Can you instantly identify these naïve questions as well-intended wisdom that unfortunately contributes nothing to alter your Un-cope-able Parents desperation?
- “Why don’t you…”
- “Have you ever considered…”
- “How about…”
Fill in the blanks with conventional advice like putting them into an assisted living facility or calling additional support resources into your upsetting folks’ home on a consistent basis.
You can’t blame your friends and colleagues. They know not better.
If unsophisticated truisms could solve your issues, wouldn’t you already have done so eons ago? Of course! Please!!! Give you more credit!
Let’s get real here.
Sure, there’s ample clinical content out there about how to best interact with an aging population. Resources, advice, updates on federal legislation and regulations, funding opportunities and more…
Then, there’s your non-compliant reality.
Anyone with extreme elders knows there is zilch any documented professional can say or write that you haven’t already long ago thought of to contend with your complex family dynamics. One can research all the theoretical volumes in the world; this will contribute nothing to changing their impossibility.
How do you know this in your core? Because you’ve already exhausted your creativity!!
Learn from my failed “experiments”.
Even if no one else validates your truth of “Duh…Tried it”, I’m here to acknowledge you’ve probably tested these tactics – and maybe more – in a vain effort to influence your stubborn pair to entertain wise alternatives that support their increasing health and other needs:
- Abdicate (your needs)
- Beg
- Cajole
- Demand
- Explain (logically)
- Force
- Grovel
- Humiliate
- Insult
- Jump (up and down in frustration)
- “Kill” (as in, wanting to kill them some days)
- Lie
- Manipulate
- Name-call
- Over-ride
- Plead
- Quarrel
- Retaliate
- Shout
- Train (as in, educate)
- Undermine
- Vanquish
- Wrong
- X-acerbate
- Yell
- Zeal (demonstrate)
What a list of actions that most certainly do NOT work! Gosh!
My anticipation next time…
Believe me! No stone remains unturned in terms of the A to Z strategies I’ve explored with my infuriating mother and father. Akin to an out-of-control pendulum, I’ve attempted the level-headed and ridiculous, the rational and irrational – and everything between.
I’ve also failed – miserably – at ploys remotely smacking of my hidden agendas. Not that I didn’t strive to inflict my preferred solutions until such unconstructive endeavors proved 100% fruitless.
Stay with me as we journey into proven and practical action steps that prevail under even the most galling of eldercare circumstances.
Carol-Ann Hamilton
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