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.

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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     

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Beware-Countertransference with Dysfunctional Families

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Dysfunctional families call care managers in the summer. Why? During the summer adult children visit their parents because of national holidays, family reunions, and trips to their parents’ homes or summer houses with entitled seniors. When Dysfunctional family members call you because they are appalled frightened or both as they find their parents have deteriorated or are alone in boiling heat from climate change- beware of countertransference. What’s that? When working with difficult aging families, aging professionals and geriatric care managers experience strong negative feelings and intense reactions this experience is called countertransference where the therapist develops an intense emotional reaction to the patient.

Many health and family professionals come from dysfunctional families themselves. So it is important foraging professionals and geriatric care managers to acknowledge and understand any countertransference reactions to develop an effective strategy for intervention. Which types of emotional reactions might an aging professional experience in dealing with a difficult aging family?

·      Intense dislike of family members

·      Condescension toward client or family

·      Impatience with family decision making

·      Arguing with clients or family members

·      Avoiding necessary contact with clients or family

·      Becoming paternalistic, for example, taking over decisions that should be made by family

·      Becoming passive-aggressive, for example, the GCM does not follow through with her own recommendations.
is important that an aging professional working with a dysfunctional family, has 5 years of experience with difficult families, training in family systems, and an education that covers countertransference.

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Dysfunctional Aging Families are tortured unresolved issues brilliantly portrayed on HBO’s Succession, films like  Learn clinical strategies and techniques the geriatric care manager uses on actual  VIP families to get and maintain care.

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 Taming HBO’s Succession -10 Vital Tools for Dysfunctional Families

Tuesday September 19 2023 ,2:00-3:30

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  • Join me learn how to come to clinically rescue of desperate concierge dysfunctional adult children and family caregivers.

 

  • Give frantic adult children hope when they desperately call.  
  • 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 10 Clinical Tools Professionals must learn before they work with these difficult Families.
  • Learn how to solve dysfunctional family problems after you master these tools.
  • Get care for aging family members when the dysfunctional family members resist.
  • Learn how to work with aging parents like Rupert Murdock & Logan Roy

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YOU WILL LEARN TO

  • Give frantic VIP adult children hope when they desperately. 

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  • Understand the VIP Dysfunctional Aging Family System you must enter to get care for elders!
  • Understand 11 Warning Signs You Are Working with VIP Dysfunctional Family
  • Master 10 Clinical Tools from Care Manager Claudia Fine and Emily Salz writing the Professionals must learn before they work with these difficult Families

Learn how to solve dysfunctional family problems after you master these tools.

  • Get care for aging family members when the dysfunctional family members resist.
  • Learn how to work with aging parents like Rupert Murdock & Logan Roy Sign Up

 

The rich “They are not like you and me” said Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby.

Every family must deal with life’s most important events- birth, marriage, aging, and death. Dealing with aging and the succession of the head of the family is a struggle for all families but it can overwhelming and destructive with the dysfunctional family, marked by strained relationships

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