Make sure you find a therapist who has experience working with blended/not-so-blended families. It makes a HUGE difference! Good luck!

With your first (few) session(s), your therapist will be listening to you closely. Make sure you too listen closely to what the therapist is saying. That is to see if you are a "good fit" with the therapist.

You may be lucky that your therapist's area of expertise matches what you are seeking advice/guidance/understanding on and you feel comfortable with him/her. You may, upon talking to the therapist, find you are a mismatch - you dont feel comfortable with the person or they arent familar with (in this instance) the step family dynamic / marriage counselling or even both. If this is the case, walk away, find someone else. Dont waste your time trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

I am currently going through court ordered marriage counselling. The first therapist was, in polite terms, a moron! I knew this around 10 minutes into my first session. We have a different therapist now and it is going great. Not in terms of MARRIAGE counselling, but with coming to terms with understanding, accepting and need to move on WITHOUT each other.

Your therapist should help you understand your own situation and help with tools and strategies to cope (and flourish) in dealing with your situation. There should also be a limit on the amount of sessions required. I am not in the US, but from (too much TV) it seems that people are forever in therapy. May not be reality, but therapy should very much be a "learning to fly or ride a bike process". You get hand holding, help and guidance in the initial stages, but afterwards the training wheels need to come off and you need to spread your own wings. With time, you need to have mastered the skill to do it on your own.

More of a past.

Yes therapy did help my marriage initially but it still failed. Me and my ex went to therapy and things got alot better for a while. When we started to struggle again I requested we go back but he refused.

I had been dealing with my hours being cut at work and my parents divorce. He was dealing with a reality where he wasn't the golden boy and didn't become an overnight hit writer. Both of us were in individual therapy and he stopped going. He would then lean heavily on me expecting me to make him feel better and I could not.

It got to a point I told him that either we went together and he went back to his individual or we wouldn't make it. We had a pattern of fighting. Not a week after that conversation he asked if we were better now. He had made no effort to change ANYTHING and I blew up on him and that was pretty much the end.

Therapy was amazing and I truly think it could have helped us work it out but he didn't want to and that's the reason for my story.

It will only work if you both go in wanting it to and willing to work. You can't go in trying to win because that's not what it is about. You have to accept that you are part of the problem and you too need to work on things.

I still wish he had gone back and a few years ago we ran into each other. He agreed he should have tried but he was blinded by other things. There's ALOT more to our story but it didn't have to end the way it did.

Yes it helped me, to find myself and stop being a doormat.... I went alone, no couples thing.

Only you can make yourself happy, you will never be able to change your DH, you will have to change and deal with situations, and that's why you can find therapy helpful.

Couples therapy never helped but going alone did.

I’m not sure all therapists can see or understand step dynamics. The advice they give you as a stepmother seems to be contradictory to the advice they give you as a person.

Stepmom is expected to bend, to give, to see the other side, to take the high road.
When you are working on yourself, it’s ok to say no, it’s expected that you put yourself first, you are given permission to set up barriers and enforce them.

So I’d say go, see if it does indeed help but if it’s not working, go find a therapist and work on yourself.

I agree with notsobad. Go to see a therapist for your own needs. You can never be happy if you are always worried about your partner. True happiness comes when you are living the life you want. Your needs matter. When you can be happy and love yourself that is when you can offer love and understanding to someone else.

It really can,if DH is willing and has an open mind. In my case, DH wanted to stand up to OSD but was "afraid she will hate" him forever. Once he was told by someone (who wasn't me) that he had every right to set boundaries, he actually guilted her into a session! He said what he had to say, a lot of it was in my defense, then hearing her declare she was "spokesman" for her younger siblings (which he knew was a total lie)He saw more of her manipulation and became more determined not to allow it. And he learned he was no longer responsible for any of his kids and that the rest of the skids said they had bigger fish to fry than trying to run our lives!
Dh is probably more the exception than the rule, and I know I got lucky, but it is possible when DH really wants to make the relationship better. best of Luck!

Yes, it helped us. Things aren't great (I'm disengaged), but they're manageable now.

One mere thing I got was a chance for a third party to tell my husband he was handling things with SD the wrong way. He needed to hear it from someone other than me. That gave me some confidence that I'm not out of line with feeling the way I felt about SD. This was priceless for me.

We learned ways to manage specific issues in the marriage: it's OK for husband to let calls from SD go to voice mail if we're in the middle of dinner or our honeymoon. SD shouldn't be calling before 8 a.m. or call to talk about problems with her mom. SD should not be with us every time we visit extended family. SD should not snuggle on the sofa with husband while I'm sitting alone across the room. SD comes third in our marriage, but first in her marriage to her husband. It was almost as if my husband needed to hear it's OK to let SD be a grown up.

What therapy didn't do was get my husband past his guilt for SD. It didn't make him deal more easily with confrontation and it didn't make him defend me or intervene when SD is aggressive toward me.

Despite what therapy didn't do for us, I still think it was worth it just to get past the same old arguments about the same situations over and over. Use your time in therapy to give specific examples of those constant argument triggers. Then you can find ways to handle them that you both agree to.