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

Sign Up Now

Find out more in the YouTube for My YouTube, Channel Geriatric Care 1

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

Join me

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

Sign -Up Now

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

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

SIGN UP FOR MY FREE HOLIDAY WEBINAR –

Find out more in the YouTube for My YouTube, Channel Geriatric Care 1

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)

Join me in my newest FREE Webinar

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

What we will cover

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

SIGN UP

REGISTER NOW

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

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

Get Cathy’s “10 Critical Success Steps to a Profitable Aging Life or GCM Business”