Lesson 7 of 7  - evolve a high-nurturance stepfamily
	Use Structural Maps to Strengthen Your Family Discover what needs improving - p. 1 of 3 By Peter K. Gerlach, MSW Member, NSRC Experts Council

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        This is one of a series of lesson-7 articles on how to evolve a high-nurturance stepfamily. The "/" in re/marriage and re/divorce notes that it may be a stepparent's first union. "Co-parents" means both bioparents, or the several stepparents and bioparents co-managing a multi-home nuclear stepfamily.  

          Note - tho this article focuses on stepfamilies, structural mapping can be useful in any family.

        This three-page article introduces and illustrates a visual tool for understanding how your home or family is "built" - "structural mapping." It may look complicated, but if you experiment with it you'll find that it's easy to use. This tool can help you answer questions like...

• "Who has the power in our home and family, including dead people?"

• "Who's in charge of each of our homes?"

• "Who is allied and who is conflicted or shunned?"

• "Is anyone excluded from full family membership? By Whom? Why?"

• "Do we have major communication blocks in and between our several homes?"

• "How do the structures of our homes change in situations like child visitations, major conflicts, and celebrations?"

  Contents

This page...

• explains "family structure,"

• provides 13 premises about family functioning,

• describes sample structural-mapping symbols; and...

• illustrates baseline maps of functional and dysfunctional biofamily homes;

Page 2...

• illustrates maps of functional and dysfunctional stepfamily structures before and during child visitations; and...

• starts describing how to map your family;

Page 3...

• completes how to map your family, including four special situations;

• suggest how to use your structural maps, and...

• recaps the whole article.

        Note that the principles and benefits of structural mapping apply to any family, not just stepfamilies.

  About Family Structure

        Here "family" means one or more related co-parents, and all the adults and kids (a) regularly living with them (b) or significantly affecting any of them  psychologically. The latter can include dead and distant relatives, key friends and professional consultants, a Higher Power, neighbors, teachers, coaches, baby sitters, and even influential media figures.

       Families exist to nurture - i.e. to fill the current and long-term needs of each member. Families range from low-nurturance (dysfunctional) to high nurturance (functional), depending on many factors. One way to gauge how well any family (like yours) functions is to diagram its structure. Structure refers to:

• Who's included and excluded from the family;

• Who's in charge of each home, if anyone. Whose needs and behaviors cause the main decisions in calm and stressful times?

• Family, subsystem, and relationship boundaries, or lack of them;

• The roles and rules that govern how members' needs get met (or don't);

• Family-member bonding, alliances, and hostilities; and ...

• Communication blocks between people and homes.

Structural mapping is a visual diagnostic tool. It can help you identify and validate what's strong about your home or multi-home family, and spot structural problems that lower your nurturance level. The structural mapping scheme outlined here is based on some basic ideas about family functioning. See if you agree with each of these beliefs, and add your own:

 Premises

        A high-nurturance or functional family's key purpose is to fill all members' needs. A key need is for a safe haven, where every member feels consistently accepted, valued, respected, supported, and encouraged to develop and use their unique talents. Families that don't fill all their members' key needs consistently can be called low nurturance or dysfunctional. Nurturance levels vary over time and from member and environmental changes.

        The main factors determining a home or family’s nurturance level are (a)  whether the adults are guided by their true Self or not and (b) how aware each adult is. In my clinical experience since 1981, typical divorced-family and stepfamily co-parents come from low-nurturance childhoods and have significant psychological wounds. Most co-parents and their supporters aren't aware of this, and/or don't know what it means or what to do about it.

        A stepfamily "co-parent" may be a biological parent (who passes on genes), a psychological parent (like a stepparent, who chooses to do child-nurturing things), or both (a dual-role co-parent).

        A nuclear stepfamily includes all people regularly living in the one to three homes of all stepkids’ living bioparents. This means that (a) both divorced bioparents and (b) all their kids and current primary partners are members of the same multi-home stepfamily - even if some are currently uninvolved or rejecting. So a complete structural map of the whole nuclear stepfamily (excluding relatives) includes two or more co-parenting homes.

        Resident co-parents should consistently want to make the daily and long-term  family decisions and rules, and set and enforce boundaries and consequences. Alternatives are an aggressive (needy) child, relative, ex mate, outsider, or no one making key family decisions.

        More basic premises about stepfamilies...       

        In high-nurturance families and homes, all kids and adults including co-parenting ex mates, usually feel...

• considered enough in family decisions that affect them,
  

• enough self and mutual respect,
  

• safe enough, and...
  

• clearly heard, when they have needs or opinions.
  

        Generally, co-parents should share responsibility and authority for most  home and family decisions as co-equal teammates. In new step-homes, bioparents (ideally) should do most discipline of their kids until the stepparent earns appropriate respect and authority.

        Generally, the emotional and physical boundaries separating all persons, couples, and homes comprising a stepfamily should be clear and pretty consistent. Boundaries are conscious and unconscious rules or limits which define acceptable behaviors.

        Meaningful boundaries have consequences that the boundary-setter enforces. An important class of boundaries define how emotionally and physically close an adult or child will allow others to get. Boundaries are set by words (e.g. "No, I won’t do that" and "Sure, glad to") and actions.

        When two or more people are too emotionally entangled (have fuzzy identities and weak personal boundaries), they’re enmeshed and/or codependent. Significant emotional distance between two or more family members is called detachment or a  cut off. Enmeshment and detachment usually reduce family nurturance levels, and are signs of adults' psychological wounds and unawareness. In high-nurturance stepfamilies, co-parents (vs. kids, others, or no one) set key boundaries cooperatively within and between their related homes.

        Co-grandparents and relatives should support, vs. control, ignore, or hinder, the co-parents' marriages, homes, and multi-home stepfamily bonding and growth.

       All co-parents in a divorcing family or nuclear stepfamily should consistently strive for a united front in filling their dependent kids' needs. This implies e less this happens,  the more stressed all members feel (specially the kids) and the lower the multi-home family's nurturance level.

       Most stepfamily homes with resident minor kids have two structural states: kids home and kids away (visitation). If both re/married mates have prior kids and living ex mates (a blended three-home stepfamily), the home "in the middle" may have three or more visitation structures or states, depending on how each divorced biofamily’s visitation schedule compares to the other’s. One home's structure may be functional (promoting member health and growth) and another very dysfunctional.

         If all bioparents and stepparents...

• have assessed and begun to heal any significant psychological wounds; and

• accept their identity as a stepfamily and what that identity means; and they

• have formed realistic role and relationship expectations, and they are...

• able to effectively resolve any major belief-differences between them, and...

• can act consistently on their beliefs as a caregiving team, then...

they’re more likely to build a high-nurturance multi-home stepfamily. Where all co-parents can’t do these, adults and kids feel confused and stressed, and the risk of legal or psychological re/divorce rises.

        Discuss these premises with the other adults in and supporting your related homes. The more aware you all are about ideas like these, the more useful family-structure mapping will be for you.

        Now Let's put these premises to work...

  Structural-mapping Symbols

        Structural family maps use symbols to show how the members relate to each other. In this article, I’ll use the generic letters below. You can use these letters, your family-members’ names or initials, cartoon figures, faces, or any other meaningful symbols.

        Be creative: doing these maps can be fun as well as instructive! Consider using colored markers or pens, too - whatever makes the diagrams clearer for everyone. Try to see the big picture and theme, to minimize getting boggled by all these symbols. Once you try them, they're surprisingly easy...