Four Tips for Successful Family Blending

 

Although blended families are becoming more and more common, the unique difficulties around forming a new family continue to be a challenges experience for all involved.

Some common concerns from the parents include: How do you validate your new partner and your children without alienating the other? How do you create a bond with these new children? And for the children, how do they begin to cope with this new adult in their life while still trying to process the divorce? And… who are these new kids living in their house?

Here are some tips to support blending your family in a healthy and supportive way.

New Couple’s Bond is the glue!

The complex set of challenges ahead in blending a family requires a strong, united front. Ensure communication remains, open, respectful and safe between you and your partner. The commitment to maintaining a strong, healthy connection will support the both of you in addressing whatever problems that show up along the way.

Boundaries, Boundaries, Boundaries

Those first few months, and even years, will require boundary setting with people in your extended network. Firstly, being clear with your previous spouse around your needs and expectations will support the new relationships to formulate and crystallize. Boundary clarification may also be needed for past family members, friends and colleagues.

Additionally, clear communication around the expectations of your new family members will support initial anxiety as the family blends. For example, being open about how affection will be shown between new family members can be helpful in creating safety with one another. Boundaries between you and your partner may also be needed around discipline and parenting conversations with biological and step children.

Allow for Grieving

The grieving does not only happen for you and the end of your marriage. The grieving occurs for your children as well around the loss of the past family unit. This grieving may even extend to their prior home, extended family members, friends and connections in that prior version of their life.

Reactions to step-family formation is a response to insecurity of a family looking one way and then suddenly looking different. Behaviors in children can show up as an attempt to protect the fear of “will this happen again?”. The experience of loss and need for grieving will be increased if the divorce is high conflict.

Find Support

You and your partner want to ensure you have support around you that will ground you when challenges are feeling tough or unmanageable. As the needs of each family members are likely to increase during this transition, engaging in family therapy can support the entire family system.

Family therapy for blended families allows the space for a professional to support the competing needs of each family member while normalizing the challenges of step-family formation. Additionally, the family can create new patterns of communication and connection in a healthy and intentional way.

Anxiety and Yoga Therapy

Are you a Pinball Wizard? Racing and bouncing daily between destination points: home, work, carpooling kids, grocery store, last-minute errands. Factor in groan-inducing hurdles like traffic, unexpected deadlines, a miscommunication with someone special, maybe a lost night’s sleep worrying about juggling details or staring at your phone checking emails…

Where does your self-care fit into the list?

We become conditioned to think a Netflix-binge or tunneling into social media allows an escape, but afterward did you find that true calm and grounding you were seeking? Still waiting to catch your breath?

Living in a culture dominated by multi-tasking, material distractions and compulsive screen time, it is easy to feel disconnected and overwhelmed. Many of us have lost the ability to sit in peaceful stillness and feel centered within in our body, mind, and breath.

Consistent and excessive stressors cause anxiety, which can affect the ability to pilot daily living. Forty million adults in the United States are affected by anxiety. Anxiety and stress take a toll on an individual’s ability to navigate the tightrope associated with maintaining life-work balance. Individuals with ongoing anxiety experience symptoms manifesting as restlessness, sleep disturbance, irritability, chronic headaches, muscle tension, gastrointestinal difficulties, depression, decreased receptiveness to new experiences, disconnection from social support systems, and/or a diminished sense of fulfillment.

With nearly one-fifth of the American population experiencing anxiety and related symptoms, the challenge of maintaining self-care practices and life balance is a very real experience.

Living with chronic anxiety, one’s mind and body struggle excessively to counterbalance stressors. Unable to claim grounding, the stress-response perpetuates. Chronic anxiety creates dysfunction in the body’s stress-response system preventing the mind and body from effectively returning to a state of calm. This imbalance in the nervous system has far-reaching effects on emotional regulation, cognitive function, and social relationships, as well as with proper functioning of the cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal, and immunological systems.

Yoga therapy can help. Research shows the yogic elements of breath, meditation/visualization, and mindful movement can address the ramifications of chronic anxiety. Benefits include re-balancing the nervous system’s stress-response cycle, neuroplasticity to retrain the brain how to respond in stressful moments, neuromuscular re-education to teach the body how to be strong yet flexible, and improving a sense of connectedness to self and social networks.

With practice, one can begin to recognize and reduce the symptoms associated with anxiety. Learn how to reset the mind, breath, and body to more calmly and intentionally respond in any given moment.