Efft and Stepfamilies Blended Families or \"Step

EFFT and Stepfamilies

Blended families or "step families" have one parent who is not the biological parent of the children in the family. These families will often face unique challenges due to their makeup. Furrow and Palmer (2007) discuss Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) for stepfamilies. Furrow and Palmer identify four basic challenges that stepfamilies face:

(1).The past experiences of the different families join compete with the new family's ability to consolidate newer relational commitments.

Typical family boundaries are clouded in stepfamilies (e.g., who disciplines which child, who is the real parent of whom, etc.).

There is an "inheritance of loss" that occurs through remarriage that can affect the parents and the children of both original families. This can interfere with the development of the new stepfamily.

(4). There are different developmental needs in stepfamilies compared to other families.

These four specific challenges can make working with stepfamilies particularly difficult.

Within the family system there is an expected pattern response to the loss of an attachment figure, whereas within stepfamilies there is what the authors referred to as "attachment insecurity." Both parents and children may respond to attachment insecurity in terms of anxious and avoidant behaviors. The attachment insecurity becomes even more complicated for stepfamilies where divorced parents still engage in conflict and this affects the new stepfamily. The authors suggest that understanding how unmet emotional needs and attachment insecurity play out and then helping to put these in perspective in a stepfamily are the goals of EFFT.

EFFT is a therapeutic approach designed to create secure emotional attachment between family members. This is done by using an "attachment lens" to understand the families presenting problem, assess and understand the emotional responses of each family member, work towards the family understanding of these experiences, develop self-awareness for each family member and for the family around each member, and promote emotional processing of basic relational needs. There are several steps to accomplishing these which include building a therapeutic alliance with the family so that every member can feel safe within the therapeutic environment, identifying problematic interactional patterns, reframing these problematic interactions as patterns that have taken over family relationships, processing the emotional experience of family members as part of the therapeutic cycle, and helping family members to connect with their emotional responses and the behavioral patterns of themselves and other members of the family. Once these problematic cycles are clarified the therapists and family work together to restructure the family's pattern of interactions to facilitate acceptance and sharing of attachment -- related needs and emotions. This is done by structuring interactions to have family members openly share their emotional experience and needs in a supportive family environment.