Why Stepfamily Dynamics Feel So Hard to Navigate | Parental Alienation

In this conversation, Lawrence Joss sits down alongside Stephanie Sternes, a specialist in two-family systems, to explore the often-overlooked realities of blended families and the emotional complexity of navigating life across two homes. Together, they unpack how attachment, shifting roles, and stepfamily dynamics shape both parent and child experiences, especially in the presence of parental alienation and high-conflict family environments.

With both professional and personal perspective, Stephanie brings awareness to the emotional layers within stepfamily dynamics, inviting greater understanding and compassion for what blended families and two-home systems hold. This episode offers a deeper lens into parental alienation and blended family dynamics, providing clarity and a more grounded way of understanding the complexity many families navigate.

Key Takeaways

• Two-family systems and their impact on children
• Attachment, grief, and loss in blended families
• Loyalty binds and the love-loyalty paradox
• High conflict, oppositional parenting, and abuse spectrum
• Clinical training gaps and systemic understanding in therapy 

Chapters

00:00 - Understanding Two-family Systems
02:47 - The Impact of Grief and Loss on Family Dynamics
05:49 - Navigating Attachment and Regulation in Two-family Homes
08:48 - Misconceptions in Therapy for Two-family Systems
12:03 - The Spectrum of Parenting Styles: Co-parenting vs. Oppositional Parenting
14:46 - The Loyalty Bind: Navigating Love and Loyalty in Divided Families
18:06 - The Role of Therapy in Healing Family Dynamics

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Transcript

Welcome And Community Resources

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There's a thread of attachment that comes that's natural, biological. But when these systems shift, we try to take all that time, crush it into one moment, put everybody in the same house. The rules are different, they do it this way, they do it that way, and it's just too much too fast. It overloads the system for both the adults and the children and makes it so that we're a reactive household. And once the adults are reactive, then the kiddos are reactive. And depending on how long that lasts, we can predict, understanding through two home systems, where that's headed and where to intervene.

Meet Stephanie And Two Systems

SPEAKER_01 0:47

Like I'm talking about my family, but I'm not getting any kind of feedback that makes any sense. Are you in a relationship where there's stepparents, other partners, and the dynamics are super confusing and you don't know what's happening and you don't know how to navigate it? Are you just thoroughly frustrated with all the dynamics and you don't know where to go? That was me. And I keep asking these questions because I'm like, God, it was so frustrating back then, and I didn't know what to do. And here I am today interviewing Stephanie, and she is a rock star. She teaches about two family systems, and we have never had this conversation before. So it is a phenomenal conversation and uh a couple of great episodes, and there'll be another episode coming out with her, hopefully shortly, that addresses a little bit more of this complex subject because she's bringing a lens that is so sorely needed. So if you're new to the community, welcome. My name is Lawrence Joss, and this is the Family Disappeared Podcast. We have over 130 podcasts already in the can on subjects, therapists, court attorneys, panels of parents, panels of grandparents, what not to do. There's just so much cool stuff in there. Check it out. Great resources in the show notes. We have a free 12-step program for rental alienation anonymous. The community saved my life. If you don't have community, get community. If that doesn't work for you, find something. It's an incredibly important part. Also, we're a 501c3 nonprofit. If this is useful, if this makes sense, donate. Let us help the next person. You're not donating for yourself. You're already here. Anything that we get is just helping to bring this resource continuously and hopefully expand our resources at some point when we get enough donations. We're not super great at that right now. And please like and share. Like people need to hear these stories and these things that are going on. And you can always reach me at family disappeared at gmail.com. Love to hear from you. And thanks for coming out today. And let's jump into the show and see what uh Stephanie has to say. So we're so excited today to have uh Stephanie Stearns, and she's gonna talk about a segment of the population that doesn't get enough airtime and doesn't have enough resources. So, Stephanie, if you could please introduce yourself and also a little bit about the topic we're gonna be discussing and why, please.

SPEAKER_00 2:55

Yeah, I'm so happy to be here. I'm Stephanie Stearns. I am a dual licensed counselor, clinical counselor, and also a marriage and family therapist here in Idaho. And I specialize in step family or two home systems. And so I'm an educator. I educated two counselors at Northwest Nazarene University, and it truly is a portion of our population. 50% of our clinical folks that come in are part of that population and very little training. And so that's really who I am professionally, non-professionally. I um live on an elk ranch in Idaho. I've got six kids, two marriages, so I've got a blended family myself. And so this is really close to my heart, both personally and professionally.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

Well, I would say for me on a personal level, I just want to talk about the elk ranch. I think we can that that's awesome. What a beautiful place to raise a family and an atmosphere to raise a family. That sounds awesome. So for clarification, just so everyone understands, when you say two family systems, can you please just you you know clarify what that means? Is just divorce families or there's other two family systems?

SPEAKER_00 4:08

Yeah, and I think that's a really important distinction that I purposely try to make because we talk about blended families, we talk about divorce, we talk about children of divorce, we talk about blended step, we talk about all these types of families, but we really don't understand that they're two separate systems trying to function. And the children are functioning in two systems, but I can't tell you how many different times that you have a client come in, whether it be an adult or a child, and you ask them to tell us about their family, they typically only talk about the family that's coming in the door with them. And in all cases with adults, they will build a family structure and tell us about it from just their family and talk about the other family only as in to blame or a negative way. There's just not a lot of understanding that when kiddos come from a place where they're living in two systems, as counselors, if we don't look at both systems and how that interplays on diagnosis, what's going on for them, we miss the whole point. We start treating children as if they're in one family, and it's not the case. Um adoption. Adopted kiddos are in two systems, they're in a system of foster care, and they also have a system somewhere that still belongs in their heart. So these people are running in two home systems, and we are trained, we think as if people are in one home, and it's not the case. Lots of times we have kiddos that have four parents. We don't think about it that way, but it gets very complex very quick when we stop saying step families, blended families, children are divorced, and start saying two systems.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

Well, I I love the terminology, two systems, and thank you for clarifying that. And it's it's actually stunning when you say most people come into therapy and they distinct, they have a distinction between the actual family, maybe like an enemy image of the other family or the other part of the system. And I think that's kind of what I'm hearing.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

Yeah, I think that's common, especially in in my work, right? Because they're not going to come to the level of care and to see a counselor and there's struggles like that, right? There's 50% that get divorced and move on and they do fine. But that other 50% that starts showing up in the counseling center, and 20% that are really high conflict, those are the ones that I see. And so my experience is with that group of the population, and they really do. They turn in and they just see themselves, their home, and it makes it really difficult for the kiddos.

Grief Loss Attachment And Reactivity

SPEAKER_01 6:46

So then just diving right in, like the attachment and the regulation is very different in a primary family system and a two-family system. Can you talk about that a little bit and what that might look like?

SPEAKER_00 6:58

Gosh, you're really touching on the core of the problem and the start of what we can predict, I can predict whether we're going to end up with a teenager that is in resist and refuse and start to cut off parents. It really starts at the very beginning of that story. It starts with a story of grief and loss. Every single step family, blended family, two-home system starts with grief and loss. And so when one family, the nuclear family, ends, whether through death or divorce, and we start to build a new one and we start bringing people in, there's an old attachment that was built biologically that took lots of time, however long it took, from when they were dating to when they got pregnant to when the child came into the house. There's a thread of attachment that comes that's natural, biological. But when these systems shift, we try to take all that time, crush it into one moment, put everybody in the same house. All the rules are different. They do it this way, they do it that way, and it's just too much too fast. It overloads the system for both the adults and the children and makes it so that we're a reactive household. And once the adults are reactive, then the kiddos are reactive. And depending on how long that lasts, we can predict, understanding through two home systems, where that's headed and where to intervene.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

Just talking about this a little bit, like I feel emotional. Like as you're qualifying and quantifying what's going on, like I feel like some yeah, some like moisture in my eyes. It's like that's intense what you're saying, and it's incredibly important, and no one's talking about it, except for you and maybe a handful of other professionals. But one more clarifying point we have the two-home system, and when someone just separates, like a husband and wife separates, the kids are going back and forth between two homes, but there's no step parents, there's no other players right now in this pictures. That's still a two-house system.

SPEAKER_00 8:55

It's still a two-household system, right? Because the married relationship did negotiations between how they wanted to parent, how they needed the house to be, what the time was, how they split the roles and the rules in the house. And when we divorced, we now no longer have to negotiate those. There's this freedom that comes that I don't have to negotiate with that other person, the things that I didn't like. And so I'm creating my own world here while the other one is doing the same thing. There's things that they didn't like or want to do in negotiations, and they have this new freedom to not have to do that. So they do their own thing. And so it makes it so the kiddo may be taking baths over here and stay up till midnight and watch scary movies, where over here this one had more of a conservative, more rigid rules. And so the child, even if there are no other adults, just the biologicals, can have that. And to be honest with you, it's one of the things that parents miss is that they don't realize that when that structure shifted, the child's now having to operate in two different systems. And so it brings us back to a real foundational point that if when we're separating and divorcing, that we don't recreate a co-parenting structure that at least has some consistencies, the kiddo is automatically put into a fight or flight system because this isn't their norm, this isn't their attachments, and now I have to regulate and relearn everything about who my dad is, who my mom is in these separate situations. They change, they're different, and we're not even talking yet about the loss and the grief of the relationship and the breakup that's affecting them. We're just talking about household rules. There's still so much change that's happening that the children often get left trying to navigate that without real understanding from the adults because the adults don't understand it and they don't know to seek help.

Why Two Homes Dysregulate Kids

SPEAKER_01 10:55

Right. And just going back to a clinical perspective, like clinicians, like what do you see the most misinterpretations or misconceptions that therapists are bringing into a two-family system by not identifying, I guess, the two systems, like, hey, I need help. And then I go to a therapist, where do you see them dropping the ball and not being able to help build a bridge for the families?

SPEAKER_00 11:19

The challenge here is the training, the lack of training, the lack of exposure to complex family systems. Again, very few universities teach that. They'll do a family class and they might talk about divorce, but the complex system of people navigating two different homes, it's just not taught that much. And so with that, you come out of school and your education is about if you're a clinical counselor, then you're taught about diagnoses, anxiety, depression, teaching coping skills. All these things are great and wonderful. But when a typical child gets dropped off, that child is dropped off and saying, they're having behaviors or their anxiety. And it's because their parent over here doesn't do a great job of managing that. And so I get them back, and it takes three days to get them back. It's such a common thing that comes into the clinic. And the problem is that we'll we'll go after the anxiety, we'll offer an anxiety diagnosis if it's reached that level, right? Or depression or an adjustment disorder, and we go straight to teaching coping skills. But a family therapist, a therapist that has actually trained in two homes, would actually look at those symptoms and go, okay, most likely there's five things going on when you're in two systems. Number one, what's the conflict like in the co-parenting relationship? That conflict or or even moderate tension research says will cause the child to not sleep at night. If they're not sleeping at night, they're going to be in an arousal state where if they have fight in their system, they're going to be having behaviors. If they are a flight or a freeze in that system when they're not getting enough sleep, they're going to be isolating, depression. And so without an understanding that those five basic things happening in two systems, it's really hard for a clinician to not go through what we've been trained to go through. There's anxiety, work on the coping skills, try to talk to the parents, but then send them right back into a system that didn't get addressed. And so that's really, it's not the clinician's fault. It's just a lack of understanding. And to be honest, a lot of times when a parent drops off, there's high statistics saying clear up to 70% of adults don't even realize that it's the tension between the two homes that are causing their children to be dysregulated. They don't even understand that.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

Wow. And just to clarify something that you shared with me before we started taping, you you shared some kind of statistics of how many people are actually teaching this as colleges and what the actual access to training is in the states. Could you just share that a little bit before we go into the next question?

SPEAKER_00 14:01

Sure. I don't know what the statistic is. I know in Idaho that Northwest Nazarene is the only university in the counseling programs that is teaching it, because I teach it. Nobody else is teaching it. Before I was teaching it, it just isn't taught. It's not part of the curriculum. If you're a counselor and trained clinically, you might get one or two classes on a couple's, you know, counseling or family counseling. If you decide to make that your emphasis that you want to do, that you might get four or five classes. So clinically, unless you seek extra knowledge about that or extra training about that, it's not part of the core training. If you're coming out of school as a therapist, American family therapist, you're going to get a lot more systemic thinking. So you're already thinking about yes, there's anxiety, yes, there is coping skills, but also what's the system that this person's living in? Is the stress coming from school? Is it coming from home? We're looking at the whole system because we're trained to think systemically, not just diagnosis and coping skills. So it really matters when you are divorced, stepfamily, blended family, thinking about bringing other people into your life after divorce. I think it's super important that you find an expert that can help you navigate this. It's not easy to do, and it's not innate. We think that we just pick up and rebuild our house, and that is the exact opposite that turns everything upside down, makes attachment moving too fast, too complex, too much for us to take, whether it be adults or kiddos, and it causes the system to end up in a high tension where we get all those diagnoses.

Therapists Missing The Real System

SPEAKER_01 15:45

Thank you for that. And that that was very much my experience. I hadn't my kids in therapy like within months and the for years, and the therapist didn't pick up on any of this stuff, and it didn't uh it helped perpetuate some of the problems because of the lack of training, not the lack of intent or not a good person as a therapist. And I think a lot of us experience it where there's just not enough qualified professionals that understand the dynamics, especially when it's really high conflict. And you're talking about like the oppositional co-parenting. How does that differ from high conflict? Is there something you can say, hey, this is a super differential point between the two, or is it the same thing?

Co-Parenting Parallel And Oppositional Parenting

SPEAKER_00 16:21

Yeah, that's kind of a long answer. Um and it starts, it goes all the way back to I don't think if we say oppositional parenting, most people would have no idea. You can get a gist of what that might mean, but it's not a term, it's not a term that anybody's talking about. You're not going to find it necessarily in a research book, although it is going to be coming out soon in a book for this training by Dr. Proper now. What we look at typically is we go through divorce. If you're in a state where they mandate you, if you have children, to take this mandated divorce, if you have children course, it's usually a couple of hours, one night, they check it off, it's mandated. Those courses, if if it's mandated at all, are very rare to talk about any other type of after-divorce type of parenting, co-parenting. They only typically talk about two. They talk about co-parenting, which is we're friends, we get along, it's all aimed at the kid, it's going to be fine. We usually don't see those in counseling, or do we see them back in the courts? If you're co-parenting, and we know there's lots of them out there doing that well, they're fine. The only other option they teach us about is called parallel parenting. And that's what we do if we can't co-parent. And what that means, what we're taught in those divorce courses, that mandated class, is that it means we don't get along. And it means that we're going to put aside our differences, we're going to have a business relationship aimed at the kiddo, and we're going to have low tension, and we're going to agree to work together. That's all they tell us. You only get those two options. So if you're sitting there in that class, you're like, I'm clearly not co-parenting, then I must be trying to parallel parent. The problem is, is that research says anything above moderate, moderate and above tension, not just conflict, tension, will end up in this place, this caveat a year and a half later, where we end up, we can almost, I can almost predict in my own experience where we're going to have resistant refused teenagers. Because if that tension is still going on after a year and a half, those teens don't do well with that when it hits them at that developmental stage. They're aimed at their friends. And if the tension in the parents is still going on, they're out and they're going to do whatever they can to get to those friends. That's just a normal developmental process. So oppositional parenting is something that I came up with to lay in between. Yes, there's co-parenting, we all know about that. Yes, there's parallel parenting, we all know about that. But oppositional parenting for me and the people that I train is a red flag that says we need a higher level of care here. It means that it's more than low tension, and something's going on that is continuing the tension, and that higher level of care is needed. So I put that in there so that I could have a place to teach where to be aware that we're not just parenting and co-parenting here through parallel and co-parenting. The other side of oppositionals, yeah, there is abuse. We know that. That whole kind of spectrum of from co-parenting to parallel to oppositional to abuse, in my opinion, without having a way to scale that for professionals and even for you, if you're in a divorce mandated course, to register where am I? How do I know when I need to get a higher level care of help? I wouldn't know that. This isn't my world, this is all new. I'm in shock. So, in order to train that, that spectrum became really important in the training because a lot of times a counselor will get lost in taking the louder parent's voice. So this parent's scared, this parent's really afraid that the other parent isn't safe. That's their own experience, it's where it's coming from, and it's contagious. When you take that in and you're scared for your child, a counselor's a human, they can pick that up. And then if there's no way to assess the difference between true abuse and oppositional parenting, then we get too many folks, including the courts, moving over to abuse because we have to rule that out. It does happen and it's super important. So, in my work, when I put that oppositional parenting in there, there's a place where we can go that isn't abuse, a place where we can intervene and make a difference and help these families, even if we have to back up, create a co-parent relationship through coaching, through help. They need help. If they're afraid of the other parent, how are we ever going to get to co-parenting? So that's where I came up with that oppositional parenting is a place for us to all intervene and to have an awareness that, hey, hey, hey, stop. There's something we can do, we can get help, we can't do this on our own.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

Thank you for that explanation. So it's wonderful. And introducing a new term and an idea and filling in a gap that's clearly missing, like the system's broken, right? We're all trying to intervene in the system and you know, make it a little bit better. And that sounds like what you're doing. And I really appreciate you adding that to my uh terminology. I love that. And you also said something really interesting when you were explaining that you said that it's predictable. A year and a half in teens will split from one parent to another parent, and it's actually common if the conflict is not resolved.

SPEAKER_00 21:49

Yeah, and I think that's complex. I mean, it's not as easy as just that, right? The the predictable patterns and the research that backs anything over a year and a half in moderate to high conflict. There are predictable patterns that will happen with kiddos because it affects their regulation system. If there's conflict or tension, imagine that instead of being at a five where we have like peace, love, joy, we get to play, we're kids, we we feel attached to our parents. If there's moderate tension, we pop up to a six already. And then if it keeps going, we're always working from a six or a seven, like listening to see if we're safe, listening to see if there's a war, listening if I'm caught in the middle. And over time, if that goes on more than a year and a half, and this is what they're bathed in their whole childhood, they're not developing. They're not developing a normal emotional regulation system because they're in fight, flight, or freeze. They're not developing how to be relational, they're developing how to be reactionary. The research is clear that that kind of conflict or moderate tension, even if they're not verbally fighting, but the tension, especially if you have a kiddo that's an empath, they can feel that and it puts them on edge. Therefore, they're not developing. So if this goes long term, you take a five-year-old that spends the next 10 years under this kind of tension, by the time he's 15 and he developed mentally appropriately in a normal developmental pattern, should be leaning towards building relationships, should be leaning towards friends, should be leaning towards less structure. That's normal. But if he's got 10 years of being up here where he couldn't really trust, always walking on eggshells. If I say this, my mom will be mad. If I say this, my dad will be mad. They're always fighting over my clothes or my schedule or my structure or what I'm doing. I can't ever just be a kid. By the time he's 15, it's very likely that he'll pick whatever household gives him the leniency, gives him the ability to hang out with his friends. And it's super sad because the courts sometimes allow those kids to make decisions, but it's not based on this whole systemic look of what's been going on in their family this whole time. And so I don't know. This brings me to a really sad portion of all of this work is that if you can't afford to go to court to fight for your kids, you lose them. Because there's nobody going to stand in the way of a 15-year-old that doesn't want to be at your house anymore because it's easier to be at mom or dad's house, whichever, it happens all different ways because they're fighting you. They're fighting you now. It's just a super sad, sad situation that we don't get early intervention, we don't realize tension, anything above low tension, moderate tension can create these kinds of systems where a natural developmental in a teenager is going to push away from the system that holds structure. It will also push away the system that's not safe. I mean, this is true, but that's that piece between oppositional parenting and abuse, right? We just don't have language for it, and these kiddos fall through the tracks. For me, it's like developmentally letting a two-year-old choose what they want to eat for dinner every night. Nobody would do that. We know better. They're gonna pick cookies, right? But at 14, 15, 16, we start to allow kids to pick whoever they feel safest with. But that's there's just so much more to the story than that. They feel safer with their friends, so however they can get to that is what they're gonna be doing.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

Yeah, and and that is definitely sad, and again, brings up a lot of emotions. And that that was my experience at 12 years old, my daughter picked up to stay with her mother and not knowing any better and thinking that the family system would just revert back to normal C at some point. So it's it's profound information, even once we're digging a little bit deeper into systems. We're talking about a lot of systems on the the shows of adding this system really makes a huge impact. And as you're talking about the kids splitting and or in two family homes, like the love loyalty paradox that's happening because that's what's going on, right? Like, can you dig into that? Like this loyalty to maybe one particular parent, and love involves both parents, but the loyalty, I guess, trumps the love.

Loyalty Binds And The Loyalty Paradox

SPEAKER_00 26:16

Dr. Patricia Papernow, she's been four decades, she is the world's expert in these step family systems, and she has long identified that loyalty is a real thing in these these homes. And and I think, you know, as I work in social media, I work with Facebook and LinkedIn, and you start to see the this thread of people are starting to understand that that kids get caught in a loyalty bind. Dr. Popper now had that way back then, and so it's finally starting to come forward that we do understand that, and so that loyalty bind can be natural. I don't want to hurt my mom's feelings, so I'm going to side with my mom, or I'm gonna split into this idea of if I if I spend more time with mom and I spend less time with dad, I have to work really hard to let him know that I love him, and I can't tell mom about it because I don't want to hurt her feelings. Those are natural. And the problem with those natural binds is that the only way that they can be cured or released is through the parents that hold them. And lots of times the parents don't know they hold them, they're actually unintentionally increasing those, right? Because they're sharing their feelings about I don't have enough time with you. And and so these binds can be really, really natural. Again, good therapist, good good training in understanding two system homes would help to say, hey, look, mom, this kiddo's in a bind. Can you please just let her know it's okay that she loves everybody in the other house? That you're working really hard to make sure that she has more love in her home and in her heart. And so that's a loyalty bind release. That's something that lets the kiddo go, oh, okay, I don't have to keep doing that. We don't have to keep building a child that's going to end up in perfectionism or achievement because they're trying to manage this loyalty bind that they're in. So those are all natural ones that we can actually release for them. If I'm in a stepfamily and my child isn't building a relationship with the new stepdad or the stepdad that's been around for a year, the more love in the house, then as a therapist, I can go back and go, Well, you have a really great relationship with your dad. It may be that you feel uncomfortable building a relationship with him out of loyalty to your dad. And then as a therapist, all I need to do is go, Dad, do you want more love for your kiddo? What's that like? Of course I do. Then let her know it's okay to play games with stepdad. Let her know it's okay because she's got a natural loyalty to you. Those are natural loyalty lines, but there is something else that's a lot deeper and darker, and those are what I call it's a made-up term, I made it up, a love uh loyalty paradox. And what that means is it's a story as old as time, right? We go back to the Hatfields and the McCoys, we go back to lots of Shakespeare that talks about these family systems that are so loyal that that is what it is. We talk about gang mentality, we talk about religious places where where we're just looking at, look, you have to be loyal to the system. You got my back, this is what love is. And we get confused. We get confused that if you don't have my back, then you don't love me. That's a bind that is about a loyalty that may not be healthy. Obviously, loyalty comes with love, but when loyalty takes the place of love in one house or both houses, then we can predict that a child's going to be in big trouble as he grows in teens. Because there's no way when you take two systems and they're required as currency for love to be loyal to one that splits them. So whether you have two homes that are running on loyalty as currency for love, it's a super dangerous place. I can predict just about every time in my in my own clinical work that there is going to be a kiddo that is an at-risk team, for sure. If you have a home where one runs on loyalty and the other one runs on unconditional love as best they can, and not making loyalty the thing that helps them be stuck together as a family, then this is a family unit that really needs therapy. Because this type of understanding is generational. They were taught that from generations down that you have to have my back. This is how this family runs. Clinically, we call it enmeshment when everybody has to have the same feelings and thoughts. When you have a system that has a love and a loyalty paradox in it, these are ones that need lots of help because this one may never change, and this one is going to need a third party, so that developmentally, when children, when they're two, when they're 10, when they're 15, when they're 18, when they're adults, they've had somebody therapeutically that said, of course, love is an important thing, and of course, you feel this loyalty, and that makes it really hard for you because you feel like you have to choose. We get to work with those children all the way through their childhood so that when they come out the other side, there's this hope of a deeper understanding that they don't cut one off for the other, but they were protected through that process, that they can hold love. We can teach them boundaries that they're not able to do until they're adults. As an adult, if I have a mom that's been upset or a dad that's been upset that I, you know, I didn't choose them through the divorce, and I have somebody that did teach me about love and unconditional love, and that children need to be loved by both their biological parents and hold that as a co-parenting top 10 in their relationship. Again, we're not talking about abuse, we're talking about oppositional. If I'm not taught that, then I have this person that held that belief for me. With my adult brain, I can look back and I can make better decisions about my relationships.

Healing Takeaways And Closing Calls

SPEAKER_01 32:19

Wow. You know, like super well. We're gonna give Stephanie a super well. And I'm thinking if you're out there, maybe you want to give yourself a well too. What a what a great show. And it brought up a lot of emotions for me. I really, really felt that. Some of the nuances that she was talking about really hit home. They really talked to some of the things that I'm I'm not struggling with in the present moment, but I'm recalibrating in the present moment as I'm doing the interview because so many of these are things were part of my life and part of my story. And as I get more information, I have more compassion and understanding for my children and what they're going through, and I have more compassion and understanding for me and what I was going through, and even trying to seek therapy and even trying to seek resources that they just weren't available. I wasn't broken or defective. I just I just didn't know. I just didn't know what I didn't know. And if you're new to the community, oh my God, that you get access to this information, that you can have an intervention in the system so much sooner than so many of us. And if you are in the middle of this and you're five, ten, twenty, thirty years in, my God, this is wonderful healing information. So thank you for coming out to play in the sandbox with us today. Donate, we're a 501c3 nonprofit. Let us expand what we're bringing. We're really tapped into some incredible people, and we need more resources to be able to expand a little bit if you want. And if you got a lot of resources, you can do it all, and let's go. Check out resources in the show notes, free 12-step program parental alienation anonymous. I hope you have a beautiful day. And in case no one's told you today, I love you. I'm so grateful to be here and to be doing this work alongside you. I might be the person interviewing you, but I'm doing the same work that you're doing at the same time that you're doing in this particular episode. So I'm grateful that I get this opportunity to show up, be of service, and also continue to change the trajectory of my life and maybe help someone.