boundaries dysfunctional families Archives ⋆ Cathy Cress

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.

SIGN UP FOR MY HOLIDAY WEBINAR –

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
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Cathy Cress MSW author of the Handbook of Geriatric Care

Management

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4 Dysfunctional Family Markers Clinicians Face

August 2, 2023

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

The dysfunctional family has frequent psycho-social blockages that prevent the family from growing emotionally. They fail miserably at moving through all family stages and orchestrating family rituals. The adult children both love and hate their parents

2. They Cannot make Life transitions

In each dysfunctional family 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, family reunion, funeral any family gathering might be 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 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 is characterized by a lack of leadership in the family and the ability to nurture the children. Mom rarely became the high priestess at the summer family reunion or the memorial day picnic when everyone gathers at her house or any family ritual gathering. The family members generally do not believe the parent is there for them and can be depended upon. The concierge’s 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 play A Long Day’s Journey into Night” portray 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 family ritual celebrations -children of dysfunctional families recall with horror. 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, or Succession Where a Narcissistic Dad pits his adult children against each other to succeed him when he dies

Rituals Bring Out the Worst in Family

In a dysfunctional 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, the Memorial Day family Reunion or big things like the daughter’s wedding, someone has got to take over or be and family organize or r the successor to Mom, 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. Succession is about the transition of power in the family.

Sign Up for My September Webinar on Working With the Dysfunctional Family

11 Clinical Steps to Work with Dysfunctional Families-

Tuesday, 2:00-3:30 PM

September 16, 2023

Give frantic adult children hope when they desperately call after the holiday

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and learn how to come to the rescue of concierge dysfunctional families who found coal in their stockings.

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 the 5 Clinical Tools – you need – to solve these problems with your clients

Learn Six Steps Professionals Must Take to Work with These Difficult Families

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Learn more about how to work with the dysfunctional family in Handbook of Geriatric Care Management 5th edition

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-

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

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10. Ways to Spot Dysfunctional Family Calls After Thanksgiving

November 8, 2015

How to IDENTIFY THE DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY WHEN THEY CALL YOU After Thanksgiving

1.They are overly sensitive to criticism and disappointment. The difficult family feels easily criticized by the Aging Life or Geriatric Care Manager and may become defensive regarding the GCM’s recommendations.

2.They become easily disappointed in the aging life or geriatric care manager if your suggestions do not have an immediate positive impact on the situation.

3.They may have intense emotional reactions. Different members of the difficult family may have intense reactions to the GCM’s suggestions and to other members of the family.

4.Family members will often disagree with each other about the extent of the older adult’s problems.

5..Families accept little responsibility for their actions and tend to blame others when things go wrong.

6.They tend to blame the GCM or other institutions when the older adult’s situation deteriorates or when the older adult resists a plan.

7.These families easily find fault with services or staff, and they become critical or angry without trying to discuss, understand, or resolve the perceived problem.

8.Have unrealistic expectations of their older relative. Difficult families often feel that the older adult can do more than what they seem capable of doing, either physically or cognitively.

9. have little patience or understanding for the resistance that older adults commonly show to accepting services.

10.May deny the existence of cognitive problems or disagree over how to handle behavioral issues, all signs of their own unresolved earlier issues.

5 Boundaries Care Manager Must Build to Work with Dysfunctional Family

October 4, 2015

Boundaries are tested between professional and client when the care manager works with the dysfunctional family. Signs that you are losing appropriate boundaries

1. Overidentification: Although it is professionally necessary to understand and empathize with the emotional realities of the family or the client, it is not appropriate for the care manager to routinely share details of one’s own emotional story or personal history.

2. Overconsolation:

The family should not expect or be expected to erase the difficulties they face. The care manager can alleviate but not eliminate the difficult family burdens.

3. Overindulgence: care managers cannot always please the client. The care manager needs to be honest and direct, and sometimes the care manager may have a recommendation that the family may not be prepared to hear.

4. Overinvestment in strategy: It is easy to put too much weight on one strategy. The care plan is a dynamic intervention that must evolve as family circumstances change. The care manager should always remain flexible and resist the temptation to adhere to a favored, original strategy.

5. Overinvestment of time: Care managers may want to make themselves available on a 24-hour basis for client crises. However, it is important to carve out personal time so that the care manager does not blend personal and work lives.

Read the new chapter on care managers working with the dysfunctional aging family. Get the new Handbook of Geriatric Care Management 4th edition now– or out in Kindle on Amazon in November (to keep up with technology)

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 Spot Dysfunctional Family Calls After Thanksgiving

5 Boundaries Care Manager Must Build to Work with Dysfunctional Family

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