Wednesday Martin

As we’re addressing the concerns of you, women with stepchildren, a reality is taking shape. Namely, many of you could benefit from counseling. Either couples work or individual work, but something. But as stepfamily researcher, social psychologist and stepmother Elizabeth Church, Ph.D. notes in her book Understanding Stepmothers, it’s possible that a therapist treating a couple in a repartnership with kids will do more harm than good. Church details that many of her patients came to her after being treated by therapists with no training, familiarity, or real experience helping remarried couples with kids. The results were unfortunate: therapists telling women to “treat stepkids just like they’re you’re own” and otherwise importing a first-family model to address stepfamily or stepcouple reality. Since stepfamilies are different, that doesn’t work. These couples understandably became frustrated, discouraged, even hopeless before finding real help.

I asked Kela Price, a certified stepfamily coach and co-founder of www.todaysmodernfamily.com, to weigh in. Here are her thoughts on how to find a coach, therapist, or psychologist who can help you:

Guest Post by Kela Price, Certified Stepfamily Coach

Choosing a therapist takes some serious consideration. Choosing a stepfamily therapist takes even more. Navigating through stepfamily life is a challenge and choosing the right counselor to help you do so is imperative. Many think that choosing a therapist with a slew of academic credentials and qualifications means that he or she is the best fit for their stepfamily, but this is rarely the case. There are far more important factors to consider when choosing someone who can truly understand and help this family system.

While it’s important to have some academic training or education, it’s more important to have the right academic training and/or education. Many stepcouples make the mistake of just choosing someone based on whether or not they have a degree and what particular school they graduated from; however, even if that individual graduated at the top of their class, with a psychology degree from Yale, Harvard or Columbia University, it doesn’t mean that they are qualified to guide your stepfamily through your challenges. What matters is that you interview the candidate to see what experience they’ve had specifically with the stepfamily.

I’ve known and counseled stepcouples who have been discouraged because they express that counseling didn’t work and are therefore hesitant to try it again. This is because many traditional therapists will try to apply a first family model to a stepfamily, and it does not work. Additionally, there are therapists who have only read about stepfamilies in a book and then attempt to counsel a stepfamily. Again, it doesn’t work. The most qualified therapist for the stepfamily is one who has the academic training or education specifically in the area of divorce, remarriage or repartnership with children and the stepfamily dynamic, and also one who has lived or is living the stepfamily life. Academic knowledge alone doesn’t work because in order to apply that academic information to your treatment of stepfamilies, you have to first know if it is correct, and in order to know if it is correct, you have to know how a stepfamily operates. In order to truly understand and know the inner workings of a stepfamily, you have to have lived it! The right combination of both professional and personal experience is important to consider when deciding on a stepfamily therapist.

I encourage anyone who’s about to enter into a stepfamily (the best time to get counseling is BEFORE you enter the stepfamily, not when you’re in crisis mode) or is in a stepfamily situation and feeling in need of help (it’s never too late to find the help you need!) to ask their potential therapist, counselor or coach the following questions to determine whether or not he or she is qualified to help in this area. Don’t be afraid to interview them prior to choosing, as choosing the right therapist can prove to be a great benefit for your family.

Interview Questions for Your Stepfamily Counselor Candidate
1. Specifically, what kind of stepfamily training have you had?
2. Do you treat stepfamilies different from first families? If the candidate says, “No, the stepfamily operates much like a first family and so the treatment is the same,” keep looking!
3. Have you ever been divorced and/or remarried and experienced stepfamily life yourself?
4. What are some of the unique challenges that stepfamily co-parents face, and (specifically) how do you handle those?
5. Why do you feel that so many remarriages fail as opposed to first marriages, and what specifically do you do to help strengthen the remarriage?
6. How many stepfamilies or stepcouples have you worked with?

Phone Coaching

Phone coaching is an increasingly common option for individuals and couples for a few reasons. For many stepcouples, finding qualified counselors in their area is extremely difficult as there aren’t that many of us out here. As such, when distance is a major factor, phone counseling may be their best option. Additionally, some find a coach or counselor’s office sterile, intimidating and uninviting, and are less likely to truly open up. For some men, the thought of counseling makes them want to run, let alone if they have to actually sit in front of someone and discuss their feelings. For them, phone counseling isn’t as intimidating and is the only way their spouse can get them to attend.

Overall, phone counseling/coaching can be just as effective as sitting face to face with your counselor or coach. It’s not for everyone and it’s most important for you to choose the option that works for you.

As a mother, I’ve felt tremendous relief and validation as writers (whether they’re blogging or publishing in traditional print media) have recently blown the lid off the secrets lives and feelings of mommies. They have all my gratitude and respect for letting the cat out of the bag regarding the aspects of motherhood that were not spoken of much until recently. Like how mind-numbingly dull it can be sometimes to keep up your end of a conversation with a five-year-old, how infuriating it is to sunblock a toddler, and how you’re ready for a drink (or at least a massage) by 10 a.m. some days.

Whether it’s It Sucked and Then I Cried, Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay, Ayelet Waldman’s Bad Mother, or any of the dozens of mommy bloggers telling it like it is, our romanticized and sentimental notions of motherhood have been replaced with a new honesty. We love our kids, but some days motherhood stinks.

When will it be okay for us to write with such brutal honesty about how much it sucks (sometimes) to be a stepmother? Why are mothers allowed to let it out, while women with stepkids are still supposed to keep it zipped? It’s hard to be a mother, sure, but it’s harder, much, much harder, to be a stepmother (I’m not going to cite the half dozen studies that say it’s so. Look them up yourself if you don’t believe me. And those stepmothers reading do believe me…). It’s hypocritical to expect women with stepkids to keep up a wall of silence about it for much longer, while we’re giving mothers the latitude they need and deserve to re-write our social script about what mothering is and what mothers “should” think and feel and do. A stepmother who bitches is considered unseemly, a cliche, not an interesting and important mouthpiece for a cultural shift like the mommies who bitch. This is not a competition, of course. I’m not saying Ayelet Waldman doesn’t have to take a lot of crap. Sure she does. All the mommy writers are putting themselves in the line of fire for telling the truth about how they feel about motherhood some days, and quite often they are berated for it by those who would prefer that that the veil of sentiment that distorts our concept of motherhood remain in place.

But can you imagine if a woman with stepkids dared to be that out there? It’s hard to fathom. And it doesn’t often happen. Women with stepkids are careful, I learned in my research, very, very careful indeed, about telling the truth, about disclosing how much they struggling, about confiding their ugly and taboo (but perfectly normal) feelings, and speaking honestly about less-than-perfect lifetime outcomes with His Kids. That’s why our blogs are so often anonymous or carefully edited, our conversations so hushed, our blood pressure and rates of divorce and substance use so high. We have learned the hard way that when we speak of our stepmothering experiences publicly, we will be excoriated, often viciously, if we are anything less than tactful, diplomatic, and utterly ladylike in our descriptions of life with his kids.

“You sound like a lobotomized Stepford Wife!” a friend, also a woman with stepchildren, chided me after she had watched one of my TV interviews about my book Stepmonster and stepmother reality. She was right. Like most women with stepchildren, in many of my TV appearances and radio interviews I had bent over backwards to seem reasonable, so fearful was I of being branded wicked, bitter, and all the other stepmother cliches. Which I am anyway, many times, in spite of my best efforts. It seems that advocating for women with stepkids at all is profoundly disturbing and unsettling for some tv viewers and radio listeners.

Meanwhile, over the last few months, I have received over a hundred emails from women with stepkids who confide, “I can’t blog about this because I don’t want my husband and his kids to know”; “I’m a stepfamily therapist but I have to tell you…”; “I counsel couples for a living but I’m at my wit’s end about my own remarriage with children”; “As a psychiatrist, I am just starting to accept that it makes no sense for me to make any more efforts with my husband’s young adult son”; and more. During a Canadian call-in radio interview I did last Spring, the host told me, “Something really odd is happening. No one’s calling in, but in the last 10 minutes I’ve received about 50 emails from women saying they want to call in and talk about what stepmothering is like for them–but they’re afraid someone listening will recognized their voice.”

I feel for all these women –who wouldn’t? Everyone lives a partially closeted life in some ways–there are secrets we keep and little polite lies we tell every day because it’s part of the social contract. “Nice to see you.” “Everything’s great, how about you?” But I can’t help but wonder what would happen if we relaxed our expectations of women with stepkids, allowing them the freedom to say, privately, publicly, in conversations, in print, what’s really going on with them. Is it possible for us to allow women with stepkids to describe stepmother reality without jumping on them every time they deviate from the Big Lies of stepfamily life–that it’s easy if you just love them, that it’s really worth it, that it necessarily gets better with time. Disliking stepmothers who speak up seems to me the last hold out of a kind of ugly misogyny that has otherwise waned in our culture. And as Elizabeth Church has written, the fear of being branded a stepmonster or a bitch is a tremendously effective gag.

There’s no emotion more taboo for a woman with stepchildren to admit to feeling (let alone actually express) than jealousy. And there’s no more potent stereotype than a green-eyed stepmonster. Who wants to be that ugly cliche? No one. And so we bend over backwards, many of us, and protest too much, insisting that we would never, ever, ever Feel Like That.

But scratch the surface and you will quickly learn that jealousy is an astonishingly common, albeit stigmatized, stepmother experience. Virtually every woman I interviewed in the course of researching my book told me (after a good half hour or so of warming up) that she had felt jealous of her stepchildren’s relationship with their dad at some point. And disgusted with herself for having the feeling. “Daddy loves us the best!” one woman I interviewed reported being told by her twin nine- year-old stepdaughters. She was furious for herself for not being able to just laugh it off–and also upset that her husband said and did nothing when his girls were around to dispel the notion that they did, in fact, count more in the household.

And there’s the rub. Social psychologist and stepmother Elizabeth Church has written extensively on women with stepchildren and jealousy. And her insights may come as a real epiphany. Jealousy is not just common; it is normal, Church notes, and it is also a two way street–stepchildren are frequently quite angry and jealous of stepmom for “taking dad away” (forget about the fact that stepmom probably didn’t–the vast majority of men do not leave their marriages for a woman they have an extramarital affair with. But that’s another post).

In addition, stepmother jealousy isn’t so simple. It is actually an emotional detour of sorts, a kind of sleight-of-hand in which one feeling masks another reality. Jealousy, Church notes, is really powerlessness turned inside out. Find a jealous stepmother and you will also have found a woman who feels utterly shut out, excluded, and disempowered whenever her stepkids are in the picture.

Moreover, Church notes, it’s not just that women with stepchildren FEEL powerless and disregarded in relationships in the stepfamily system–they ARE powerless and disregarded.

In previous posts I’ve considered at length the many ways in which women with stepchildren, far from being power-crazed excluders, are actually fundamentally vulnerable and powerless. But in short, feeling second best; feeling like an outsider in one’s own home; having little or no say in parenting practices and even when and whether the stepkids will visit or move in with you; and feeling like a rival due to interactions between our husbands and their kids are all very typical aspects of stepmother reality. They are also all factors that contribute to a stepmother’s disempowerment and outsider status in the household. “They show up,” one woman with a stepson and stepdaughter in their twenties told me, “and it’s like the baby and I don’t even exist.” She is unpartnered and parenting an infant alone whenever her husband’s kids show up, a difficult and trying situation, and yet if she speaks about it to her husband, or even acknowledges her frustration and resentment to herself, she has become an evil stepmother, the very cliche she has promised herself she will never become.

But jealousy, Church’s research confirms, is NOT a sign of being a wicked, flawed, petty stepmonster. Rather, it’s an indication that there are still power imbalances within the family system. Jealousy is a message to the couple: WARNING, this couple relationship needs to be strengthened! The site of intimacy and decision making needs to be transferred from the father-child dyad to the couple dyad. When women with stepkids feel truly supported and partnered by their husbands or boyfriends, when the couple relationship is the center of the family, when the kids of any age revolve around the couple rather than the couple revolving around and contorting themselves to accommodate his kids, the stepmother’s jealousy will subside.