The emotional issues of remarriage go back at least to the disintegration of the first marriage. The intensity of emotion unleashed by the life cycle dis- ruption of divorce must be dealt with over and over again before the dislocated systems are restabilized. No amount of "dealing with" the emotional difficul- ties of divorce will finish off the process once and for all, although the more emotional work is done at each step, the less intense and disruptive the sub- sequent reactivations at later stages are likely to be.
The predictable peaks of emotional tension in the transition to remarriage occur at:
•The time of serious commitment to a new relationship
•The time a plan to remarry is announced to families and friends
•The time of the actual remarriage and forma- tion of a stepfamily, which take place as the logistics of stepfamily life are put into practice.
The emotional process at the transition to remarriage involves dealing with anxiety about investment in a new marriage and a new family; deal- ing with one's own fears and those of the new spouse and the children; dealing with hostile or upset reac- tions of the children, the extended families, and the ex-spouse; struggling with the ambiguity of the new family structure, roles, and relationships; re-arousal of parental guilt and concerns about the welfare of children; and re-arousal of the old attachment to the ex-spouse (negative or positive).
Failure to deal sufficiently with the process at each point may jam it enough to prevent remarried family stabilization from ever occurring, a problem that is reflected in the high rate of re-divorce.
The most common mistakes parents make are as follows:
1. Preoccupation with themselves and neglect of their children's experience, which follows from the conflicting life cycle tasks of parenting ver- sus new couple relationships or couple conflict
2. Treating the remarriage as an event, rather than a complex process of family transformation, which will take years
3. Trying to get children to resolve the ambi- guities of multiple loyalties by cutting off one relationship to create clarity in another.
