Clinical Guidelines for Working With Stepfamilies: What Family, Couple, Individual, and Child Therapists Need to Know

This article draws on four decades of research and clinical practice to delineate guidelines for evidence-informed, clinically sound work with stepfamilies for couple, family, individual adult, and child therapists. Few clinicians receive adequate training in working with the intense and often complex dynamics created by stepfamily structure and history. This is despite the fact that stepfamilies are a fundamentally different family form that occurs world-wide. As a result many clinicians rely on their training in first-time family models. This is not only often unhelpful, but all too often inadvertently destructive. The article integrates a large body of increasingly sophisticated research about stepfamilies with the author's four decades of clinical practice with stepfamily relationships. It describes the ways in which stepfamilies are different from first-time families. It delineates the dynamics of five major challenges stepfamily structure creates: (1) Insider/outsider positions are intense and they are fixed. (2) Children struggle with losses, loyalty binds, and change. (3) Issues of parenting, stepparenting, and discipline often divide the couple. (4) Stepcouples must build a new family culture while navigating previously established family cultures. (5) Ex-spouses (other parents outside the household) are part of the family. Some available data are shared on the impact of cultural and legal differences on these challenges. A three-level model of clinical intervention is presented: Psychoeducational, Interpersonal, and Intrapsychic/Intergenerational Family-of-Origin. The article describes some "easy wrong turns" for well-meaning therapists and lists some general clinical guidelines for working with stepfamily relationships.