💬 Send us a text! (Yes really!)

I expected my stepkid to be a little distant with me at first. What I didn't expect was her extreme and total rejection of me. And not just for a little while — for YEARS.

So I’m sharing with you what I wish I would’ve known earlier: that some hesitance from your stepkid is totally normal, but an extreme and disproportionate negative reaction to a new stepparent could be a red flag that there’s something else going on.

At first, I figured it was just me. Something I was doing wrong. I tried everything I could think of to overcome her objections toward me and try to connect with her in more positive ways. Nothing worked.

It wasn’t until my stepkid also started rejecting her dad did I finally start thinking… I don’t think this shit is normal. And once I learned about the terms “high conflict” and “parental alienation” and learning how those issues affect your ability to bond with your stepkid as well as your ability to blend as a family did the dots finally start connecting: yep, that shit was not normal.

Every blended family faces speed bumps along the way. But if you're facing landmines and razor wire barricades instead, you need to start looking outside the typical vanilla blended family advice and start educating yourself about high conflict stepfamily dynamics and how to effectively limit a toxic ex’s ability to damage your blended family.

Dan & I have put together a ton of resources on high conflict to help with this, everything from a parenting plan checklist to a high-conflict co-parenting guide. Even a blog on how to protect your own mental health as a stepparent if your partner’s got crappy boundaries.

And if you want a little more hands-on support, our Substack community is awesome and helpful and so many of them are going through exactly this kind of crap. We’d love for you to join us. xo

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🧡 Need a bigger pep talk? Start here or join us over on Substack! xo

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