How Therapy Can Set Your Blended Family Up for Success
The decision to combine families rarely comes easy. When you have children with a previous partner, there’s an inherent need to be cautious with their emotions moving forward.
New people aren’t introduced into their lives until it's something serious. Blending two families together is a big decision. The beauty of this decision is that it provides a wonderful opportunity to create new memories, traditions, and experiences.
These new connections that form from a blended unit don’t come without their own unique struggles. Seeking out a therapist to help guide the process can be beneficial in overcoming these challenges in a healthy way.
Help with the Adjustment Period
A blended family has unique challenges that arise when multiple households combine. There’s a lot that goes into the merging of different parts of different families. Chaos may seem like an appropriate word choice.
There’s a decently long adjustment period for most families during this process. Therapy can help tremendously throughout by providing helpful perspective, teaching how to manage emotions, instilling a sense of patience, and giving insight into different milestones reached.
Aid in Establishing Structure
Children require structure and a supportive environment while growing up. This holds even more true during the transition process of a blended family. Structure can provide a sense of safety, make them feel grounded, and lead to an all around better experience blending the families together.
Therapy can help uncover what your family members’ specific needs are, how they are best supported, and what structure is best suited to meet those needs. It allows for problem solving different options, guides practice scenarios, and encourages accountability.
Prepare the Family for Flexibility
Structure is important, but so is a certain amount of flexibility and grace. You can have the best ideas and plan in place only to have it fall short for meeting the family’s needs.
Getting away from how you envisioned the transition phase and the initial time together can be hard. Changing plans and pivoting your approach can take some finesse. Understanding where to scale back and what to modify in your plan can be worked through during therapy. With guidance, you can adjust your expectations without taking on frustration and guilt.
Provide Guidance for Managing Relationships
Bringing children from a previous relationship on both sides means there are likely to be at least two ex-partners. Assuming there is going to be continued involvement in their children’s lives, you’ll want co-parenting and any involvement to be cordial and consistent.
Depending on how your relationship ended, this can be difficult. But you want to do what’s best for any children involved. Keeping a calm and stable interaction going forward will be key. Therapy sessions can focus on mending any broken relationships, processing emotions, improving communication, and letting go of any negatively harbored feelings towards a past situation.
Work on Communication Skills
Communication is a skill that requires practice to be performed correctly and is ever evolving. For a blended family, communication holds a high value.
You’re blending different people from different backgrounds and with different needs together. Just talking to each other isn’t going to necessarily work out the way you plan.
You need to identity what each person’s communication styles and preferences are. There needs to be time made to have routine conversations. It’s also important to uncover how to have deep conversations and find comfort in doing so within this new dynamic.
Children from a partner’s previous relationship may be hesitant to open up to you or your own children initially. With therapy attendance, you and your family can address any communication issues, practice new skills within the secure environment of a session, but also in the real world.
Blended family dynamics can be challenging. If you or your partner are experiencing difficulties in achieving that steady family flow, family therapy can be a helpful tool. Contact us to learn more about our services.