Transcription
Hi, I'm Darcy from Core Parenting and welcome to the big blend theory. Theory? Yep. Okay, perfect. Is that good? Yeah. My name is Darcy Walker. I'm a psychologist and I specialize in working with parents and families.
Um I have a website called Core Parenting that I write and blog about parenting issues and um kid issues. Mostly what I really love to do is work with the dynamics of the parents as they kind of grow into the identity of parenting and the shifts in that identity, the shifts in the family identity um and how families kind of grow and change when children enter our lives.
What we're finding um as a blended family as well, there's so much negativity focused around um broken homes. Um, we've been talking recently about about the use of, you know, war terms or fighting terms a lot. You know, I'm I have a custody battle. You know, there's I'm fighting for my kids or, you know, just trying to find ways to abolish that type of language and reestablish or redefine what it means to be in a blended family. Right?
As far as we're concerned, you know, there's a lot of negativity that comes from um you know, the other households. When you know, when we have kids that leave our family and they go to spend time with the other parent, they often can come back and it's like they bring uh you know, here's another war term, a whole arsenal of problems um back into our family. And because we are a blend, uh we've got um all these other kids that are now impacted by maybe one kid's uh problems that they're bringing in um for lack of a better way of explaining that.
What common themes uh do you find that they share when they're, you know, when they bring in their troubles? Right. So um as I was thinking through that question, I really kind of narrowed it down to to three things. I think about the blended families that I'm working with um kind of three main topics seem to be the focus of our work and one is um identity like how does the family the new family create a new identity and what does that mean for the child.
Um the second is um expectations. So when you have two parents who are coming together, each parent, even if parenting philosophies are similar, there's different expectations and different understanding of um what boundaries and rules and and the feeling of the house should be like and different comfort levels and all of those things. So those expectations are an area that families struggle with.
And then third is narrative. And it's exactly what you're talking about like those reward terms. Um there's something that I have seen over and over in my own life and people friends lives and my my clients lives and that is that happy people tell happy stories and depressed people tell depressed stories and angry people tell angry stories. And the narratives that we tell and the way that we tell them and the words that we choose mean something and they impact our brain and the way that our brain is functioning kind of those pathways that are being enacted as we're emotionally experiencing the story that we're telling. So when we choose really emotionally charged words or we choose a negative way to tell a story, we're reinforcing a negative feeling. we're reinforcing a negative um narrative to our life.
So, one of the things that I work a lot with in blended families, but also just in therapy in general, is how are you telling the story of your life? And when we talk about divorce or separation or blending families, how are you telling that story to your children? And what is the story that you're giving them to hold in their hearts about who they are and what their family is all about? So when you start out in a separation saying we're splitting or we're divorcing or this is happening then that negative story line already begins. Whereas if a family can say our family's changing, our family's reorganizing.
Because the thing that we have to remember is that for kids when when a family um separates and the mom and the dad or the mom and the mom or whatever the case may be live in two different places, that's still the child's family, right? So we in our adult minds think this is splitting. This is over. I'm not going to have a relationship with this person anymore. And that's never true for the child. The child's family remains their family. So dad is still dad and mom is still mom and they live in different houses. But we don't give them a narrative for that. The narrative that we give is this family is over. And that doesn't make sense to them because they still have to negotiate all of these different the way that their family works and there's no way for them to communicate or no way for them to understand. So it creates this this displacement feeling.
So if right off the bat we start by articulating that narrative as our family is changing and this is why and dad will live here and mom will live here and we're all still family. It looks really different and it's going to feel really different but we're all still family. Then the child doesn't start out with that immediate struggle. And there's a positive narrative that goes along with it. And the change may still be hard and tricky and all of that kind of stuff, but there's positive language and positive narrative that allows the child's family to stay intact even though it looks different.
So then when you invite another family to join you, then it's the same. that that narrative continues to be that idea of look, our family's changing again. We're inviting new people in and we're going to change the way the structure looks, but we're all still family and dad is still family and I'm still family and now there's these other people that are also involved. And as that family tree kind of grows and then you add in those kids other families and that this big picture begins to develop of all of the people that impact our family's lives.
So then when you say you know this one child brings back this from that other place right? Yeah. It's not because that other place is really a part of all of our storyline and all of our narrative and understanding that no matter how tricky or difficult or challenging that is for the child when we use language that says that other place. Yeah. Right. We're creating that disconnect for them that they have to have I have to hold these negative views, these negative narratives about that other place that's different from this place. And somehow I have to be two different people to negotiate living in those two different worlds. And we're asking the impossible of that. Yeah.
And it's so starting with that narrative, starting with that understanding of families are so hard and expectations are different in every place you go and and you go to this part of your family and these things happen and these expectations happen and it feels like this and then you come to this part of your family and it feels different. And understanding that the child is having to renegotiate their understanding of themselves and their world every time they switch back and forth. And so starting with our narrative and being really mindful about our narrative. Um, and so I loved when you said like kind of getting rid of the war language and kind of even taking that to a a more subtle level and really understanding how easy it is for us to give a child that message that part of their family is bad or, you know, or harmful.