The email on marriage and blended family triggered some responses. Since there are so many of you facing situations where you are dealing with such situations, it deserves some attention.
One reader wrote “Just calling it (the family) blended doesn’t make it so. There’s a host of healing that must occur in order to be capable of reconnecting.”
Throwing a collection of people together with a marriage and calling it a family is a common occurrence. The reader is correct in pointing out that work is needed before they’ll act like a family.
You can call them a family, yet without healing and reconnecting, they won’t act like family.
Sure, you can share some common experiences, but that won’t magically turn you into a family. You need healing before there’s the possibility of reconnecting with others in forming a functioning family.
Each family member needs to feel safe before any healing occurs. They’ll need validation and feeling valued. You may say you value them, yet they each need to feel that they are valued.
Love only grows in a family when the conditions are right. Each member of the family looks to the parents for how to connect and behave. When you and your spouse are on shaky ground, there’s not much connection to show them.
You’re only going to be able to take your family members as far in healing as you yourself have come. If you’ve never moved past the affair, you can’t expect them to.
Besides knowing how to connect, they also need the ability to connect. When the trust level is low in the family, or they’ve never seen real connection, they don’t know how.
You need the ability to connect and communicate. If you don’t know how to connect, you’re not connecting.
Getting yourself healed from the affair isn’t just about you, it’s also about your family. They need you back in the role of parent in order to show them how its done.
If you don’t know how to reconnect with others yourself, now is the time you can do something about that. In the video “Let’s Talk: Hurting People and Healing Questions“, you’ll gain many of the basic skills you need in reconnecting with others.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
