Blended Families—How to Heal, Build, & Sustain a Healthy Family Through Grief, Loss, & Complicated Circumstances
Episode Notes
Did you grow up in a blended family? Are you navigating the complexities of creating one?
Blended families face unique challenges, and it can be overwhelming to sift through the stigmas and bad advice that often surround step-parenting. In today’s very personal episode, I’m joined by blended family expert Ron Deal. Together, we explore how step-families can become a powerful part of God’s redemptive story, offering healing and hope in the midst of grief, loss, and complicated circumstances.
Today’s episode is filled with powerful tips for ANY family about how to become healthier.
Here’s what we cover:
1. The two key ingredients to building and sustaining a healthy family
2. Common sources of dysfunction in families and how to address them
3. What the church often misunderstands about blended families and how we can shift the narrative
4. The redemptive power of step-families in transforming pain into purpose
5. Empowering children to navigate change and loss with resilience6. Practical ways to honor grief within families and create a supportive environment
Additional Resources:
- Ron Deal’s books
- Pre-order The Mindful Marriage by Ron Deal and Nan Deal
- Phillipians 2:3-4
- Restoration Therapy by Dr. Terry Hargrave
- familylife.com/blended
- rondeal.org
Related Episodes:
- Episode 85: The Goal of a Healthy Family & 6 Roles We Take On In Dysfunction
- Episode 12: Overcoming the Pain of Divorce with Eryn Eddy
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so glad you're here today for this very special episode.
My guest today has decades of experience working with families. Ron Deal is a bestselling author, licensed marriage and family therapist, podcaster, and popular conference speaker. He specializes in both marriage enrichment and stepfamily education.
Ron is the author and consulting editor of the Smart Stepfamily series. So just listen to some of the titles of his books: Building Love Together in Blended Families. The Five Love Languages. The Smart Stepfamily: Seven Steps to a Healthy Family. The Smart Stepdad, Dating and the Single Parent, The Smart Stepmom: Practical Steps to Help You Thrive. The Smart Stepfamily Marriage. He's just got so many resources for anyone who's trying to develop a sense of family. He also has a brand new book coming out in January called The Mindful Marriage. There is so much wisdom for everyone in this episode about the ingredients that make for a healthy family, no matter what your family looks like. Please enjoy my conversation with Ron Deal.
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Alison: Ron, I am so thrilled to have you with us today. Your work has meant so much to me personally, which we'll get into later on in the episode. But even coming into this conversation today, I'm aware of how formative and powerful family dynamics in general are.
We're going through some things as my parents age, family transitions and family dynamics can resurface. Even in my own life as an adult child, as an adult member of a family, let alone my own family...families are such rich soil for healing, is how I like to look at it. But they can also be the places where we get hurt and get wounded. I'm curious, in your years of expertise, in families in general, what do you see as some of the key ingredients of health and wholeness and what we might call successful families, whatever that means?
Ron: First of all, thank you for having me on the program. It's an honor to be talking with you, and I appreciate the work that you do for people and families. I'm in total 100 percent agreement with you. I've often said to pastors, list for me the spiritual disciplines. And they'll say, oh, the classic definitions are silence and solitude and fasting and Bible meditation and prayer and memorization.
I'm like, yeah. Where's “relationships” on the list? If there's one thing that shapes us more into the image of Christ, moves us toward our God and understanding who He is and how great His love for us, and there's also one thing that moves us away from all of that, it's relationships.
Relationships are discipleship. Walking out love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control in an everyday intimate relationship is no easy task. We're all imperfect, and we have imperfect families, and so we need God to help us to move in that direction.
But at the same time, He's inviting us to grow up into Christ, even as we're living out our relationships. To your question, what are those things? There was a point in my career, I've been in marriage and family ministry for roughly 35 years. Earlier, I would probably come up with a list of things. I would say you've got to know how to communicate really well, and it helps if your family structure is the way God intended it to be.
I probably would have given a list of things that are external to who we are. But Jesus made it clear that things come from the inside. That's what makes us clean or otherwise. I rattled off the fruit of the Spirit. What I'm always reminding myself of lately is that every one of those things are attitudes or qualities about our character that come from the inside.
Those are the things that make us who we are, make us more like Christ. To become more patient, to become more Spirit filled, to have more self control. Those are things that anybody can do. Whether you've had a traumatic childhood, whether you've grown up in a complex family, whether you grew up in the foster care system, no matter what the backstory is, none of those things on the outside, those external factors, are going to dictate who you become and who you are on the inside.
I think there is so much hope in that. That's what I want to move toward. That's who I want to become. Of course, in the process, I'm becoming more like my Lord.
Alison: Yeah, I love that emphasis on the inside out. In your work, you're focusing on external families. My work focuses on this internal family systems, IFS idea, which is exactly to your point. I think Richard Schwartz originally was a family systems therapist, the founder of the model. And what he found is that we actually have an inner family that we have to parent.
I love what you're saying, because that's what I often talk about–as you learn to be patient with yourself, as you learn to express kindness toward yourself, that's what spills over. That internal work is what spills over into our families. When I think about families, Ron, and we think about healthier versus maybe dysfunctional families, I know it's a spectrum. There is no such thing as the perfect family.
I think that's so important for people to hear, but there are families that are more functional than others. If we think about the fruit of the spirit as the benchmark where there's patience, where there's kindness, where there's self control, where there's joy, where there's delight in each other, as the sort of the benchmark for health, what do you see as the ingredients that get at that dysfunctional side of the spectrum where a family is starting to fall apart and not really be what God wanted it to be?
Ron: There are two foundational pillars to healthy relationships: love, which by the way, the Beatles said, all you need is love. They were half right. They're half wrong because the other pillar is trustworthiness. You can't be healthy in any given relationship, or even as an individual, if you don't have within yourself a sense of, am I loved?
Can I give love? It's not just, do I love you? But it's, am I lovable? It's that sense of worthiness that comes from being loved. We get this in our most foundational relationships from the moment we're born. We're either taught, you're lovable and you're somebody worthy of being loved, or unfortunately, I don't have time for you.
That adds up to a story about myself that I'm not very lovable. Trustworthiness has got to be right there as well. Trustworthiness is that sense of, can I rely on you? Am I reliable for you? Are we responsible to one another? Is there this emotional safety? That's what you get out of trustworthiness.
I can trust my climate, my relationship, you can trust me. We're both emotionally safe in this relationship. With love and a climate of emotional safety, then you feel really good about who you are as a person. By the way, this is how God loves us. In the most important love relationship in our entire world, we know that He loves us with a never-ending love.
That's the trustworthiness part. We can rely on Him for His promises. In the process, He is making us worthy because of how he loves us. So this gives me God-esteem. I like to call it that. Not because Ron's such a wonderful dude, but because my Savior is an amazing person. What he's done for me makes me a person of worth and value.
Now, when I turn around and know that and then offer that to another human being, now I'm getting at being able to love them in a way that is reliable and trustworthy. They receive the benefit of that when you have a human relationship, family, parent, child, husband, wife that are trying to live out love and trustworthiness day in and day out.
We all fail, but we're trying to move in those directions. You're going to have healthier relationships. The absence of one or both of love and trustworthiness is where you get the unhealthy and the dysfunctional dynamics. Again, notice this isn't necessarily tied to family structure. Structure brings advantages. I always want to point that out.
A man and a woman who meet, fall in love, and then begin to have children after they're married with one another provides a family structure that brings advantages to children. You can't replace that any other way. But they can still live in faithfulness to one another. They can still love deeply. Those are the things that, at the end of the day, really build us from the inside out.
Alison: I love what you're saying. A couple of things. One, the love and the trustworthiness. It's not just love. Because that's where we get into trouble. A parent can love their kids and not be emotionally safe and do a lot of toxic behaviors, and it can really mess up a family dynamic. You can be really trustworthy, but kind of cold or distant, or maybe you show up all the time, but you don't create that emotional connection.
I see that a lot with clients. Where they had all their physical needs met, their parents showed up for dinner every night, but there wasn't that loving warmth and kindness. If we think about marriage, we talked about on last week's episode, those four horsemen in marriage that Gottman identifies: contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling.
It's almost like you could put that into a family. If there's not that loving environment, that warmth, if there's contempt and criticism and defensiveness, that's going to lead to unhealth as well. There's something else you're saying that I really appreciate, Ron. I like how you said it, that there are advantages to certain family structures, but that doesn't mean that the single mom who has love and trustworthiness can't provide a nurturing family environment.
That also doesn't mean that the traditional family structure can. That was something that was really interesting to me, to realize that the superficial structure does not guarantee that you have those key ingredients.
Ron: It does not. It does not at all. There are a whole lot of still-married Christian couples sitting in church every Sunday, judging the single parent who has gone through a divorce, and those still married Christian couples are miserable. Because they don't love well at all. They're not living to love, honor, and cherish.
They're in it to manipulate, lie, and deceive, and yet they're still married and somehow they think that structure is better than a different structure. Like they've somehow got more up on somebody else. In God's economy, that's not the way it works. It is when we are living out those inner qualities that we've been talking about, that's what really matters.
By the way, I got to add this little addendum–I love your comment about John Gottman and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. A lot of people don't realize that 15 years after he wrote that book about predicting divorce, he came back and wrote another book and said, in the four horsemen, we missed something.
A lot of people are not aware of this. The book is on the science of trust. To the point I was making earlier, he came back and he said, we figured out that when something is missing, then the four horsemen show up. What's the something that's missing? It's trustworthiness.
When you're in a climate where I cannot trust you to be looking after the best interests of me, and when I don't feel in my heart that I want to be trustworthy to you, then the four horsemen start showing up in great excess. Isn’t that fascinating? By the way, his language was, how do you define trust? He has this whole chapter, and he's a secular scientist, he doesn't have any theological positioning about all this, but I got to tell you in the book, he does a whole chapter on defining trust so we could measure what trust looks like.
Long story short, he ends up saying, it's when you consider the other person's interests as much as your own. Now that's Philippians. It's the exact wording that Paul uses of what humility does. Humility doesn't look after itself. It looks after the interests of others. So it's taking their best interests at heart and acting accordingly.
That is being trustworthy. This is what our God does for us. That's why we can rely on His promises. When we emulate that, no matter the family structure, it moves the relationships in healthy directions.
Alison: So for the listener, it's fascinating, whether it's marriage or family, that trustworthiness-- it's not perfection, it's not finding the right formula to never have family conflict, it's that combination of I love you and I'm trustworthy, which means I'm thinking of your needs as much as I'm thinking about my own.
When we have those two ingredients, we're setting our families up for success. We're setting our families up for health that comes from that inside work that we do to cultivate those fruit of the spirit. That's beautiful.
Ron: If we've been missing that, as all of us have, my wife and I, we're doing lots of family of origin work these days. I'm 57, almost 58, and I think I'm doing more family of origin work at this point in my life than I ever have. I'm looking at that and I'm seeing the connections to who I am today.
I'm thinking, yeah, that has an influence on me. But I get to move toward love and trustworthiness. I get to be somebody my wife can rely on. I get to be somebody who's dependable in how I carry myself and how I act and build my character. I'm going to mess up again today. And then I'm going to turn around and go, Lord, help me put on those qualities and the fruit of the spirit, and that's where growth and change and hopefulness comes from.
Alison: That's right. It's never too late to develop those qualities in ourselves. Yeah, that's where we start. That's beautiful. you've specialized for many years in your practice and your writings and your books with blended families. Tell me a little bit about how you got interested specifically with writing to blended families.
Ron: You know, it's a funny story. A lot of people end up doing their professional careers, taking them in a direction that's very personal for them. That's not my story. This is professional for me and always has been. It started because of my first job; I was a youth minister. Here I was, working with teenagers that I didn't understand, trying to figure out how to help them and encourage them and deepen their walk with Jesus.
I realized, boy, I don't understand enough about the family. I actually had an undergraduate degree, one in Bible and one in family studies, but I knew I didn't know enough. I went back to graduate school, specifically for the purpose of studying marriage and family therapy and so I could go back into ministry and help people.
I wanted to prevent problems as much as try to fix them. When I was in graduate school, I got introduced, this is in 1992, it's been a minute, okay, since that class. I was introduced to single parent therapy and stepfamily therapy. Little did I know how rare that course was, especially at that time. It is still a rare thing today, and it opened my eyes to those kids that I had been working with, and now I understood them better and deeper.
I was eager to start working in that direction when I came out of graduate school, and I went back into local ministry. I started trying to do marriage and enrichment and parent training and single parent ministry and stepfamily ministry. What I didn't know, Alison, is at the time, I looked around and said, who else is doing this in the Christian community?
I found one guy, and he was about to retire, and he tagged me on the shoulder and said, you're it. You need to take over. I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing. Are you kidding me? So I stumbled and fumbled my way into trying to do something in a way that was meaningful to couples.
I found myself tiptoeing into some things that worked and we did them again. I started talking about it and teaching about it. I wrote my first book back in 2002. My first book came out, The Smart Stepfamily. Now we have nine books and eight video curricula. We're the largest blended family ministry in the world that we know of, and a regular podcast and live streams and all kinds of things that people can tap into.
It's because I felt like the Lord called me into helping kids. I still think I'm doing youth ministry because if I can help the parents, I am helping the next generation.
Alison: That's right. That is so good and true. I want to tell you personally, I don't think you know this story, Ron, but your work has literally changed my life. I don't say that often. I really don't. It surprised me. When I met my husband, my listeners know, my husband was a widower with two young children. His wife had passed away tragically, and I met them after their mom had died. They were young, and we clicked instantly. My husband and I clicked, the kids and I clicked, and so that was all great at the beginning. Also, it's really hard to blend a family. I was unequipped and I didn't understand it.
I thought being a loving person, I thought being a kind person, this will all magically happen. I also got some advice, especially from Christians, that wasn't helpful. They were applying Christian principles to a blended family. It was something like, “The marriage is always the primary relationship. The marriage has to come first”.
Folks were watching my husband and I, my then at the time, significant other, fumble our way through. We took it really slow. We didn't rush things. We constantly worked to bring the kids in, but we actually got a little bit of criticism for that. I don't blame the folks. They were well intended. But the idea being, this should be about the two of you.
Intuitively, I'm a therapist, I knew that's not quite right. Finally, somebody told me, you've got to read Ron Deal's work. I read it and you put language and research and scripture onto what I was experiencing, which was essentially that this attachment between the biological parent and the children is primary.
Ron: Huge.
Alison: It was so helpful to go no, we're doing something right here. It looks a little bit different than the way people think it should. The other thing you talk about in the book was that sometimes the honeymoon comes later on if you put in the work on the front end and you use the crockpot metaphor.
I am here to tell you, 15 years in, we have the best family. I'm like, we've got a honeymoon family. We put in the work on the front end. Those attachments are so strong. We let that crockpot simmer and I couldn't love my family more. I wouldn't trade my family for any family. And I want to thank you.
The language that you put on some of those early dynamics in a blended family, I think they probably relate a little bit to folks who've adopted children in addition to stepfamilies. So with that long introduction, tell me a little bit about how you began to realize this, that this crock pot method works a little bit differently when you're bringing in different elements to the family.
Ron: First of all, let me say, yay, and I'm glad the work has been helpful to you and your family. That warms my heart. The crockpot metaphor was born out of trying to understand the unrealistic expectations that a lot of people bring into their journey. It's really typical for even the church, like the advice you got is based on traditional family structure, instead of taking into consideration what's unique and different about a blended family structure.
You got “first family” answers to “second family” questions. Those almost always backfire. You add that to an unrealistic expectation– “Hey, honey, because you and I love each other, the kids are going to love the fact that we love each other. They're going to love you as a step-parent”.
All of that immediacy is not realistic; there's a journey here, liken it to the Israelites leaving Egypt to get to the promised land. How long did it take them? A lot longer than they thought. Not a few days, but 40 years. The same thing happens with blended families. On average, you need somewhere between five and seven years. This is what the best research says, for a family to create their sense of “familiness”, identity, their togetherness, their cohesiveness, that they've bonded and figured out how they're going to navigate life with one another.
That's not five to seven months. That's not five to seven weeks. That's not five to seven days. You honeymoon, you're back, and familiness is here. No, that's a journey that you have to be patient with. So I kept trying to figure out how to communicate that well to people, and the crockpot metaphor developed.
It is one of our cornerstone teachings, that when you embrace that and you get that, some ingredients cook faster than others. You understand that some ingredients came into your crock pot touching one another. They were family. They were connected. They had a bond and a last name and DNA and a history together. That didn't ever stop because now there's new people in the household.
How does the bonding happen and how long does it take ingredients to warm up, soften, and then share of themselves, which is what happens in a crock pot? Each ingredient has its own timing and has its own process, and when you embrace that and see it for what it is, and then add low heat, (there's the key, low heat, not high heat, which is what a blender has).
High heat is friction, and we're going to use a blade, and we're going to throw everybody together and make a smoothie. It's good in concept, but it doesn't actually work that way. Everybody's getting damaged by the blades. That doesn't work. We can throw this thing in the microwave and nuke it and be done in 30 seconds. It's a good idea, but it doesn't work that way. As a matter of fact, it tends to backfire.
The more you press people for a relationship, the less likely they are to give it to you. So when you rest into the process, which is what the low heat attitude says, and you trust that time is going to take over, you're going to be very intentional, low heat. You're going to do what you can do, but you're going to trust God with everything else that you can't control, and that adds up, on the whole, more than likely, to a genuine, authentic connection that develops over time. it sounds like your journey is exemplary of what we try to recommend for families.
Alison: Oh, intuitively I understood, my now husband understood, but we needed that language that you gave us and the biblical and scientific backing. Because sometimes it does mean short-term sacrifices. I remember, my husband had done such a good job of being that primary attachment figure for them through the loss of their mom, so you're not only dealing with children who are loyal to their parents, and that's a beautiful thing. They're not only loyal to their mom who passed away, making sure she's not being replaced, but they're also loyal to that parent. They don't want to lose that primary attachment to dad.
Even things like vacations, initially, here I am. I'd never been married, we were in love. Then it was like, we're going to take a vacation. I needed to not go initially. I needed to wait a little, until there was enough nurturing of all the different relationships, versus throwing everybody in a car.
I hear from people now all the time, when I talk about this, my peers who got thrown in that blender as kids, where it was suddenly like, here's your new mom. Here's your new dad. We're all hopping in the car for a family vacation. They're like, I don't want this.
Ron: Right. This is weird, at a minimum. It's weird. And, at a maximum, it feels violating to be thrown into close proximity with somebody that you're expected to love and totally embrace, in the case of your stepchildren, as if mom never existed. No, that goes against everything inside a child and I don't care if that child is 5 or 15 or 35.
They have to process this on an emotional level and it is a real challenge for them. When the adults understand, can I give you a compliment to say, I was willing not to go on vacation. Which means you have to set aside that eagerness in you, that loving heart that's bubbling over for a relationship, but you're saying, I got to consider what they need.
I call that meeting/pacing with the child, and I need to give them some space to have that attachment reassurance with their father and spend some time together. But here's the thing that I want you to see. We were talking earlier about love and trustworthiness. That move on your part showed you to be emotionally safe.
That means you're trustworthy. That means they can actually like you and it doesn't come with the cost of you invading every inch of their life, pushing into their relationship with their dad, acting like you're their mom, where you're replacing their mom, when you're certainly not able to do that.
That shows you to be a safe person and that makes you more lovable. You see how those things work in concert with one another. Because the stepparent took a posture that said, I'm respecting your connections, your time, your grief. Good for you. That's exactly the kind of thing that we want to see happen in the early phases, especially because it gives the family a chance to like each other and then eventually to love each other.
Alison: To trust each other, to your point. Yeah. Thank you. That means a lot, because I will say, it takes internal work. I understand why you want to take it personally. Why wouldn't you want me to come? Stepping into that role taught me more about love and trustworthiness.
I wouldn't exchange it for what I learned about myself and what I learned about love. Paradoxically, through making those decisions, that was how I became a true parent figure. That's mother love.
Ron: That's right.
Alison: It's putting their needs above my own.
Ron: That is exactly right. Again, notice how the relationship for you was a discipling factor for you. It deepened your trust in God. Lord, I gotta trust you in these moments when I feel like I'm eager, but they're not. I've got to relax and trust that if we crockpot, we cook a little at a time, we'll actually get farther than if I try to force the blend in my time and demand it in my way.
Alison: It is so helpful. I want to recommend to everybody listening, who's either in a position of trying to blend a family or when I tell my story, what's so fascinating to me, Ron, when I tell my story to other people who were raised in situations where they got just shoved in, there's trauma there.
They immediately lock on to, you mean I wasn't bad because I didn't want that or I wasn't ready for that? I found it to actually be really healing for a lot of different kinds of people. This is a really delicate process of creating a family. Any family is a delicate process, but when you're bringing in, and I would imagine, I'm curious, that there's some similarities with bringing in an adopted child as well.
Ron: There are. There are some distinctions between fostering, adopting a child, and becoming a stepparent and having a stepfamily. But the bonding process, the recognition that grief continues, that there has been some sort of significant loss in the child's life, especially in a blended family, everybody has gone through some sort of loss, or they wouldn't find themselves in that moment.
Loss doesn't end because you form new partnerships, new love, loving relationships, and try to form a new family. The past comes with that. Again, we want to educate everybody to say, how do we acknowledge the past, recognize the past, and not be afraid of those previous attachments that still continue on in a child's heart?
In the case of a child who has been adopted, for example, we've all heard of somebody who's been adopted at the age of two weeks and didn't ever know their parents into a loving Christian family. At the age of 25, they go on this kind of wild journey to find their biological parents. What is that? That is the attachment.
That is something that is so hard to even describe, it has something to do with DNA, something to do with that God-given relationship between mother and child, and things that we cannot even fully comprehend in this life, I don't think. All of a sudden, I need to know who I am, I need to know where I'm from, I need to know my people.
That carries into the adoptive family. Of course it does. To ignore that is to emotionally say to the child, hey, we don't want to have anything to do with that past, and we don't want you to have anything to do with your past. That's to show yourself unsafe as it relates to what matters deeply to this child.
See, we can't do that and then expect them to trust us at the deepest levels. It is very much related to how much they love and trust us.
Alison: Yeah.
Ron: Even in the best of scenarios, we're going to have some moments where the child needs to know what happened. What was my past? What was that about? They need to fill in the story and figure out their identity, their story in life. It's all tied together. Same thing is happening with children in blended families.
If it's been post-divorce, unlike your situation where it's another home, we're back and forth and I love my mom and I love my dad and hey, stepmom's here. She's pretty cool. Stepdad's over there. He's pretty cool too. But I'm still trying to figure out where I put all of you in my heart. How do I make room for you? That's a lot for children to navigate.
Alison: It's so much. Again, the inner work that you're describing, I think about it now, even as my kids are older, trying to make sure you’re not imposing your own thoughts on your kids and letting them find their own way. But when you are coming in as a stepparent or as an adoptive parent, all the more an opportunity to really honor your child's need to find their way through that kind of sometimes murky crockpot, that murky maze.
I love the work that you're doing to name those things for people in so many different settings. We will link to all of your resources. I haven't found anybody else doing it as well as you're doing it in that space. Just helping people navigate and really honor the needs of the kids that are really legitimate and really valid. Even as we're trying to honor the goal of having that family-ness. I like that, how you say that. It's a different way to get there.
Ron: This reminds me of something that we say a lot around here. Blended families done poorly, unfortunately, it adds chaos and pain and difficulty to the children's lives, but even more to the adults as well. It's difficult. But blended families done well, they're redemptive.
Alison: Yeah.
Ron: Because think of a person who's gone through a miserable relationship, you were faithful to your vows, but your spouse wasn't, and that was the end of the marriage. You've been beat up. Life taught you, marriage is not forever. Here you are now, risking again and investing yourself in a new love relationship. You go into it with this little fear and trepidation in the back of your mind going, I don't know, the last one didn't work out so well.
How much of myself do I give? That level of trust that's being called into question because of the past. We call that the ghost of marriage past, by the way. You begin to love well and that's reciprocated in this blended family marriage, and you discover you can trust people to show up for you and you can show up for them and make sacrifices.
All of a sudden, your heart is redeemed. Or think about a child who's gone through great difficulty, in and out of homes, various people moving in and out, dad's life, mom's life, whatever the case may be. I'm not even sure what's consistent in my world. All of a sudden, somebody shows up, a stepparent, and in the beginning you reject them.
I did an interview for our podcast, Family Life Blended Podcast, not long ago, where a woman said that very thing. She said, I told this guy, I don't want you, I don't like you, don't be with my mom. You're out. That was her attitude at the age of 12, when her stepdad, third stepdad, shows up in her life.
But then he won't go away. He's got the love and stubbornness of Jesus. He's basically gonna keep showing up, doing what he can. It took a long time. She finally was won over by that. Isn't this the way the Father pursues us?
Alison: That's incredible.
Ron: Parents get to emulate the passion of God for people who don't yet know Him. You get to win. He won her over. By the way, she's one of the biggest Christian music worship leaders in the country. She says, my step-dad showed me Jesus, taught me who he was. This is why I'm doing what I'm doing today. That is God's redemptive work through this stepfamily home.
It's amazing. We love to watch that. We love to see those stories. That's what we're trying to do with our work.
Alison: It's amazing. It is redemptive. It is a glimpse of how God comes into even some of the hardest places and brings his love and it makes me filled with gratitude for the fact that you're helping so many people do that. I want to ask you one other question. You brought this up and I wanted to circle back to it about the role of grief, making space for grief.
In all families, but in particular blended families, talk to me a little bit about how you encourage families to do that.
Ron: I wrote a book called Preparing to Blend, which is a do-it-yourself guide for couples that are engaged, planning to get married that, by the way, that doubles for ministry leaders as a premarital counseling tool. We've got to radically update premarital counseling in the local church for people who are bringing children into that scenario to make it what it needs to be for them.
One of the chapters that we have is on the grief of the past and we've got another chapter on the grief of the future. In other words, how things are going to change as a result of this family coming together. But let's talk about the past for a second.
So one of the things I'll coach a stepparent on is, imagine a stepparent who is learning how to gently step into the grief space, saying to a child, (this is real counterintuitive, so it's important), hey, look, all the kids in this house, including you are my kids. There's no his kids or my kids. There's our kids.
Okay. First of all, let me compliment the heart of that stepparent. In that scenario, they’re saying, I want you to know that I care about you and that you're mine and I see you as mine and I don't want you to think that I don't. Got it. Love it. Love that part of you.
However, there's a child on the receiving end of that who's going, oh, so you're my mom now? I think you tried to push mom out of my heart. No, thank you. I don't want any of this or any of you. You made it harder for them to love you. Not easier. You had good intentions. But the strategy worked against you, okay?
To step into that space is to say, what term for me are you comfortable with? What do you want me to call you? When I'm introducing you to my friends, and we're out at church, and, hey, this is my husband and my what? How do you want me to say that? You ask the child to find something that is in alignment with their grief journey, that they're comfortable with.
That's one tiny example. Another one is to imagine a stepdad who's driving his stepkids to school one day and he goes, oh man, I figured out your dad's birthday is Friday and you're still on our time. You're going to be at my house instead of your dad's house on his birthday.
Imagine a stepdad saying, “Oh, that stinks for you. I am so sorry. Is there anything I can do? Do you need to run to the store? I'll take you to the store, get him a card, a gift. Can I help arrange a FaceTime so you can talk to him on his birthday? When do you want to do that?”
Listen to the eagerness of the stepdad to say to the child, your relationship with your biological father is not a problem for me. I'm not in competition with that relationship. In fact, I want to encourage your relationship with your dad. What that says to the child is you, stepdad, are safe.
You care about what matters to me, and you'll step into the hard, grieving, sorrowful places of my life, and you won't cry. You won't compete with it. You'll actually help me grieve and do what I need to do. That is a blessing and a gift to the child and a double blessing for the step parent because you become more respectable, more lovable.
Alison: You paradoxically become more of a parent figure. It's right. You actually are showing that kind of fatherly love that you crave. You want to show it, but you show it in such a counter-intuitive way. It's to me, right out of the playbook of Jesus. It's just, it's so beautiful. I love how you describe that.
Any other tidbits or wisdom that you've found to be really helpful for folks who are either healing their own wounds or who are in the midst of trying to do this?
Ron: I think probably the most general comment I'll make, like I said, we have a dozen books in our series, we have many on children and stepparenting, being a stepmom, and all kinds of different things. The more you learn about your blended family, how it works, how the dynamics work on the inside and an understanding of what's going on with you on the inside, I love your work to that end, then the easier your decision making becomes.
You take your family forward at a pace that actually works for the rest of the family, the people involved in it. It's when you try to force the blend that you tend to get less of one. It's when you relax into the crockpot that you find more authenticity and connection being developed. So there's lots of little paradoxical moments. You gotta know. We call it getting stepfamily smart.
The smarter you get, the better decisions you make, the easier the family goes in general. There are still things you don't get to control. The family will never be like with a biological first family. There's never everything the way you want it to be. Life gets in the way, but that's okay. More often than not, it goes in the direction of where you would like to see it go.
It often gets there much more slowly to what you, and I'll close with this that you said earlier, there is a honeymoon for remarried couples. It comes at the end of the journey and not at the beginning.
Alison: It's so true. We're aware, to your point at the very beginning of the episode, those qualities of love and joy and peace and patience independent of the family structure, we have those. I'd put them up against a traditional family any day.
Before we wind down, you have a new book coming out. This one is about marriage.
Ron: It is. I also want to say, I think it's probably the most important book I've written for blended families. Because the qualities and attributes that you will learn are not limited to marriage, because really, like your work, this book is about how we gain self control. That is the biblical term.
The modern psychological term is self-regulation. How we self-regulate in the midst of dysregulation in such a way that we bring our best self to relationships. The book is primarily looking at the marital relationship. But later in the book, we actually have a whole chapter on how this applies to parenting, how it applies to stepparenting, how it applies to dealing with grief and loss and sadness and sexuality.
The principles are everlasting. I'm going to brag about this until the day I die, and it's not because Nan and I had anything to do with it. Let me tell you what this book is. Dr. Terry Hargrave created Restoration Therapy that is now being used all over the world, thousands of people.
It's the best integration that I know of modern therapy, neurology, and understanding of interpersonal neurobiology, as well as relationship systems and how they work, self-regulation, and New Testament theology, of changing and renewing our minds. It is a beautiful integration of that.
He helped to transform Nan and I's relationship years ago, and we have partnered with him and his wife, Sharon, to write this book. Basically, Nan and I are the case study. We're the ones that you're going to read about–how we screwed a lot of things up and how these principles really helped pull us out of a lot of difficulty in our relationship.
So we're telling the story of us and teaching the principles of restoration therapy in the process. We're very excited about it because we know how useful and impactful it really is.
Alison: I cannot wait to have you back on to talk about this book. It comes out in January.
Ron: It does. January 7th,
Alison: You live in this integration of the best of what we're learning in modern psychology with biblical wisdom. It's powerful. I see you doing that with this next book, and I'm really excited.
I do have a couple of questions, Ron, as we wrap up, that I like to ask all of my guests . I'll start with, what would you say to that younger you back in the day who is making these decisions about your career and your own life? What would you say to that younger version of you now?
Ron: Oh, you're going to read it in The Mindful Marriage because it's in there. I think in a nutshell, I would say Ron, look in the mirror. I was so busy looking up and beyond in ambition, and in pridefulness, not so much arrogance as in I'm a great person, but as in I was more of an insecure, prideful person.
But I felt like I could work my way into all the right things, whether it be my marriage, my family, my career. Because of that, my pride blinded me. So I needed to look in the mirror and see what was really there. As soon as I started doing that, I recognized there's a lot of things that I needed to deal with and change, and that those were the very things that were driving my wife crazy. Yeah, I would say humble down, look in the mirror, and trust God more than you do.
Alison: I love that. What's bringing out the best of you right now?
Ron: Learning how to put on self-regulation, learning how to recognize that I have agency by the power of the Spirit to act in ways that are different from what my flesh wants to do. I am not a slave to my flesh. That's the old self. The new self is becoming, and it's pretty cool.
Alison: I love it. That's awesome. Tell our listeners where they can find all the things that we've talked about. What's the best place to get in touch with your work?
Ron: Two websites, familylife.com/blended. So familylife.com/blended will get you right to our section. My personal webpage is a collection of where everything can be found, new and old, blended and mindful marriage, that's rondeal.org.
Alison: Thanks, Ron.