🍪 The secret blending recipe
How to feel blended when the ex continually tries to prevent you from becoming a real family.
Back when I went to counseling for my anxiety, Counselor Jen and I talked a lot about life at home. Sometimes Dan and sometimes SD, but mostly HCBM, whose bullshit antics consumed my every waking moment.
"Usually when a client has such a visceral reaction to someone in their life, I find it's because that person represents something symbolic. What do you think HCBM represents for you?" Jen asked.
"She's the obstacle to us becoming a real family," I answered without having think about it. "But she's not a representation of that. She's literally what's preventing us from being a family. She poisons SD against us. She brings constant drama to our lives. Nothing at home ever calms down because she's always flipping out about something. How are we supposed to feel like a family when she's actively keeping us from being one?"
I don't remember what Jen responded; I just remember driving home after that session feeling pissed. Pissed that even after however many sessions and stories about HCBM, Jen apparently still didn't get the real problem here.
What I really wanted out of counseling was for my therapist to tell me what Dan & I could do to get his high-conflict ex to stop acting so crazy. Because once HCBM stopped acting crazy, I knew that then I'd be able to kick anxiety's ass, no problem. My stress would plummet back down to normal-people levels. I could stop living strung so tight, like I teetered eternally on the edge of breaking wide open at any moment.
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I used to think I was the only stepparent who struggled in this role. Which also made me feel like the worst human ever. But after many years of talking to thousands of stepparents, turns out it's super normal for stepparenting to be way harder than you expected! This list of coping tips for emotional overwhelm includes many of the practices I used myself to get my head above water again. xo
Making HCBM act normal was the first and most important step. Because if HCBM got off her rampage against us, then SD would see that it was okay to like us. Love us, even. She wouldn't be so sulky at our house anymore. She'd be nicer to all of us.
And if SD were more pleasant to be around, then I knew it'd be easier for me to feel positive on those dreaded transition days, which would help lower my anxiety even more. Also our home would be happier, which meant that SD would stop complaining to her mom about coming there. And then her mom wouldn't freak out at Dan, so HCBM & Dan could finally co-parent positively.
See?? Just like that: no more anxiety! Positive co-parenting! A functional blended family!! And all we needed to make our perfect future happen was one single thing: to make HCBM not act crazy anymore.
High Conflict Co-Parenting: Better Boundaries, Not More Compromise
Typical co-parenting advice assumes both exes are capable of rising above in the best interest of their shared kiddos. Unfortunately that's not the reality for those of us dealing with toxic exes.
Stepfamilies in high conflict situations need different strategies and resources, especially around co-parenting. In this workshop, Dan & I share what helped us reclaim our family from his ex's constant drama. xo
Someday, I was sure, I would figure out the secret recipe to accomplish that. Hopefully Counselor Jen would give me a hint pretty soon. I didn't know why she was taking so long to help me out on that when HCBM was the clear cause of my panic attacks, and stopping them was the whole reason I was in counseling in the first place.
Jen never did give me the secret recipe. Later, though, I figured it out on my own, and now I'm gonna share it with you:
There is no secret recipe for blending in high conflict. Because blended family life doesn't have to be chaos-free to count as real life or a real family.
You are a blended family right now, even with all the complications and complexity and messiness we all wish didn't exist. Blended family life is complicated and complex and messy by definition. You don't have to wait till life with your partner gets simpler or calmer or tidier to be a "real" blended family. You're already there. This is it. It's happening right now.
Know what actually lowered my anxiety? First, accepting that I couldn't control the crazy. HCBM acting unhinged wasn't my fault, nor did I have the power to stop it.
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Stepparents in high conflict need extra support. Because unless you're an expert in the family court system, parenting psychology & childhood trauma, c-PTSD & emotional abuse & recovery, and high conflict personality disorders, you're probably feeling pretty damn overwhelmed right about now.
Trust me, it's not you! It's the unsustainable co-parenting and stepfamily dynamics surrounding you. In this workshop, I'll go over what helped me protect my own mental health and get my head back above water. xo
I kept thinking if I could just figure out the right thing(s) to do instead, HCBM would chill the fuck out and stop trying to ruin our family, and then — whew! — we’d have blue skies for life.
Then one day the thought hit me... but what if she never stops trying to ruin our family? What then?
Were we less of a family because Dan's ex was on a mission to destroy his relationship with his kid? Was I willing to let our family be defined by HCBM's actions? Only exist at her discretion, like we silently agreed that we didn't count until she chose to acknowledge that yes, we were SD's family too and she'd respect that and stop trying to sabotage us?
Fuck that.
The other realization that helped my anxiety was redefining what I thought our family should be. If our goal was peace and the reality was chaos, we must be failing, right? Nope. Really, our blended family life was like a cute little house built smack in the eye of a hurricane: solid, as long as we maintained our own center. Secure in the knowledge that every storm eventually blows itself out.
It’s so damn easy to point the finger at a toxic ex’s clearly inappropriate actions and say "SEE? If it weren't for THAT kind of shit, we'd probably be FINE."
We blame the conflict and the ex, or we blame our partner’s shitty boundaries. We don’t realize that even if there were no conflict between houses, blending a family literally takes years.
Does shit like custody battles or visitation withholding or parental alienation complicate our ability to blend? Abso-friggin-lutely. But are those the only reasons blending is hard? NOPE.
They say that blending a family takes 5 to 7 years... but up to 10 (or more!) in cases of high conflict. I'm sure there are many contributing factors why high conflict delays blending, but I suspect one of them is that all the drama and confusion of high conflict masks the real work we all need to do to become blended.
Conflict can become its own convenient scapegoat. We've never been in a stepfamily before so we don't understand there's core work that needs to happen, regardless of the ex’s behavior: work within ourselves and work within our family. Instead, we tell ourselves "Once this drama is gone, then we'll be able to blend."
We want to know how to make the conflict stop so we can finally feel blended. What we don't realize is we are the keepers of our own secret recipe; no one can make us feel blended except us.
We decide. We decide what blended family life looks like and feels like. We decide where we need boundaries instead of more attempted compromise, or disengaging instead of more frustration. We are Harold and his purple crayon, drawing our reality as we go.
Don't wait for the perfect conditions before you give yourself permission to feel blended. And don’t let the ex’s smoke and mirrors trick you into believing you’re not a real family.
🧡🧡
— Maarit.
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