Carolyn L. Rosenblatt, RN, Attorney, Mediator

Every 6 seconds someone turns 60. That also suggests that every 60 seconds, someone’s aging parent turned 80, 85, or more.

There’s a sea of us with aging parents who are presenting all manner of challenges for us Boomers. One of the most daunting is the necessity to interface with siblings. Maybe we never got along. Maybe we’ve been estranged for a few years. Whatever it is, we find ourselves having to make decisions we never considered making.

Does Mom or Dad have enough money to live on? What about paying for help at home? Who is going to be the caregiver when an aging parent requires our involvement? There are disagreements about who makes the financial decisions. There are disagreements about what kind of care a parent needs and how it should be paid for.

We at AgingParents.com are advocates for the family meeting. We think it’s a great place to start the process of ironing out the difficulties with siblings who in one way or another share the role of addressing aging parents’ needs. Part of our work is to conduct family meetings.
Consider these alternatives:

• If you and your siblings don’t do well face-to-face, try email as a start. Keep it objective and don’t personalize anything with a sibling who has never stepped up in the past. Test the waters.

• If the siblings can meet by phone, that’s even better. It allows for exchange of ideas and efforts at problem-solving that can’t be done as well by email.

• The best way to get everyone on board is the in-person family meeting, which can be done after any family occasion, or before, if all are willing to plan for setting the time aside. If you shudder at this thought, here’s a quick way to learn techniques to stay sane through any family meeting.

• You can download in a few minutes a 39 page instruction manual, How to Handle Family Conflicts About Elders. You can also get it in print. Find it here: http://agingparents.com/products/information/364-how-to-handle-family-conflicts-about-elders

When you’ve got more confidence about this subject of dealing with your siblings, it will be easier to show some leadership in your family. Whether you parent is turning 80, 90 or beyond, you’ll know what to do.

© 2010, AgingParents.com

What Feeds Family Conflict?

By Carolyn L. Rosenblatt, R.N., B.S.N., Attorney at Law

There are a lot of kinds of conflict, but some of the very worst are the kind that occur in families. Why is this? A long history of interacting in ways that don’t work, family members who are totally closed to change, lack of self-awareness and self-understanding, and fear are among the things that can maintain patterns of conflict for years on end.

Psychology teaches us that all behavior is motivated. That is to say, from that perspective, everything we do comes from some reason, some conscious or unconscious place within. If people behave unreasonably, there is a cause for their behavior. Knowing that may not change a thing about family conflict, but it can help us deal with it a little better. Dealing with family conflict is essential as our elders age and family members have to step up and make decisions about aging parents.  Everyone may not get along so well in this situation.

In our practice of elder mediation, fear seems to be the single biggest motivator that drives the conflicts we see. It can be fear around money, or control, or change. It can be fear of being found out, exposed. It can be fear of being asked to do something one is not competent or willing to do. It is one of the most basic of human emotions, but an emotion that causes extreme self-protective reactions. These reactions sometimes manifest in strong words, violent behavior, or generally hostile contact with others.
Mediators work to help participants at mediation find ways to agree and to make compromises. The stronger a participant’s fear, the more difficult it is for that person to give in to anything, or to make agreements that touch upon his or her fear.

What can we do about all this? Perhaps we can start by recognizing that no one enjoys being horribly difficult at mediation or any time. Behaving badly is simply what shows on the outside. What just might be on the inside is a person frightened of losing control, security, money, the family home, an inheritance, the right to make decisions, or anything.

Compassion and understanding can do a lot to uplift the process of working with persons who are showing their worst side in a dispute. It does not change the difficult person’s behavior, but it can cause the whole tone of a mediation to soften. Understanding that emotion feeds conflict can cause one to step back and try to imagine what it is like to be the person who is acting out.

If one is able to imagine that, to “walk in someone else’s shoes” for the moment, it makes it a lot easier to compromise or try to figure out what would work for that difficult person. I guess you can call it being a little less selfish in a dispute.

It works. This, of course doesn’t apply only to mediation of disputes involving elders. It’s a general concept, and can apply to any kind of conflict. Difficult as it is to see the other’s side of the story in any clash of ideas, working at doing just that is essential to getting things resolved.

At the risk of sounding too philosophical here, I conclude that elder mediation can uplift us if we are willing to put forth the effort to stop thinking of only our own point of view. It’s not easy. The upside to the effort is that your dispute could be over with, or at least down to a workable level. Were we all able to see past the specifics of a family conflict to the underlying emotions we would surely be more peaceful.

To learn more about family conflicts and aging loved ones, sign up for our free newsletter at http://www.AgingParents.com.

© 2009, AgingParents.com