Should You Put Your Step Kids In Therapy?

Every week for the past two years, we have taken our oldest son to play therapy.

For those who don’t know, play therapy is a form of therapy where our son plays in order to verbalize or demonstrate how he is feeling.

Today, while he was talking to his therapist, I could hear him getting very worked up. His arms were flying up in the air and he clearly felt very emotional about something.

I scooched my chair closer to try and hear what he was saying.

I don’t want to invade his privacy by saying what he was sharing but all I can say is these kids struggle.

Going through a divorce as an adult freaking sucks. Going through it as a kid? I can’t even imagine.

I am sure even an amicable divorce is hard on kids, but even worse the boys’ mother and Alex did not have a nice separation.

The boys had a front row seat to their family falling apart.

Still to this day there isn’t a civil conversation held between the two, and the kids are old enough to see that. They are told so many things about Alex that for so long they believed, and it took years for them to finally form opinions of their own.

The boys can’t just forget all they have seen and heard. They don’t know how to handle the inconsistencies in their life. They go from a place with tons of rules, to a place with no rules. It takes them days to get back into their schedule when they leave our house for any amount of time.

All these things they had to go through are exactly why we started our oldest in therapy. He was lashing out, misbehaving, and had so many negative feelings he didn’t know how to handle.

It was the best decision we could have possibly made.

There are things our oldest shares with his therapist that I would never even know he was feeling.

It blows my mind that his therapist is able to get him to open up so much and able to tell so much about how he is feeling just from the way he is playing with different toys.

I can’t help but think about what he would be like if we never started him in therapy. All these feelings would be building up and he would have no outlet to dump them into.

A year ago we couldn’t get him to talk about anything. He never knew how he felt. If you asked him what was wrong it was “I don’t know.”

Now he never stops talking about his feelings.

I have seen such a change in him. He has gone from a kid who couldn’t express anything to a kid who sometimes overshares, hahah.

Basically what I am saying is we are HUGE advocates of therapy.

I feel that any kids, especially young ones, who have had to go through a divorce should be able to talk to someone outside of their family about it.

In our family, it was easy to see our son was struggling by the way his behavior was escalating.

That’s not always the case.

Kids are good at hiding things. They might surprise you with the amount of thoughts going through that little head of theirs.

Just take them.

We could all use a little therapy at some point in our lives.