Divorce and the Challenges when Blending Families
This week’s discussion was on divorce and stepfamilies, as well as the effects and some of the challenges associated with blending families that have been broken. Whether a family separated because of tragedy or not, I am not trying to say that family groups that have gone their separate ways are bad by using the word broken. I am using it to clearly identify the change in a family that occurs in the case of divorce or death.
Divorce is not what any of us want to go through and yet it is something people choose even when going into marriage. They never thought they would be the person who would make that decision. The unfortunate thing about many divorces is that the two individuals to divorce each other will often regret it years later. When looking back they say that they could have and wished they would have saved their marriage instead of opting for divorce. Something that we as a class mentioned early in the class was the idea of not walking into marriage with divorce as a plan “B”, but going in with the notion that if both partners work together and serve each other that they will have a joyful marriage.
With that said there are times when divorce is the best option for the family or individual. After a divorce or tragedy, parents will potentially remarry, one of the things we talked about was that waiting a couple of years before remarrying will give those from these broken relationships a chance to recover emotionally. It will also allow them to be in a place where they will be ready to move forward in blending their family with their spouse.
There are a lot of pieces that go into blending families beyond the obvious difference of having two families living in one house and sharing. There are many other things that will need to be handled over time. In the new arrangement of a stepfamily, there are a lot of unforeseen challenges that are not the most obvious. Challenges like wanting this marriage to work out and the pressure that comes with trying to make it everything that we want it to be. These expectations and hopes can make things difficult because people don’t often recognize them as a driving force in their life.
Other challenges that stepfamily have to overcome to build a sense of unity and safety are the spoken and unspoken rules. Each family has its own set of rules and while the spoken ones will be obvious and known making it easier to change them where needed, the unspoken rules and expectations for how one should react to something are not known making them harder to blend the two different sets together. Trying to understand the intricacy of a family pattern that is different from our own can be very challenging for everyone making it hard to understand what to do.
Divorce is not a situation that anyone wants to find themselves in, but in the case where one does and remarries there are some very good things to know like what was the cycle that caused the first divorce what if any emotional baggage might still be with us. What things could our current spouse do that will look like a previous spouse, but not have any of the same meaning behind it that we should be aware of so we don’t judge them harshly for doing nothing wrong.
Becoming aware of the unspoken rules and the expectations can help to build up a blended family making their home a happy place to be. Not every family’s circumstance will be the same, which is the reason that we need to learn good tools for how to handle hard situations to make our homes the places that we want them to be.
Divorce is not what any of us want to go through and yet it is something people choose even when going into marriage. They never thought they would be the person who would make that decision. The unfortunate thing about many divorces is that the two individuals to divorce each other will often regret it years later. When looking back they say that they could have and wished they would have saved their marriage instead of opting for divorce. Something that we as a class mentioned early in the class was the idea of not walking into marriage with divorce as a plan “B”, but going in with the notion that if both partners work together and serve each other that they will have a joyful marriage.
With that said there are times when divorce is the best option for the family or individual. After a divorce or tragedy, parents will potentially remarry, one of the things we talked about was that waiting a couple of years before remarrying will give those from these broken relationships a chance to recover emotionally. It will also allow them to be in a place where they will be ready to move forward in blending their family with their spouse.
There are a lot of pieces that go into blending families beyond the obvious difference of having two families living in one house and sharing. There are many other things that will need to be handled over time. In the new arrangement of a stepfamily, there are a lot of unforeseen challenges that are not the most obvious. Challenges like wanting this marriage to work out and the pressure that comes with trying to make it everything that we want it to be. These expectations and hopes can make things difficult because people don’t often recognize them as a driving force in their life.
Other challenges that stepfamily have to overcome to build a sense of unity and safety are the spoken and unspoken rules. Each family has its own set of rules and while the spoken ones will be obvious and known making it easier to change them where needed, the unspoken rules and expectations for how one should react to something are not known making them harder to blend the two different sets together. Trying to understand the intricacy of a family pattern that is different from our own can be very challenging for everyone making it hard to understand what to do.
Divorce is not a situation that anyone wants to find themselves in, but in the case where one does and remarries there are some very good things to know like what was the cycle that caused the first divorce what if any emotional baggage might still be with us. What things could our current spouse do that will look like a previous spouse, but not have any of the same meaning behind it that we should be aware of so we don’t judge them harshly for doing nothing wrong.
Becoming aware of the unspoken rules and the expectations can help to build up a blended family making their home a happy place to be. Not every family’s circumstance will be the same, which is the reason that we need to learn good tools for how to handle hard situations to make our homes the places that we want them to be.
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