StepWisdom: Knowledge from the Ages for Successful StepFamilies

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More About This Book

Overview

StepWisdom: Knowledge from the Ages for Successful StepFamilies asks us to shift the way we look at stepfamilies. These vibrant, flexible, and creative families are a boon to our society. Stepfamilies can indeed be challenging and sometimes difficult, but StepWisdom provides the reader with a solid understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of blended families, offering useful guidelines, anecdotes, and expectations to help your family be a success. Eleanor Alden's work encourages stepfamilies to recognize their worth and to function at their best. Combining history, archetypal psychology, and modern family systems theory in a practical and often humorous way, StepWisdom brings hope.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781604944440
  • Publisher: Wheatmark
  • Publication date: 1/1/2010
  • Pages: 246
  • Product dimensions: 9.00 (w) x 6.00 (h) x 0.56 (d)

Meet the Author

Eleanor Spackman Alden, LCSW, BCD, has been working with stepfamilies for over forty years. She has taught Jungian psychology and family therapy at Naropa University's graduate school, and has been in private practice since 1985. She lectures and does workshops on stepfamilies, and presently lives with her husband and two doodles in Colorado.

www.StepWisdom.com

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4.5
( 8 )

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Sort by: Showing all of 8 Customer Reviews

  • Posted July 31, 2010

    Perfect "Steps" To Creative Relationships After Divorce

    I am a "step" individual in every category, step daughter, step mother, step grandmother, step sister, step aunt etal. I was excited to read "StepWisdom" to see what I could learn to improve those relationships. My expectations were exceeded and I can't wait to share this book with others.

    Eleanor Spackman Alden has provided an easy to understand handbook for all types of relationships. She takes case studies of dysfunctional marriages and destructive divorces to illustrate certain rapport issues. Eleanor uses examples from the Bible, Greek mythology and Dr. Jung, a Swiss Psychiatrist to graphically depict specific behavior tenancies. She uses humor to lighten the load of uncomfortable situations and demonstrates how to correct the situation.

    This book is a must read for any person wanting to nurture and progress to create loving and supportive family relationships in all circumstances. Reading this book can help avoid unpleasant interaction mistakes.

    Carra Riley Author Cosmic Cow Pie...Connecting The Dots

    5 out of 6 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted July 29, 2010

    very readable and compelling

    The understanding you seek for what makes a healthy family and a healthy stepfamily has been available to you for thousands upon thousands of years. In a very readable and compelling way, Eleanor Alden has pieced together archetypal images, fairy tales, biblical stories, historical figures and her own case studies to help us gain understanding from the wisdom of the ages. As she states "whether the stepchild is a historic, mythic, or biblical figure, the courage to face the new and different and to believe that change can be good is a common theme in the stories." And, it is a common theme in this encouraging work. Eleanor's masterful work addresses the negative perceptions about stepfamilies that
    our society has fostered for far too long and allows us to see that these families have tremendous potential to support the development of strong, healthy and courageous individuals. We are invited to step back and accept the tremendous gifts that can come from brokenness. When we stand in judgment of brokenness, which our culture tends to do, we will miss the gift, and Eleanor gives us multiple examples to help us rework our thinking and to reshape our belief system.

    She captures beautifully a central message of her book: "stepfamilies are not easy or simple family systems, but much in life that is the most rewarding is neither simple nor easy."

    Thomas Long, M. Div

    Pastoral Counselor, Minister, stepfather

    4 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted September 12, 2010

    Much needed perspective

    While this book in no way minmizes the difficulties of forming a successful step family it gives solid well thought out concepts about the positive value of such. This is real family values in a whole new light. Practical ideas to implement, and no whining.

    3 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted July 28, 2010

    A must read for Stepfamilies

    In StepWisdom Eleanor Alden makes a valuable contribution to the study of families by broadening our awareness that stepfamilies have been a part of our family systems since the beginning of family formation. By highlighting the wisdom that stepfamilies contain she brings to them the status they deserve. Her Jungian perspective brings new light to the uniqueness and commonness of stepfamilies highlighting both their positive and challenging aspects. She skillfully weaves the lessons from our rich history of fairytales and myths giving them modern interpretations that express both the conscious and unconscious beliefs in our families. This is a must read as we are all members of stepfamilies.

    Mel Grusing, MSW, LSCW
    Past President of StepFamily Association of Colorado

    3 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted July 28, 2010

    Finally... Wisdom for Step Families

    Stepfamilies and family therapists will find a deep reservoir of wisdom here. Even amidst the often-devastating fallout of divorce, there is the real possibility to create a successful and vibrant new family. Straightforward and inspiring, Eleanor Alden brightly illuminates the journey to a different kind of wholeness.

    Dr Kenneth Plattner
    Tucson, Arizona
    Author, Pastoral Psychotherapist and stepfather

    3 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted November 8, 2010

    more from this reviewer

    Wonderful addition to the literature

    I'm so happy to see such a book regarding step-families and their values. It reads very smoothly and was a pleasure, as well. Having come from two step-families and being a step-sister and step-aunt on top of that, I found this book very refreshing in light of so many negative opinions towards step-families.

    Lets encourage growth, healing, and the building of something greater through blended families. If divorce occurs, this is the book to read when you are ready to expand your family again.

    I highly recommend this book.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted September 12, 2010

    Paradigm shift.

    For more than 30 years of clinical practice I've been reading books designed to educate and enlighten. StepWisdom is most definitely one of the best.

    What I love about Ms. Alden's book is its unapologetic optimism about the opportunities for personal growth in stepfamilies, and, at the same time, its unflinching directness about the complexities and hazards associated with bringing parts of two families together. (For example, she dares address the almost taboo subject of parental favoritism toward children.) Ms. Alden is clear; the challenges that hold potential for trouble also carry opportunities for growth. She repeatedly makes a compelling case for shifting the lens to illuminate the positive side of a dilemma that previously might have been seen as only threatening. Indeed, Ms. Alden successfully argues that our culture makes a significant error when it assumes "broken homes" lead to broken people, rather than to individuals who have been enriched and expanded by the diversity and challenges of their families.

    Anyone who reads this book, practitioner and client alike, will be rewarded with a far more usable and positive paradigm within which to work through the complexities of stepfamily life.

    1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted September 6, 2010

    Good book

    Eleanor wrote a good book, with many insights about attempting to make better a "horrible" situation for the kids thrust into a relationship not of their making. Unfortunately, in her "making the best of it" way, Eleanor too easily takes the responsible parents off the hook for the messes their kids are often stuck with. She also neglects to make clear, that up until the last hundred years the act of adultery was grounds for capital punishment in many societies, so when a family broke up due to adultery, the guilty parents were executed or banished by society, enabling the kids to feel vindicated when their adulterous parents suffered a "just" consequence for the sin that destroyed their parent's marriage. Now all the kids can do is "object" in desperation when they are "forced" to accept the new "lover" of the parent who abandoned or mistreated their spouse who they made a "life-long" commitment to in marriage. And what often happens, is the kids views are either ignored by the selfish determined parent to "make a new family", or on pain of "banishment", "disowning" or "shunned" by the "supportive" relatives or friends of the adulterous parent who feel the parent is "entitled" to have a "new" life, unencumbered by the vows of their "youth", that "were not really meant seriously anyway". It takes an offspring of an adulterous marriage and the victim of one parent abandoning the other (after the second marriage), after both tortured one another for the fact they committed adultery by hooking up in the first place, with no regard at all for how it would ultimately affect their own kids from the previous marriage to understand these dynamics. In my counseling of students who are burdened by the selfish childish acts of adulterous parents, it is clear to me, that the "acting out" of these students in high school and college, in promiscuity (ie., over a hundred hookups), in drug or alcohol abuse(stoned regularly, so their teens or 20s are "forgotten" due to brain damage), early hookups (or marriages)that result in the death of children (abortions by adult children (or their lovers), or death of a child of a previous marriage), which are the grandchildren (or a child) of the adulterous parents, is directly connected to the adultery of the parents which made the mess for the kids in the first place. Eleanor uses the Bible now and then to illustrate, therefore I will do the same, people often forget the offspring of David's adultery with Bathsheba (and the execution of her faithful husband who would not act so David could cover up his sin) died after birth and led to the rape of one of his daughter by one of his sons, and the later death of his more of his sons in his own lifetime. Who says Adultery has no lasting consequences?? There is a reason "Do not commit adultery" is one of the Ten Commandments, it is wrong and it has lasting consequences, particularly for the children (and grandchildren) that are attached somehow to the participants. Eugene Farley Douglass, MS, MDiv, PhD Family Counselor

    0 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

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