As I get closer to the designation of elderly, or as my 10 year old son says, “the ooooooollllllldddddd man”, I am curious about what the counseling field has to say about working with Boomers and elderly counseling.
All the folks I hang around with are really crucial and engaged in life, and I am 61. Many of us have been hit difficult by the current recession, and some are worried about finances, but I am not seeing anybody give up.
All of us have had to deal with losses and triumphs and illness and youngsters and divorce and marriage and re-marriage and betrayal and medication and illness and death and funerals and disappointment and insight and wonder and awe and enterprise reversals and company successes, and have developed wealthy deep friendships and spiritual, physical, and cognitive healing paths all through it all.
Speaking for myself, I am seeking forward to a retirement, meaning I own my own time, where I earn my livelihood on the net, and I am amazed at folks who do not see the chance there.
I work regularly on my physical and spiritual health, and I am paying close attention to my mental well being, and employing some recently developed software programs to keep my neuroplasticity and neurogenesis going. (By no means heard of those new neuro-words? Nobody else had either until a few years ago, so read on please).
My workouts are in some respects stronger than those I did 40 years ago, and I just do not feel proper if I don’t work up a great sweat.
The place where I break down is in nutrition, I eat larger portions than I need, and can consume for comfort rather than nutrition, which occurs when I am tired.
So far, I am not finding a great deal of data about counseling for the elderly that does not deal with illness, even though I have had some care givers in my domestic violence classes, so that I know caring for an aging parent is quite challenging.
Elderly counseling is a new field, and it looks like there are programs that supply a degree or a certification for that field.
The problems that are covered in those programs are final life cycle stage, the aging mind, changing family systems, multicultural issues of aging, preparing retirement, family issues, sexuality, security, illness and dependency, bereavement (widow or widower), community resources, advocacy, and life review or generativity.
Certain groups show prospective for higher counseling requirements such as the sick and disabled, the disadvantaged, minorities, prisoners, substance abusers, homosexuals, and the single or widowed.
Elderly Counseling and Wellness
The marketers have not given up on us Baby Boomers, even though the counselors are still a bit behind the eight ball.
The marketers are seeking out for our pocket books, , and providing us wellness, and supplements, and antiaging pills and potions, and coaching programs, and there are advertising campaigns aimed at just us, as there have been given that we began to arrive enmass after WWII.
There are some tools folks that I believe are extremely excellent elderly counseling.
1 of them has been put together by Michael Merzenich,Ph.D. who is a leading researcher in the new field of neuroplasticity.
I first came across Merzinich’s work when I read a book by Norman Doidge, MD, about a year ago, called THE BRAIN THAT Modifications ITSELF.
Merzinich was talking enthusiastically about the possible of our brains at any stage of life, if we continued to take care of the ‘pillars of brain fitness’ and challenged our neurons with novel studying experiences.
For decades, neuroscience has taught us that our brains had been fixed and that we could only look to slowly losing them until we had been sent off to the property.
Merzenich and other researchers are discovering that absolutely nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, the IMPACT study just published in April of 2009 indicates that there is wonderful value to computerized brain fitness programs like the The Posit Science Brain Fitness Program, developed by Merzenich’s business.
Brainfit for Life is a genuinely neat book written by Simon Evans,Ph.D. and Paul Burghardt,Ph.D. who are neuroscientists at the University of Michigan. They write for the layperson, and they have culled the neuroscientific study for hints that you and I can use to keep our brains alive and vibrant at any age. They say there are some pillars of brain fitness that we can attend to, which are important in us keeping our wits about us.
Those pillars are, physical exercise, and I exercise with guys at the YMCA who are in their 80′s, and they are there each and every day.
Even at 61 they call me ‘young man’, like I could not have learned anything about life.
So I like to use the Scott and Angie Tousignant model of physical exercise when I am not at they YMCA. If you go part way down the page that the blue link takes you to, you will meet two of the Tousignant students who are in their 80′s and began to exercise to make travel less complicated.
Tension management is a key piece of the elderly counseling puzzle, and the very best tension managers there are would be physical physical exercise and deep breathing.
They are totally free and we are built for them.
I tell my anger management clients that deep breathing is good for them, and they nod sagely and go back to really shallow breathing which in fact induces a tension response.
So I use a tool known as Heartmath or heart rate variability biofeedback which teaches customers on their PC to regulate the time between heart beats, which is a really feel very good encounter, and leaves them with an internal bath of DHEA, the antiaging hormone, rather than adrenaline and cortisol, the aging hormones.
Heartmath also opens up the greater perceptual centers in the brain for your brain fitness function with Mind Sparke Brain Fitness Pro or Lumosity or Posit Science Brain Fitness Pro.
Elderly counseling can be in component a DIY project. I feel it is crucial for us Seniors to look out for ourselves, and take charge of our conscious aging.