4.Help the family gain patience to tolerate the ambiguity and not "over-try" to make things work out. This includes accepting that family ties do not develop overnight. Encourage step- parents to understand that a child's negative reactions are not to be taken personally and help them tolerate guilt, conflicted feelings, ambivalence, divided loyalties, and so on.
5.Include the new spouse in sessions in which you coach the client to resolve his or her relationship with an ex-spouse, at least in the beginning or you will increase the new spouse's paranoia about the old spouse-and take the frequent characterization of an ex- spouse as "crazy" with a grain of salt. The list of the ex-spouse's outrageous behaviors may reflect the client's provocations or retaliations.
6.When the remarriage ends a close single- parent/child relationship, the feelings of loss of that special closeness, especially for the child, have to be dealt with and will take time.
7.If the child is presented as the problem, try to involve all parents and stepparents as early as possible in therapy. If joint sessions are held, discussion should be directed toward coop- erative work to resolve the child's difficulties, never torward marital issues. Children should never have the power to decide on remarriage, custody, or visitation. It is, of course, impor- tant to inquire from children their experiences, wishes, and preferences. But the responsibility for the ultimate decisions should always rest with the adults.
8.When problems involve child-focused uproar, put the child's original parent in charge tem- porarily. When the uproar subsides, coach the parent on ways to "move over" and include his or her spouse in the system-first, as a spouse only. Warn the family that the shift to active stepparenting usually takes several years and will require the active support of the biological parent. In the case of older adoles- cents, it may be unrealistic to expect the shift ever to occur to any great degree.
9.Work to get parents to define predictable and adequate plans for visitation and to keep up relationships with the ex-spouse's extended family, and beware of the possible "hidden agenda" in any sudden proposals to rearrange custody, visitation, or financial arrangements.
10.Include work on the spouses' families of origin as early in treatment as possible.
Divorce and remarriage have become normal life experiences in the United States, with about 43 percent of first marriages ending in divorce within 15 years and about 75 percent of spouses remarrying at least once, though the patterns depend on social class, age, race, and gender (Bramlett & Mosher, 2001, 2002). The system transformation required in divorce and remarriage is so complex in changing the status, relationships, and membership of families that we consider each transition to require an entire additional phase for families going through them. And an entirely new paradigm of family is required for conceptualizing divorced and recoupled families. This chapter will discuss the cycle of divorce and remarriage, describing families transforming and reconstituting themselves through marriage, divorce, remarriage, and re-divorce. If we visualize a family traveling the road of life, moving from stage to stage in their developmental unfolding, we can see divorce and remarriage as interruptions that put families on a new trajectoryadding additional family life cycle stages in which the physical and emotional losses and changes must be absorbed by the multigenerational system. The family, now in two or more households, continues its forward developmen- tal progress, though in a more complex form. When either spouse becomes involved with a new partner, a second detour occurs-requiring additional family life cycle stages in which the family must handle the stress of absorbing two or three generations of new members into the system and redefining their roles and relationships with existing family members.
We all carry into our new relationships the emotional baggage of unresolved issues from important past relationships. This baggage makes us emo- tionally sensitive in the new relationships: We may put up barriers to intimacy, becoming self-protective, closed off, and afraid to make ourselves vulnerable to further hurt, or we may become expectant that the new relationships will make up for or erase past hurts. These stances complicate new relationships.
In first marriages, the baggage we bring is from our families of origin: our unresolved feelings about parents, siblings, and extended family.
In divorce and remarriage, there are at least three sets of emotional baggage:
