Dysfunctional Aging Families Can Wreak Havoc at End of Life

December 6, 2022

What do Feuding families do at the end of life?

When a family member is facing death and dying dysfunctional families have flawed conversations. Often they do not communicate at all or engage in destructive banter. They see one another as enemies. They demonize one another.

Feuding families are what I call dysfunctional families. They blame each other instead of locking arms in a crisis.

They sabotage resolution.

They actively compound already difficult decisions with intractable, interpersonal conflict. They create problems independent of the underlying issues.

Facing Fractured Communication

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

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

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 and adult children and/or spouse disagree

Pain management adult children and/or and spouse disagree.

Answer to Fractured Family at End of Life – Mediation.

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

Deliver a Good End of Life- Add Death and Dying to Your Care Management Agency

Serve Your Client Until Death Do You Part

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Deliver a Good End of Life 9 Steps to Death &Dying

Jan 24, 2023 02:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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Deliver a Good End of Life- 9 Steps to Add Death and Dying to Your Care Management Agency
Serve Your Client until Death Do You Part
Join me on January 24 2023 and learn why End of Life Services re a perfect new service for care managers
Learn to guide the patient/family through the five stages of death. Understand how to help clients be active participants in their care. Give the family caregivers tools to manage care. Find out how to provide family-centered care to caregivers and family. Learn to choose the right support services for the client through all stages of death.
Introduce Hospice and Palliative care to the client earlier and work with their team.
Find out how Use COVID -19 family coaching for GCM. Discover the role of Death Doula at end of life.

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Jan 24, 2023 02:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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Join me Thursday, March 11, and learn why End of Life Services Are a perfect new service for care managers

In this 1 ½ -hour webinar you will learn how to

1. Transition the patient/family through the five stages of death

2. Help clients be active participants in their care

3. Give the family/caregiver tools to manage care

4. Provide family center care to caregivers and family

5. Choose the right support services through all stages of death

6. Introduce Hospice and Palliative care and work with their team

7. Use ALCA End-of-Life Benefits During COVID

8.Use COVID -19 Family Coaching for GCM

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How to Help Avoid a Cat and Dog fight Among the Dysfunctional Family On Holidays

November 1, 2022

Sparring Cats and Dogs AKA Siblings

Learn how to calm the chaos of the dysfunctional family on the holiday. During the coming holiday season, especially after some liquid cheer, sour step-parents, angry step-siblings, and mid-life adult kids who grew -up in a dysfunctional family can spin into sparring cats and dogs with teeth bared at Thanksgiving Hannaka, Christmas dinner. Sign -up for my holiday webinar

Why Their Stocking is Full of Coal

As if COVID has not made the holidays hard enough for family gatherings, the ordinary

aging processes are made far tougher when a family has a history of dysfunction. The holidays are red meat for a dysfunctional family. Aging professionals, like geriatric care managers, have their greatest challenges in working with these “difficult” families.

Dysfunctional families are not able to organize themselves

They effectively face gut-wrenching eldercare challenges and crises. These families are under more stress as they move from long-established roles into uncharted territory. the dysfunctional family on holidays like Thanksgiving can face an emotional detonation then an explosion with siblings laying into each other not the turkey.

Why Cut-OFF Ruins the Celebration 4The Dysfunctional family on holidays

The dysfunctional family on the holidays faces shunning or cutoff. What if adult kids “ cut off” their Dad years ago and now he had a severe stroke- what do they do when caught between I hate you and now I love you. One sibling has taken over Mom or Dad’s care and her/his dysfunctional midlife adult siblings just don’t want her to do this. It only takes a few drinks at dinner and snarky remarks start a fracas that leads to cut-off, which leads to them not sharing in Mom’s care, overloading the sibling caregiver, and endangering Mom’s care, through this shunning.

Now that the holidays are soon arriving – they have the same attitude about attending the family Thanksgiving dinner.

SIGN UP FOR MY FREE HOLIDAY WEBINAR –

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

Learn how to create marketing to alert adult children you are there

Pre-Holiday Social media campaigns to reach worried caregivers
Pre- Holiday-Materials about the warning signs that a parent needs help
Pre-Holiday e-newsletters, podcasts, speakers bureau, blogs-to market

Learn clinical skills to covert and tools to serve frantic adult children and their declining, resistant parents and the dysfunctional family on the holiday

How to sell services to desperate post-holiday callers from Normal dysfunctional & long-distance family
How to use tools to contain sibling holiday chaos & arrange care in festive family fright
How to move the family to New Year’s stability

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 the dysfunctional family or nearly normal family during the holidays
Featuring

Cathy Cress MSW author of the Handbook of Geriatric Care

Management

Dysfunctional family on holidays

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Who Are the Entitled Concierge Clients Who Can Afford Long Term Care?

April 25, 2022

Are you aware of the entitlement of the family? Entitlement is present in five types of these rich and famous families aging families who can afford care management, home care, and long-term care because they have vast financial resources. 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)

Rich and Famous-Entitled Families:

These types of aging families, who can afford care management and home care, are identified by the aging parents’ socioeconomic, financial, and political prominence. ( example President Reagan)They are families in which all basic needs, services, resources, and creature comforts are obtained via income, assets, and abundant discretionary cash flow. Or they spring from the political position, station, or power. The entitlement of the family is passed from the parent to the child, like a virus, who in turn brings these behaviors and actions to the caregiving milieu and care management relationship.

Entitlement of the Family That is Rich and Famous

In these rich and famous clans, the entitlement of the family arises from being accustomed to purchasing everything and anything. They look to pay others to meet their needs (as opposed to families who must themselves find and orchestrate ways to meet basic and complex needs themselves or with the help of the extra-familial system). Often these families have household staff, i.e., nannies, butlers, drivers, private pilots, cooks, and maids. They may have available to the business and family lawyers and accountants, as well as, teams of medical professionals and concierge physicians. Consequently, in almost all situations they are uninvolved in processes of serving their own needs, especially those that are difficult, stressful, and time-consuming. ( Fine and Newcombe- Entitlement in the Aging Family, Care Managers Working With the Aging Family)

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How to Find These Rich and Famous Families Who Can Afford You

WHEN Tuesday, May 17^th, 2022

WHAT TIME_2 PM-3:30 PM Pacific Standard Time

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Why only the top 10% can afford private pay care management.
Who Are the 5 types of VIP/Concierge Clients?
VIP Sales Using Benefits Not Features to ALCA -GCM 3^rd PARTIES
Understand how to find VIP Concierge Clients Do hot mapping & Market Studies
How to Use Free Public Relations ( PR) to Find Adult Children of VIP Clients
How to create or revise a Concierge Geriatric Care Management Strategic Marketing Plan

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4 Dysfunctional Family Markers Clinicians Can Face In New Years

December 27, 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

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.

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 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 is 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 concierge 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” 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 holidays children of dysfunctional families recall with horror. Prince of Tides a tale of a southern concierge 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

In the 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 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.

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

11 Clinical Steps to Work with Dysfunctional Families-Post Holidays –

Thursday, January 6, 2021, 2:00-3:30 PM

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 Professional Must Take to Work with These Difficult Families

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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 5th edition

End of Life-When Do You Need Mediation?

February 23, 2021

Why do some families need mediation at the end of life? Mediation is a voluntary process in which the parties, with the help of an impartial third party mediator, work together to resolve their differences or solve a problem they were unable to address satisfactorily without help. These family differences especially happen to dysfunctional families but can beset any family at the end of life. They are faced with overwhelming emotions and decisions that demand that the family work together as a team. What happens to dysfunctional and even nearly normal families during this trying time? They don’t gather as a team. They fight. They fret and they feud. What are the results of this fighting, fretting, and feuding in families at the end of life?

Unresolved family conflicts emerge

Dysfunctional families become more dysfunctional

Family members’ grief, pain, and anxiety are often masked as anger and presents as conflict (past and present)

Older person dies without resolving important family issues

Older person dies in conflict, not in peace

Deliver a Good End of Life- Add Death and Dying to Your Care Management Agency

Serve Your Client Until Death Do You Part

Join me Thursday, March 11, and learn why End of Life Services Are a perfect new service for care managers

In this 1 ½ -hour webinar you will learn how to

Transition the patient/family through the five stages of death
Help clients be active participants in their care
Give the family/caregiver tools to manage care
Provide family center care to caregiver and family
Choose the right support services through all stages of death
Introduce Hospice and Palliative care and work with their team
Use ALCA End of Life Benefits During COVID
Use COVID -19 Family Coaching for GCM
Sign Up

If you really want to add End of Life to your care management business sign up for this webinar now

Contact

Connect with Cathy

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