Family Meetings: Strategies and Options for Working with Challenging Families

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Family Meetings Strategies and Options for
Working with Challenging Families

• Bruce McBeath, PhD
• Terje Hausken, M. Div
• Jane Whiteside, PhD
• Pat Kimble, MFA
• Age and Disability Odyssey
• Rochester, Minnesota
• August 17, 2009

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• A careless word may kindle strife
• A cruel word may wreck a life
• A bitter word may hate instill
• A brutal word may smite and kill
• A gracious word may smooth the way
• A joyous word may light the day.
• A timely word may lessen stress
• A loving word may heal and bless.
• A poem by Deborah Smith Pegues from her book 30
  Days to Taming Your Tongue What You Say (and
  Don't Say) Will Improve Your Relationships

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Family Meetings-who, when, what?

• Who holds family meetings
• Caregiver coaches
• Social Workers
• Other
• When is a family meeting held?
• Important decisions and discusses
• Conflict or problem solving
• What kind of meeting - facilitation or mediation?
• Similarities
• Differences

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Learning Objectives

• Understand and use 4 basic principles that frame
  and enhance the advancement of a more satisfying
  outcomes and set the stage
• Recognize and be able to apply 3 different
  strategies used by a facilitator/mediator in
  resolving conflict during a family meeting.
• Name the 3 steps of the process used in a family
  meeting to resolve conflict and develop an action
  plan

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Principles of a good family meeting

• Respect includes accepting and validating
  perspectives which may be in conflict.
• Neutrality means more than not taking sides.  It
  may mean supporting all sides. 

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Principles of a good family meeting

• Understanding of Conflict including honoring the
  person, and separating the person from their
  position.
• Understanding the process of transforming
  conflict into consensus includes finding
  important underlying areas of agreement among
  divergent views. 

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Strategies

• Supportive mediator
• Process-control mediator
• Problem-solving mediator

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Role play

• Who will get Father Abrahams stamp collection

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Process

• Issues
• Options
• Solutions

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Short Break

• Please return within 10 minutes

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Learning Objectives

• To gain understanding about the lived experience
  of late life aging as it impacts caregiving
  priorities
• To gain understanding about the complexity of
  stress on the caregiver family while moving
  toward end of life issues with an older adult

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The "phenomenology of aging

• Demonstrate what we know, experientially, about
  the changing perspectives and priorities of the
  older adult as they move toward the end of life
  and how that impacts what they want from
  caregivers

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Complexity of family caregiving

• The web of complex tensions impacting the
  caregiving family as they strive to serve
  caregiving needs while sustaining nurturing
  connection and support for themselves and others
  within their own family.

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Role Play
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Review
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Handouts

• Resource list
• Communication tips
• Differences between the roles of consulting,
  coaching, counseling, facilitating, mediating
• Family dynamics resources and basic principles
• Information on changes to be aware of when
  working with families whose members are aging.

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Presenter

• Terje C. Hausken is a trained mediator and has
  done divorce and church mediations for the past
  fifteen years.  He has written two books on the
  subject of mediation  MEDIATION FOR TROUBLED
  MARRIAGES (Hanson and Hausken, Augsburg
  Publishing) and PEACEMAKING, THE QUIET POWER
  (Hausken, CPI Publishing). He received his BA
  Degree from Mankato State University, and his
  M.div from Luther Seminary and has been a
  Lutheran pastor for thirty five years.  He is
  currently serving the Dennison/Vang parish (rural
  Kenyon) as their pastor..  He is married to
  Barbara and has two children and two
  grandchildren. 

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Presenter

• Patricia C. Kimble, MFA, is an Educator,
  Caregiver Coach, and Program Coordinator at Three
  Rivers Community Action, Inc. To accommodate
  changing trends and service needs, she has
  accumulated hundreds of hours in continuing
  education and graduate work in Education and
  Social Work. Ms. Kimble developed two
  volunteer-based programs and has worked with
  seniors and caregivers since 1999 she
  co-authored the Family Meetings Guides. Prior to
  1999, she was a Certified Rehabilitation
  Counselor and taught communications skills. In
  her earlier life she was a family caregiver,
  theater designer and artist. Her husband is an
  engineer at Mayo Clinic and her son is studying
  architecture.

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Presenter

• Bruce McBeath, PhD is a clinical psychologist
  with an extensive background in existential and
  transpersonal psychology. One of the founders of
  the Psychosynthesis Institute of Minnesota, he
  has written and lectured internationally on
  existential and transpersonal psychotherapy and
  taught seminars and courses on existential
  psychology and psychotherapy, transpersonal
  psychology and phenomenology at the University of
  Montana, the Ontario Institute for Studies in
  Education, the Minnesota School of Professional
  Psychology (now Argosy University) and SMU. Dr.
  McBeath has been collaborating in special
  projects designed to generate new approaches to
  understanding the psychology of aging. Currently
  he is training volunteers as Mental Health Peer
  Counselors in Red Wing, Minnesota. He maintains
  a private practice in Saint Paul and Red Wing, MN.

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Presenter

• Jane Whiteside, PhD, LP, did her graduate work in
  psychology at the University of Texas, then moved
  to the Twin Cities where she started the Twin
  Cities areas first area agency on aging and
  later worked in academic administration at the
  University of Minnesota. In 1995, she became
  licensed in psychology and later opened a
  clinical psychology practice in Red Wing,
  Minnesota.  She is currently retiring from her
  clinical practice and is working again in aging
  as a volunteer caregiver coach for Three Rivers
  Community Action, assisting with the Red Wing
  Peer Counselor training, as well as in other
  community settings including the Goodhue County
  jail and her rural Wisconsin community.

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Contacts