Institute of Step-Family Dynamics

Tag: Relationship

No Shortcuts in Step-Family Dynamics

Recently I have been in the middle of setting a lot of new technology for my business.

Recently I have sworn a lot and cried more than usual.

Those two things are directly linked.

The big problem, as I eventually discovered, was that I wasn’t following the steps I needed to in order to achieve my goal. I thought I could just wing my way through. I thought I knew what the different bits of the site did. I thought wrong.

It’s been very hard to have to go back to basics, to start right from the very beginning.

I’m not going to lie. I don’t like it!

I’m older now, I know a little about a lot of things, and usually this knowledge is enough for me to fumble my way through things.

This time it was not.

So I started at the beginning. I watched YouTube video after YouTube video. I had to go back many times and rewatch, because I had zoned out or played with my phone, or otherwise disengaged. I’m not used to have to pay that much attention to get the gist of what I am watching. It’s a source of great amusement to my family that I listen to movies while I play games on my phone. This time I needed to really pay attention and focus on what was being offered and taught.

Coming into a new family dynamic can be a similar experience to learning a new skill.

We think we know what we need to know. I mean it’s family, right?!? How hard can it be?

Turns out, it can be very hard. It can take us to the point of swearing a lot and crying more than usual. It can be very humbling to discover there are many things we didn’t know we didn’t know.

There are some statistics floating about that state it takes about 5 to 7 years for a step-family to integrate and form a new, functioning family unit.

It will surprise none of you who have read this far that I thought I could take short cuts and make it happen a lot faster.

Spoiler alert: it did not.

No amount of me deciding it would be different made it happen.

There were no shortcuts.

People need time to adjust. People need time to grieve for what they have lost. Step-families are founded on loss of another family unit. It takes time for people to get to know each other and find common ground, then appreciation, and finally sometimes even love.

And just like I am having to accept when it comes to grappling with unfamiliar technology, maybe there might be some new learning and doing involved to get to a place of it all functioning well…there is also some new learning and doing involved in establishing a new family culture that works. Sometimes we need to bring in some expert help, sometimes we need to reach out to a support group. Sometimes we just need to accept that things are not going to happen on our arbitrary timeline.

Is it time for you to reframe your expectations about how your step-family is evolving? Is it time to reach out for some professional help?

16 November 2021
Beyond Repair?

We have some dining chairs that have seen better days. I’ve spent months trying to justify replacing them with something new and fancy. Between my scrooge-like and greenie tendencies, buying new chairs when we have perfectly serviceable ones is a hard sell. Too hard, it seems.

So I decided that I would repair the 17 year old chairs. They are plywood and some of the laminate had begun to lift. Between that and the varnish that was very patchy, some wood putty and a paint job seemed like the solution. They may well last another 17 years and the trials of 7 children and associated family and friends.

Yesterday I broke out the wood putty I’d purchased the day before. I didn’t get the tiny tin because I knew there were quite a few of the 6 chairs needing repairs. I puttied up the first chair. Easy! I then went looking for the next one.

Nope, not that one. Nope, nope, nope, nope. Wait what? I went round again inspecting more slowly.

Oh my goodness! The falling apart dining chairs was in fact a single chair. I have spent the last couple of years solid in the belief my set of dining room chairs were on their last legs. This was absolutely a false belief.

One single chair had 2 areas of peeling laminate. A quick run over with wood putty sorted it out. I have put this off for so long because it seemed like such a daunting job! The sanding and painting will take some time, for sure. But the repairing of the broken chair…quite literally took a couple of minutes.

It set me to musing.

How often do we feel something is very broken, or will take a huge amount to repair, or needs replacing, when it is actually a simple fix. I was sorting clothes with one of my daughters, her favourite top had a pull in the fabric, she was about to get rid of it. I said I could fix it. I pulled the threads back through. It was fiddly. I swore a bit, but in the end, she had her top back. A top that previously she had thought was lost to her.

These simple repair jobs remind me of my work, especially relationship work. People usually wait to seek help when the wheels are falling off. Things are so bad they have come to the realisation they need help. Often the first session is filled with expressions of hopelessness and fear the relationship can’t be repaired. There seems to be so much wrong.

As we work together and unpack what the issues are, the number of chairs that are damaged lessens. We begin to see the problem is often the same issue, it just wears lots of outfits and manifests itself in different ways. Fixing it is not the huge job it seems, because it is a single problem, not a whole dining suite.

Focusing on what is broken or what is wrong can lead us to believe things are hopeless or broken beyond repair. Someone with the ability to see the larger picture than the everyday disconnects can see a pattern and identify the common thread. They can see it can be a relatively simple fix. A relationship that seems broken can be mended with the right skills, knowledge, and tools.

Relationships can be hard work, they can feel unfixable. Just like the top and the chair, very often they can be repaired. If you are wondering how you can repair your relationship, contact me on [email protected] and we can discuss a repair or maintenance plan for you and your partner.

16 April 2019
Getting Lost In The Other

For a long time, I felt I needed to launch this website with others. I needed the support and the validation. What I was really telling myself was that I was not enough alone to stand in this place. In placing myself at the whim and will of others, I felt powerless. I was in a place of constant lack, I needed this or that from someone else. Whether it was help from my husband, or more qualifications, or a business partner, or someone to provide a service…those barriers kept cropping up. They ‘cropped up’ for more than 10 years. In hindsight, it took me 10 years to come to place where I was enough. It took me 10 years to come to place where I felt I was worth spending $100, $1200 or $2,000 on, to launch my website and business.

Getting lost in the other has been a long time ‘friend’. It was a pattern in my first marriage. I constantly talked about ‘we’ needed to do things, if ‘we’ are doing something there is no responsibility to take ownership. The thing gets lost in the ‘we’ and I get to sit there helplessly playing the victim, blaming the other for the lack of progress and letting myself off the hook completely. It takes time and some uncomfortable reflecting to shift that thinking, to find the strength and confidence to make the ‘we’ into me.

We all need help and support, don’t get me wrong. I am not able to do everything I need to do to pull this project off alone. It’s finding the line between giving away our power and reaching out when we need to. I agonised over what the call the site, I asked different groups of people over and over. Nothing I got back felt right. It several incarnations till I settled on Step-Family Dynamics. This was something I had to do myself. It was not a group effort gig. There are other parts of this journey that are something that can be a group effort gig. I am incredibly blessed with those I have around me; writers to contribute their stories, a very supportive husband, who has vast knowledge I can tap into. The difference between tapping into his knowledge and expecting him to do this for me is the difference between accomplishing my goal and not. It’s not because he is unwilling to help, it’s because it’s not his dream. It’s not his priority and while he is more than willing to make time to help me, quite understandably, he is not willing to make my dream his.

When we get lost in the ‘we’, often what we are asking of those we make part of the ‘we’ is to take on our dream, to live by our values, to share our priorities. We get disappointed when they don’t, we feel let down, unsupported, and abandoned. How about we let them, and ourselves, off the hook? What would that look like? How about instead of passively expecting others to come on board with our plans, we specifically asked for their help in areas they feel comfortable helping? Instead of looking for co-pilots, we take control of our own vehicle, steer our own course.

When we take charge of our journey, we disentangle ourselves from the murky depths of the ‘we’. We stop getting lost in the other and return home to ourselves. We send ourselves the very clear message ‘you are enough, you have enough’. Independence is not about cutting ourselves off from others and becoming like the little red hen who does it all herself. It’s about taking responsibility for our journey, for the route, the provisioning, and the help we need to access along the way.

What are you currently getting lost in the other with? Where is your ‘we’ crying out to become ‘me’?

Recently I have come to a place where I am now able to bring others in to work with, not because I need them, but because I am solid enough in my own doing. I’m not looking for them to fill gaps or do things that scare, I have learned the value of trusting my own capabilities and utilising the skills of others.

We need to get solid in our own sense of being enough. If we gift ourselves that, we are no longer willing to give away our potency to ‘the other’.

18 February 2019
When Being Kind Ends Up Being Unkind

My darling and I are generally very easy-going people. Accommodating, understanding that sometimes life gets in the way and people make mistakes. Until we’re not. There is very little space between us being accommodating and then deciding the person we are dealing with is just taking the mickey.

It’s been an on-going issue for years. When I look over my interactions with people, so often my response to them not following through or doing what they said they would is ‘No worries’. I mean it, I am not worried, I get life happens and things get challenging at times.

I have also begun to realise this sets up a series of expectations around what I will accept. If I am not bothered by being let down once, I am then often relegated to the bottom of people’s priority list. When there are competing demands, my wants or needs will be pushed down the list for someone who is less kind, more vocal, and who makes disappointing them more unpleasant.

My ‘no worries’ has a limited life span. This is something I fail to point out to people, when I generously throw around absolution for letting me down or not showing up. My ‘no worries’ sends a false message of accommodation that leads people to feel secure in my never-ending approbation and understanding.

People are often shocked or hurt when I decide I have had enough and end the interaction, or stop being accommodating. They are surprised when I suddenly ‘am worried’ and hold them to account. They can often end up blaming me for this turn of events, and feel I am being unreasonable. Expecting them to follow through on what they have promised becomes something I have no right to expect, because I have taught them I will accept less than that.

So, whose fault is that? Theirs for being flaky? Or mine for allowing them to believe I was going to accept flakiness forever?

I have to believe it is mine. I set the tone, I lowered their expectations of what I would tolerate, my kindness was misinterpreted.

Or does it go deeper than that? Are there some issues around entitlement that I need to unpack? Do I feel I deserve less than others?

I think for a long time this was the case. I tolerated less, because I felt deserving of less. My sense of entitlement has shifted, but my go to responses to people who let me down have not. I am telling people it is ok to not perform, when actually I have an expectation they will, and it damages my regard of them when they don’t.

My seeming kindness is actually unkind, to myself and to those around me. I short-change myself and set others up to damage their relationships with me, sometimes to the point of no return. I am unwittingly setting people up to fail. When I tell a client it’s fine they forgot to pay me, or tell the landlord it’s ok they haven’t done the repairs they said they would, I am telling people they can walk all over me. I am telling them, I don’t value me or my time, the implicit message in that is they shouldn’t value me or my time either.

This can happen in our couple relationships. We let things go and let things go and then suddenly explode over a seemingly trivial matter. Keeping ourselves in balance sometimes means speaking up before we lose our shit! Being able to set a boundary when we are calm and centred is far more effective than losing it. The repair job takes up precious energy we could be spending on enjoying each other.

What messages are you sending with your kindness and generosity?

Is your kindness really kind? Or is it a fear of setting a much needed boundary?

23 November 2018
When You’re All Out of Love

This was a rough week in relationship world. I had a falling out with my husband. Notice the wording there – I had a falling out with my husband. As far as he was concerned, life was and should be fine. Something quite innocently thoughtless on his behalf ripped open a deep wound in me. It was a wound I thought I had healed reasonably well, but with the right triggers it became a gaping, festering wound in the space of a few hours. I wasn’t expecting to be wounded so easily,or for the pain to strike so deeply.

My response was to retreat into being a bitch. I was grumpy, sullen, and obnoxious. My husband became my ‘bitch eating crackers’. It was amazing how the little things I usually gloss over as unimportant became huge faults and wrongdoings. Him leaving his wet towel on the bed resulted in me telling him to go and put it in the wash, the way he did the most simple things became a source of annoyance and disappointment. I was all out of love. The wound had sucked it out and its place was filling with disdain and disappointment.

It shocked me how quickly I could go from being so in love with this man, to being so out of love. It reminded me of conversations I have with girlfriends when they have lost the loving feeling and their marriages have become chores and a source of stress. My hunny and I usually manage to avoid this cesspit of disappointment. Now I found that even with all of the work we have done, the safeguards we have in place; opening up a source of pain can quickly lead down paths that make you question your entire marriage and your regard for your formerly loved one.

After 3 days of hating myself and my husband, I finally came clean with what the problem was. I asked him to listen to me and not to respond right away. I was too raw to deal with an argument or justifications and the topic was too painful for us to have a rational conversation immediately. He was able to hear me and just listen. He was unhappy, I could tell he felt parts of what I was saying were unfair, and possibly they were, but they were the festering sores I carry in the wound.

It took courage to expose my deep fears, I worried about him rejecting what I had to say outright, or denying it, or trying to blame it on me. These were all things I had experienced in previous relationships, the gaslighting of making their failings mine. His response is why I love him and rarely am ‘all out of love’. As the day progressed, there was a thawing, when he came and hugged me and held me tight, I felt the love slowly seeping back.

My innate response to these kinds of bumps in the road is to catastrophise, to want to run away, to shut off my feelings and leave. It’s easier to walk away than to deal with the painful feelings. I am a master at cutting people out of my life and walking away. It is my first response and one I battle each time my husband and I disconnect.

We have spent the last couple of days being gentler and kinder to each other. We still have a way to go before we can address the wound and add another layer of salve to a wound that will probably be with me for life. This morning my husband responded in a negative way to a request for help. It brought up all the feelings of fear and rejection I had been experiencing throughout the week. One moment of him expressing annoyance at asking him for help with something he felt was trivial hurt me to the point of tears. It was then I realised that after having been ‘all out of love’ the reservoir of good will, security, and safety I felt in our relationship was low. Usually I would know this was just his way of dealing with what he felt was a demand when he was feeling stressed, not an indication he didn’t want to be married or no longer loved me. Being ‘out of love’ doesn’t just mean being out of love with our partner, it also means being unable to feel love from them.

How many of you are ‘all out of love’ at the moment? How many are running on the fumes of goodwill and love?

23 November 2018