How Therapy Can Help Your Family: Growing Pains

In the first segment of “How Therapy Can Help Your Family: Living with Teens,” we covered some ways to manage the chaos that is adolescence, living with teens, and how joining together in therapy can help find peace at home. 

In this next segment, we will get familiar with how the pain of divorce, child loss, and infertility can damage the stitching on the family quilt and how families can seam it back together. 

Family therapy can help with these struggles because there is power in owning a strong and enduring family narrative. Telling such a story can help you repair negative thoughts, restore tattered feelings, and create a family narrative that is powerful and beautifully yours.

Divorce, Infertility, and other Kinds of Loss

As many of us know, divorce is common. To be precise, about 50% of marriages will end in divorce in the United States. The chances only increase with re-marriages. While these statistics feel damning for so many of us, the unfortunate truth is relationships are difficult and complex and are nowhere near the fairy tale imagery we’ve soaked in since age four. The same can be said of another common struggle in couples: infertility. About 20% of couples struggle with getting pregnant, according to the CDC. Even more so, 1 in 4 women will experience a miscarriage.

You might be wondering, why do these numbers matter? Numbers tell a story, similar to how your thoughts, feelings, and experiences create a narrative. We must have all the evidence on the table when we work to recover from losses such as divorce, infertility, or miscarriage. What these things have in common is that you may feel like you have lost something—whether it be hopes for a growing family, an identity as mother or wife, or loss of the vision you had for your future—it all matters when it comes to your mental health.

Loss is something tricky and pervasive; it doesn’t always make sense. I bet you often feel like you are the only one drowning in it, hoping it stops. Or feel alone in your quest to seek out that pain, wanting to feel the magnitude of what you’ve lost. 

In therapy, there is space for these stories of loss. They are important to process so that the family doesn’t swallow their hurt entirely. What I mean by this is when you push down your feelings or otherwise throw them to the side saying, “I’ll deal with these emotions when I have time” or “everything happens for a reason”—you’re choosing to avoid rather than confront. When you speak your pain and the stories of hurt you’ve collected into a safe space, you release their power over you. Families who have experienced traumas such as divorce, child loss, and infertility deserve to know what it feels like to repair and heal from these significant losses in whatever form they might show up. Your process is necessary for welcoming the joy that always seems to follow grief.

Growing Pains/ Blended Families

Whether you have recently experienced a painful divorce, or you’ve met someone with whom you’ve decided to create a life that involves children from previous relationships, there’s a natural transition process that we call “growing pains.” 

Growing pains are the pains in our bodies we feel as kids when our bones and muscles are growing at rapid speed, which causes us to really feel it. While these pains suck, they are necessary and eventually help us grow into the strong, capable version of ourselves that we need to endure the rest of our lives. It is common that kids and teens will face several concerns when welcoming a new stepmom or stepdad:

Are they going to take my parent’s full attention and the focus will no longer be on me?

Are they going to try to change everything I’m used to?

Are they going to make my other parent mad because they took their role and then I’ll be forced to pick sides?

Are they going to treat me/my parent well?

What perks can I get out of my stepparent?

Kids and teens will use several defense mechanisms to try to protect themselves from the new family member. They will look for red flags, test authority, and try to manipulate situations to their advantage. This can create friction with the stepparents and furthermore, put the main parent in the middle, having to defend their new partner as well as their child.

Integrating a blended family takes love, compassion, and, honestly, a ton of patience. Whether you and your partner have teenagers, little children, or adult kids, the new family is an adjustment for all. As a partner, you are shifting your time to balance new responsibilities and care. As a parent, you are managing your children’s feelings and expectations of the family dynamic. Simply put– the makeup of families is vast, rich, and undeniably unique to every situation. 

Therapy can help blended families to: 

1. Process feelings of anger, resentment, or other reservations about new additions,

2. Create a space for families of origin to communicate,

3. Celebrate what the new family will add to their current relationships,

4. Feel a sense of togetherness with each other to welcome new chains to the link.

Shifting into Joy / Adoption

Since we’ve already covered loss, we must also cover the joy of change. Accepting new love into your life might also make you feel uneasy, especially in the case of adoption. Although there is the excitement of finally having a child, you are also changing your family’s dynamic. Even before that, the adoption process can feel long, arduous, or even unnecessarily complicated. When you just want to put more love into the world by welcoming a child, the waiting game is frustrating. 

Therapy can help new parents to:

1. Process past experiences with child loss or infertility, 

2. Improve communication patterns as new parents, 

3. Set expectations/guidelines for responsibilities,

4. Process any feelings of fear, uncertainty, or anxiety,

5. Normalize how change can feel scary AND exciting.

If you or someone you know is experiencing struggles with family transitions related to loss or changes in family makeup, find out how individual counseling sessions or family therapy may be able to help at www.havenfamilytherapy.com/teen-therapy-and-family-therapy