Book Description

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. 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 "This rich and careful work on the holy and unholy aspects of stepfamilies, written by therapist and professor Eleanor Alden, not only draws on observations and understandings from her private practice and education, but also from growing up in a stepfamily herself. This evocative work offers understandings about patterns of both sweet and sour drives and impulses within stepfamilies as found in reality and mythos. This work can help others sow the seeds for a beautiful flowering within those special families called 'step'--as in 'step' to a more fulfilling consciousness." -- Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Diplomate Jungian Psychoanalyst, Author of Women Who Run with the Wolves "Insightful, historically illuminating in a very interesting way, and a must-read for every psychiatrist and mental health professional who works with stepfamilies. And now we know that we all do!" -- Laura J. Klein, MD, Assistant Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center "StepWisdom: Knowledge from the Ages for Successful StepFamilies is truly wonderful. There is nothing out there like it. Eleanor Alden speaks to the reader with clarity and moments of humor. She makes the case so well that stepfamilies are the norm and that there is no reason that they can't be gifts. Everyone should be required to read this before they enter a marriage with children. The work is truly captivating." -- Claudia Black, MSW, PhD, Author and Addictions Specialist