rules , Siblings Rivalry , Midlife and in old age power point and guided discussion

break 10 minutes

10:10- 11-. Midlife Siblings in the Aging Family -Stress and Burden in Caregiving

What is the Role of the Aging Professional ? guided discussion and power point

Break 10 minutes

11:10- 12:10 Mom Loves You Best and I Hate You Helping Midlife Siblings Forgive and Forge Lifelong Relationships and Care for Aging Parents- guided discussion and power point

12:10-12:30- Questions – wrap up discussion

3.0 Contact Hours and CEU credits

approved for nurses and social workers.

Certificates to be distributed at end of series.

Registration Required

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