Elderly Counseling

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 very vital and engaged in life, and I am 61. Many of us have been hit hard by the current recession, and some are worried about finances, but I am not seeing anyone give up.

All of us have had to deal with losses and triumphs and illness and children 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 business reversals and business successes, and have created rich deep friendships and spiritual, physical, and cognitive healing paths throughout it all.

Speaking for myself, I am looking forward to a retirement, meaning I own my own time, where I earn my livelihood on the internet, and I am amazed at folks who do not see the opportunity there.

I work regularly on my physical and spiritual health, and I am paying close attention to my mental health, and using some recently developed software programs to keep my neuroplasticity and neurogenesis going. (Never 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 right if I don't work up a good sweat.

The place where I break down is in nutrition, I eat larger portions than I need, and can eat for comfort rather than nutrition, which happens when I am tired.

So far, I am not finding a great deal of information about counseling for the elderly that does not deal with illness, although I have had some care givers in my domestic violence classes, so that I know caring for an aging parent is very difficult.

Elderly counseling is a new field, and it looks like there are programs that offer a degree or a certification for that field.

The issues that are covered in those programs are final life cycle stage, the aging mind, changing family systems, multicultural issues of aging, planning retirement, family issues, sexuality, security, illness and dependency, bereavement (widow or widower), community resources, advocacy, and life review or generativity.

Certain groups show potential for higher counseling needs including 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 looking out for our pocket books, , and offering us wellness, and supplements, and antiaging pills and potions, and coaching programs, and there are marketing campaigns aimed at just us, as there have been since we began to arrive enmass after WWII.

There are some tools folks that I think are very good elderly counseling.

One 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 CHANGES ITSELF.

Merzinich was talking enthusiastically about the potential 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 learning experiences.

For decades, neuroscience has taught us that our brains were fixed and that we could only look to slowly losing them until we were sent off to the home.

Merzenich and other researchers are discovering that nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, the IMPACT study just published in April of 2009 indicates that there is great value to computerized brain fitness programs like the The Posit Science Brain Fitness Program, created by Merzenich's company.

Brainfit for Life is a really 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 research 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 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 easier.

Stress management is a key piece of the elderly counseling puzzle, and the best stress managers there are would be physical exercise and deep breathing.

They are 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 very shallow breathing which actually induces a stress response.

So I use a tool called Heartmath or heart rate variability biofeedback which teaches clients on their PC to regulate the time between heart beats, which is a feel good experience, 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 higher perceptual centers in the brain for your brain fitness work with Mind Sparke Brain Fitness Pro or Lumosity or Posit Science Brain Fitness Pro.

Elderly counseling can be in part a DIY project. I think it is important for us Seniors to look out for ourselves, and take charge of our conscious aging.