In her late 20s, Christie Tate struggled with crushing loneliness, bulimia, and suicidal thoughts. Then, she had a conversation that changed her life. Try group, a friend told her — as in group psychotherapy. 

Like most people, Tate had thought of therapy as a two-person endeavor: a therapist smoking a pipe and a patient on the couch. She’d been there, done that, with little to show for it.

Group therapy was different. It harnessed the power of numbers. Each week, Tate, five or six other clients, and a therapist gathered together. Then, in no particular order, members talked about their lives, and analyzed their interactions with each other. 

In those days, Tate’s problems were exquisitely painful, but also mysterious. She felt she couldn’t connect with people, but didn’t know why. But, the others could observe Tate’s interactions from the outside, in real time. Within a few months, fellow group members were showing Tate “all the ways I kept myself alone,” she said. “It’s all the ways I opt out or sit back or withdraw because I’m scared, or ashamed, or in pain, or can’t speak to my needs.” 

Group cajoled and comforted Tate as she stopped dating unavailable men, changed her relationship to food, and eventually got married. For Tate, author of the memoir Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life, group therapy was transformative. More than 20 years later, she’s still attending. Yet, most people don’t know even group therapy is an option. 

Even as psychotherapy has become something of a cultural fixation — with relentless discourse about emotionally immature parents, the rise of chatbot counselors, and TikTok therapists earning billions of views — almost all of the content is focused on individual approaches. Here, the internet reflects the real world. In 2023, the American Psychological Association estimated that less than 5 percent of American private therapy practice is dedicated to group work.

But research suggests group methods can be just as effective as individual therapy for many conditions, ranging from depression and anxiety to eating disorders and chronic pain.

In some cases, group may even have advantages. For those struggling with shame, isolation, or loneliness, group can be uniquely effective, said Bonnie Buchele, a psychoanalyst and group therapist in Kansas City, Missouri. (It’s more affordable too; group rates can be half or two-thirds that of individual therapy.) In the midst of a simultaneous mental health care shortage and loneliness epidemic — not to mention an era of incredible political division —  “group,” Buchele said, “has more to offer than ever.” 

Why most people don’t do group therapy

In the summer of 1905, American psychiatrist Joseph Pratt organized groups of tuberculosis patients with the goal of tracking their condition. Pratt found that the encouragement between members was just as, if not more, important to their recovery than any facts about their disease. He leaned in, encouraging more exchange between patients, in the process hosting the first group therapy sessions. 

Group methods continued to gain prominence after World War II, thanks in part to English psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, who worked with traumatized veterans. Bion was interested in flattening the hierarchy that gave psychiatrists power over patients and allowed his groups to form — and reform — their own structures. Bion’s later papers, which added theory to what he observed among patients, influenced group therapists around the world.

In the 1960s, however, the encounter group movement took center stage. Overnight, it seemed like everyone from churchgoers to New Age enthusiasts was in group, said psychologist and researcher Gary Burlingame. “The closest thing I can think of in today’s world is with social media,” he said. 

Unfortunately, some encounter groups encouraged emotional disclosure without limits, or were at the mercy of leaders with authoritarian streaks. Soon, there were reports of group members experiencing breakdowns, hastily ending their marriages, and even deaths by suicide.

Therapy groups — gentler ones, with principled leaders, and practices rooted in empirical evidence — continued to meet, especially in institutional settings like hospitals and day treatment programs for various disorders. But, group therapy has never again been as zeitgeist-y as it was in the ’70s. Today, the East Coast hosts a “rigorous, healthy, big group psychotherapy community,” Buchele said. But, many other parts of the country do not. 

Even if you’ve heard about group (and have access to a reputable one), there are still a million reasons not to join. Meeting times are inflexible to accommodate the greatest number of people. Group participants have to share time with others. Some weeks, some members may not speak at all. 

And group can be terrifying. Members must sacrifice some of their privacy and open themselves up to uncomfortable feelings like shame. Therapists strive to be warm and compassionate, but your peers can (and sometimes will) dislike you. The opinion of a single therapist can be dismissed quite easily, but when every member of a therapy group agrees that your behavior is unacceptable, it’s hard to say they’re all wrong.

“Not everybody wants that intensity,” Tate said. “It’s a power washing, and you may just want a gentle rinse.” (Admittedly, Tate’s group is an outlier: Her therapist does not require confidentiality among members; members are allowed to fraternize outside of the group; and members can, in theory, stay for a lifetime, instead of a more typical path toward graduation.) 

But, all these inconveniences are part of what gives group therapy its advantages.

How group therapy works

Wherever three or more people are gathered, you’ve got a group. But, what turns a sports team or a cappella club into therapy?

For one, a therapy group isn’t just a bunch of randoms. The therapist in charge identifies members who might relate to, or generate productive conflict for, each other. They keep in mind potential challenges, like a client who won’t speak or a client who won’t stop speaking, and try not to put too many of these folks in one room. They screen out clients who might be better suited to individual therapy, including clients who are likely to undermine the group. And they’re sensitive to diversity — in particular, of not creating a “singleton,” a person with a significant identity no one else in the group shares. 

The first few group meetings are some of the most important. A long-running group is, like the ship of Theseus, almost entirely reconstituted over time, as individual group members move on. But, early dynamics are likely to stick, according to psychiatrist Irivin Yalom, co-author of the 832-page textbook The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy. Facilitators must model norms of openness and respect from the jump, as well as how to work in what Yalom calls the “here and now.”

Yalom argues that group is a social microcosm — meaning that every member eventually behaves in a group the way they behave in life. That’s why, instead of talking about past conflicts with people who aren’t present (the “there and then”), members are encouraged to talk about what’s happening between members in session (the “here and now”). 

For author David Payne, individual therapy had been focused on pain from his past. By contrast, “group therapy forced me to see who I was now, the sometimes injurious adult I had become,” as he wrote in a 2015 essay for the New York Times. “For me, that was the bitter pill that led to change.”

At the time, Payne was an alcoholic in an unhappy marriage. “Within a month I’d run afoul of everyone,” Payne recalled in his essay. “Hardly a session passed without someone telling me I’d ‘erased’ them or someone else around the circle.” Payne would be telling a story, a group member would offer an interpretation, and he’d go on telling his story, only to repeat the group member’s interpretation as if it were his own idea. “Only when the group prevailed on me to tape record and listen to the sessions did I realize they were right,” Payne wrote, adding: “Eventually, I came to see that it was fear. Fear of needing them, of needing anyone.” 

The social microcosm can also be inverted; the way you behave in group therapy can become the way you behave in life. “Group is a lab,” said psychologist Jackie Darby. “I can set the experiment with my [individual] client, but in group, you’re going to practice it, and then we’re going to analyze it.” 

That’s why such gatherings are also called “process” groups. Content — the mere words exchanged — is second to the process by which interactions in the room unfold. That’s true even, and perhaps especially, when members are in conflict. While the grist can be large (anger with someone’s callous response to another member’s hardship) or small (frustration with a chronically late member), the group mills it all. 

A well-handled conflict benefits everyone. An antagonist discovers their negative impact on others, while their fellow members practice sticking up for themselves. Even an observer to the conflict may undergo what Yalom calls “vicarious learning,” in which they discover how they want to handle (or not handle) the next squabble in their own lives. 

A cohesive group will also be full of validation and generosity. “A lot of people anticipate groups not to be welcoming to them,” said psychiatrist Molyn Leszcz, who co-authored with Yalom the most recent editions of The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy. Finding acceptance can be healing in its own right. Finding acceptance in the midst of conflict is even more powerful.

“I can be mad at you and still love you, you know,” one group member told Tate after a particularly charged session. “No, actually, I didn’t know that,” Tate recalls thinking. But, eventually, she learned. 

Group in the age of loneliness

In 2023, former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy identified isolation (physical separation from others) and loneliness (a feeling possible even in a room full of other people) as some of the biggest threats to the health of Americans today. Roughly one in three adults report experiencing loneliness on a weekly basis. 

The problems posed by loneliness are legion, perhaps none more so than that it can be self-perpetuating. As I’ve written about before, research suggests that lonely brains are more likely to perceive threats in social interactions. When the lonely brain most needs other people, it’s also likely to turn away.

By this logic, group therapy is probably the last thing a lonely person wants to do. But, the path forward is not more individualism; it’s fellowship. Sharing time in group therapy may be annoying, but it’s also great practice for a life lived with others. The same is true for showing up when you’d rather be anywhere else, learning to give and receive feedback, and tolerating people who drive you nuts. 

In the best-case scenario, Tate said, a group can become greater than the sum of its parts. Members may be confused or frantic or upset, she said, but “the group knows.” Such wisdom is found not within the therapist or any other individual, but in the connections in between. 

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.

It’s hard to remember now, but 2020 — a year, a meme, an interminable parade of grief — opened with a sense of cautious optimism. US unemployment was at a record low and consumer confidence was high. Hollywood had just invested almost $2 billion in a “revolutionary” new streaming platform called Quibi; Future and Drake’s new single “Life is Good” was charting; and Tokyo was ready to host the summer Olympics. Even for those still feeling wary of the future, an impending US presidential election presented an opportunity for political change. 

But the coronavirus pandemic has quickly turned the world inside out, intersecting with a laundry list of other anxiety-inducing developments, including accelerating climate change and a record-scorching California wildfire season; police brutality exemplified by the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others; and growing fears of voter suppression or intimidation in the run-up to an election that, many argue, will shape American democracy itself. 

This spring, unemployment reached a record high, and for many, government relief quickly ran out. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in September concluded “an era of faith in the courts,” according to the Atlantic. To top it all off, we still don’t have any clue when — or if — the pandemic will end. Even if there is a vaccine, a growing number of Americans, wary of the rapid pace of development, say they will refuse to be innoculated. 

As people try to endure their unwilling ride on this grim existential rollercoaster, optimism — the belief that somehow, everything will turn out okay — is on the wane.

Between June and August, the percentage of Americans feeling optimistic about the rest of 2020 dropped precipitously, from 54 percent to 46 percent, according to a survey from market research firm YouGov. In its wake, we’ve seen the rise of nihilistic, cynical, and pessimistic perspectives that increasingly seem like the most rational (and, perhaps, most psychologically protective) response to a world in crisis.

The consequences of all this uncertainty are clear: mental health issues, substance use, and reported thoughts of suicide have recently soared, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For Gen Z, a demographic that hasn’t known a world without peril, nihilism is already de rigueur. It takes many forms, from teen climate activist Greta Thunberg’s defense of pessimism to K-pop star Kim Han-bin’s tattoo of the word “nihilism” across his left pec. But in this moment, a sense of meaninglessness knows no generational bounds.

The cheery insistence that the environment was “healing” as the world entered lockdown was served with a side of darkness — the conviction that, ecologically, humans “are the virus.” This summer, actress Reese Witherspoon memed her most famous characters into a calendar of anguish: By June, Elle Woods’s toothy grin gives way to the disorientation of Wild and stays there — time as frozen as a screengrab. And Twitter users became part of an ongoing effort to ridicule the phrase “I hope this email finds you well” into oblivion. 

When all signs point to catastrophe, believing in a better tomorrow can seem delusional, especially when unfounded optimism might be fueling anti-mask scofflaws convinced the coronavirus will magically disappear, or isn’t that bad to begin with. And when trauma is this widespread — and the resulting pain is largely unacknowledged by the government — it’s a common symptom to feel that the future is foreshortened. 

“There is a survival aspect to this,” says Mary Alvord, a psychologist specializing in resilience. “We’re thinking about, how are we going to get to the next day?”

As we turn to our collective crystal ball for comfort, we find it clouded by killer microbes, wildfire smoke, and malaise. Though many people still get out of bed and, in inspired fits, even volunteer to work the polls or test a Covid-19 trial vaccine, every act is freighted with the question of whether individual action still matters.

Nowhere is this heavy sense of foreboding more prominent than in politics. Many Americans perceived the 2016 election polls as an epic failure after they almost universally indicated a Clinton win. This time around, there’s little trust in the data, even among some industry wonks. “National polls are absolutely, utterly useless and worthless,” Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis told Vanity Fair. The notion that Biden is in the lead, he added, “puts out a false narrative that gives people either a false sense of security or a false sense of dread.”

The Republican Party and the Trump administration have capitalized on the dread many Americans already feel with efforts aimed at voter suppression and, increasingly, voter depression — a phrase that works on several levels, but technically means tactics intended to convince likely voters there’s no point in even casting a ballot.

From the controversy around the United States Postal Service to the threat of impending militia violence, many people are experiencing a sense of “electoral fatalism,” Sekou Franklin, a political scientist at Middle Tennessee State University, told Vox. “I want my vote to count so badly, but I’m really not sure it’s going to. And it’s actually frightening me,” Anna Headley, a voter in Pennsylvania, told the Washington Post. At that point, her ballot had been sitting unopened for two weeks. “I keep looking at it as if it’s a bomb.” 

This year “has revealed a whole raft of failures — of politics, of institutions, of ideals — that did not emerge with the pandemic, but have been brought into starker relief by it,” Ansgar Allen, author of a short history of cynicism, told Vox via email. “It has provided plenty of reason to be cynical, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

“Cynicism can perform a conservative function, as an excuse for inaction, as a reason not to bother to improve things,” Allen adds. “But it can also perform a disruptive function, tearing down the veil on false promises and conceits.” It all depends on what we do next.

Cultures have experienced the end of the world — or something like it — before: The fall of the Roman Empire, the Black Death, the rapid depopulation of the New World by European disease and violence, and two world wars are just a few of the historical calamities that have pushed societies to the brink.

For most of human history, apocalypse was a local phenomenon — a threat to a specific place or population. But advances in science have scaled our existential anxieties to the species level, writes Thomas Moynihan in his new book, X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction.

In the 1720s, for example, people began to think of Homo sapiens in a “global aggregate.” By the 1770s, just as interstellar risks like asteroids came into focus, scientists began to understand that humans are critically dependent on earthly environments. In the 1840s, fearing overpopulation and the depletion of natural resources, writers began to contemplate “omnicide” — the extinction of our species spurred by our own actions. More recent technological developments have created their own perils, from nuclear war to runaway climate change. Now, each apocalypse threatens to wipe all of us out at once.

At the same time, every contemporary crisis is perceived as a harbinger of what is to come: The coronavirus is emblematic of all future potential pandemics, and wildfire season is representative of every coming flame. So far, our responses haven’t measured up. We’ve met a global mental health crisis with sourdough and self-care tips, and epic burns with local firefighting but no systemic challenge to the carbon economy. This leaves many people stuck in what the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, an art project, calls “shadowtime”: an “acute consciousness of the possibility that the near future will be drastically different than the present.”

One appealing response is to stick our heads in the sand, says Alvord, the psychologist and co-author of several books, including Conquer Negative Thinking for Teens. “Avoidance is very powerful,” she says. “If we [face an issue] head-on and we commit to doing something, we take a risk.” In this sense, refusing to acknowledge a problem can feel protective, even if it’s really making the issue worse.

When avoidance isn’t possible, catastrophizing — imagining the worst of all possible futures — can feel pretty good. “There’s almost a comfort in thinking about the worst-case scenario and it not happening,” Alvord says. If you run through enough hypotheticals, and adopt a pessimistic worldview, it starts to feel like nothing can catch you by surprise again.

Kaitlyn Creasy, a philosopher at California State University, San Bernardino, studies Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher who identified nihilism in his own time — the perspective that life is meaningless. When things still don’t work out the way we want them to, we may tell ourselves they never really mattered, she says. This can manifest as things like burnout — a state of profound mental and physical exhaustion, usually triggered by prolonged stress.

Even when people actively engage with the world, they are often looking for simple solutions, says Nolen Gertz, a philosopher at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Whether it’s Joe Biden, or Anthony Fauci, or even Claudia Conway, Gertz argues that many Americans are seeking a Messiah — the “adults in the room” who can fix everything and absolve us of our individual responsibility. But a complacent approach is what created a sense of crisis in the first place. 

Many of the issues we face today predated the pandemic. But some Americans have ignored the voices of marginalized groups, who have been sounding the alarm on voter suppression and police brutality for decades, and the voices of scientists and other experts, who warned that a pandemic was inevitable. These issues have our attention now, but “it’s important for people to know, post-2020, we still have a struggle on our hands,” says Franklin, the political scientist. 

In this sense, waning optimism may not be such a bad thing, especially if it’s replaced by determination.

In times of crisis, cultures have often turned to religion and spirituality. Jacqueline Mattis, a psychologist at Rutgers, researches the role of religion in the lives of African Americans. In Black liberation theology, she says, faith is grounded in “real issues like freedom and what it means to care and forgive in the real world.” Adherents acknowledge oppression, while actively working against it, maintaining not just optimism, but hope, which Mattis defines as “optimism with a plan.”  

Hope exists outside of faith traditions, too, says David Newheiser, a research fellow in religion and theology at Australian Catholic University and the author of Hope in a Secular Age. It is a core component of many Americans’ conceptions of democracy as an ideal toward which we must continually strive.

But the easy, effervescent feeling of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign — with its “Yes we can” slogan and Shepard Fairey “Hope” posters — “isn’t robust enough to do what we need to do” now, Newheiser says. Trying to revive it won’t work. Instead, he says, we must invest in hope as a “deep, dark, critical” practice that propels us forward in moments of pessimism.

Newheiser believes the capacity for hope is in each of us, but says that it is within communities of mutual support and shared goals that hope — that optimism with a plan — is sustained. Many people know this intuitively, as evidenced by the recent swell in participation in mutual aid networks and other ecosystems of care that have blossomed in the pandemic. Now we have an opportunity to maintain these practices, even if — or when — our sense of optimism returns. 

Gertz, the philosopher, knows 2020 is a year few will remember fondly, but he believes we can carry its lessons into the future. “It’s important to not get used to the world coming to an end,” he says. Perhaps, he says, we need to “get used to the idea that there are things we can all do all the time to save each other’s lives.”

Eleanor Cummins reports on the intersection of science and popular culture. She’s a former assistant editor at Popular Science and writes a newsletter about death. She previously wrote about the “death-positive generation” and the new political family for The Highlight.

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At the Democratic National Convention in August, Sen. Kamala Harris’s family members introduced her to voters in a short biographical video. Between vintage photo montages and campaign footage, Harris’s stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff, described the California senator as “a rock — not just for our dad but for three generations of our big, blended family.” Jill Biden, also a stepmother, got a similar treatment: “She put us back together,” presidential candidate Joe Biden said of his second wife, who married the widowed Biden and took on raising his two sons from a previous marriage. “She gave me back my life. She gave us back a family.” 

This warm depiction of Harris’s and Biden’s respective roles in blended — and in the case of Harris, multiracial — families marks a radical shift in the presentation of kin in American politics, which has typically prized nuclear dynasties, like the Kennedys and the Bushes, over clans that actually represent many voters’ lived realities. Every day, Americans form 1,300 new blended families, bringing kids from previous relationships together into a new unit.

Despite the prevalence of divorce and remarriage, “we still don’t talk about it enough,” says Ron Deal, the author and therapist behind Smart Stepfamilies. Roughly 13 percent of adults are stepparents, according to the Pew Research Center, and one in six children live in a stepfamily, yet many feel as though they are navigating the emotional challenges, organizational dilemmas, and societal stigma alone. 

Like first lady Melania Trump, both Harris and Biden are stepmothers — and they’ve turned their familial roles into reliable talking points during the campaign. Harris’s husband, entertainment lawyer Doug Emhoff, had two children from a previous marriage; Cole and Ella, now both in their 20s, call Harris “Momala.” Jill Biden’s stepsons Hunter Biden, 50, and Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015 at age 46, lost their biological mother and sister in a 1972 car crash. When Jill Biden married their father in 1977, the boys decided to call her “mom.” (Jill and Joe Biden had a daughter, Ashley, in 1981.) 

Although Harris joked in a 2019 Elle essay that her “modern family is almost a little too functional” — among other things, Harris and her husband’s ex-wife have become good friends — stepmothers have consistently gotten a bad rap. Whether they’re haunted by the embittered Lady Tremaine in Cinderella or the gold-digging fiancé Meredith in The Parent Trap, decades of research show many real-life stepmothers internalize the “wicked” role assigned to them by Grimm’s fairy tales and Disney movies. In one 2017 study, 56 percent of stepmothers in New Zealand reported thinking of themselves as wicked for routine things like saying “no.” But instead of plotting revenge with their magic mirrors, these women tend to criticize and silence themselves — a phenomenon psychologist and stepmother Elizabeth Church termed “the poisoned apple,” an inversion of Snow White’s own scheming stepmother, in her own 2000 study on the challenges women face in blended families.

Pop culture, including feel-good television shows like The Brady Bunch, can set unrealistic expectations, whether sinister or oversimplified. “It’s the subject of great movies and terrible news stories,” Deal says, “but that’s not really the normal experience.” 

The blended family narrative is long overdue for an update. While millions of people, including Jill Biden and Kamala Harris, are working to define their step-relationships, the social pressure can be constricting. In a 2017 essay for the New York Times Magazine about her own experience as a stepmother, novelist and essayist Leslie Jamison wrote, “Everyone had ideas about our family without knowing anything about our family.” Stepfamily stereotypes can be especially burdensome for members of multiracial blended families, whose relationships to one another are more often questioned by strangers. 

Embracing the stepfamily as it actually exists — as a messy but often caring unit — could alleviate some of the pressure on the millions of Americans in blended families. The current moment could also help Americans reimagine what familial love really looks like. 

The stepfamily has its roots in the Old English word “steop,” which means loss. Until the 20th century, most stepfamilies were formed in the wake of grief, as widowers often remarried quickly to ensure there was someone to take care of their children. But since the 1960s, when the divorce rate overtook the maternal mortality rate, stepfamilies have increasingly been formed in the wake of acrimony, and the “replacement mother” stereotype persists. 

Throughout the ages, the stepmother archetype has changed alongside popular culture, but never truly outgrown her evil origins, says Leslie Lindenauer, a history professor at Western Connecticut State University and author of I Could Not Call Her Mother, an analysis of stepmothers in America between 1750 and 1960. Occasionally, the stepmother has been a virtuous figure, as at the turn of the 20th century, when Americans held the belief that anyone could learn to love like a mother — they just had to try hard enough. But the stepmother always returns to her most frightening form: a threat to children and society at large. In the American colonies, for example, “the evil stepmother replaced the witch in popular culture as a way of policing the boundaries around women,” Lindenauer says. Both witches and stepmothers were portrayed as women without their own offspring accused of hurting other women’s kids. And both were feared because they rejected the passive role traditionally meant for women by taking action — whether that’s over a bubbling cauldron or in another woman’s home.

Beneath each iteration of the stepmother mythology, according to Deal, is the “motherhood mandate,” a term coined by psychologist Nancy Felipe Russo in 1976 to describe the persistent belief that every adult female’s responsibility is to reproduce and rear children. In this context, stepmothers are tasked with the impossible: They must fulfill the duties of a homemaker and caretaker, without stepping on the biological mother’s toes. “The stepmother isn’t vilified for anything other than that she’s not the biological mother,” Lindenauer says. But these dichotomous demands take their toll on women, with 21st century stepmothers reporting higher stress and anxiety levels than stepfathers.

Naja Hall, the founder of the millennial stepfamily support network Blended and Black, has experienced this bind firsthand. When the New Yorker met her now-husband in 2014, she knew he was the perfect partner for her. But “the one thing that really gave me pause was the fact that he had children from a previous relationship,” she says — twins, now 10, and an older sibling, now 16. While Hall pursued the relationship anyway, she got a taste of the “baby mama drama” she’d feared, including trips to family court. “At the time, I felt victimized by it all,” Hall says. As the new person in the situation, she had to empathize with everyone else’s emotions, while accepting that no one was really concerned about hers. 

Hall searched for online resources to help her cope, but as a Black woman, she didn’t see herself reflected in the existing options. While census data shows Hispanic, Black, and white kids are roughly equally likely to find themselves in a blended family in the United States, Hall noticed representations of happy stepfamilies seemed to focus on white people. She decided to build her own network, Blended and Black, to provide other stepparents with the information, coaching, and community she craved. 

As the company grew and eventually became Hall’s full-time job, it became clear to Hall that stepmothers were facing unique challenges. “I don’t think stepmotherhood is something to be ashamed of, but it is a role a lot of women aren’t proud of,” she says. “I have heard from a lot of stepdads. They don’t envy stepmoms.” 

Saskia Thompson, a 44-year-old paralegal in the San Francisco Bay Area, joined Hall’s dedicated VIP Stepmom network when she got engaged to a man with two daughters, ages 9 and 11. Though the girls embraced her, the experience has been overwhelming. “I don’t want to say I’m making it up as I go, but if I’m honest, I am,” Thompson says. She doesn’t want to be in the traditional role of a “stepmom,” and instead sees herself as one member of the “village” that’s necessary to raise every child. But she’s found that many people are not accepting of her mentality — or her presence in her fiancé’s children’s lives.

“No one even looks at me like a stepmom,” says Thompson, a Black woman engaged to a white man with white children. It’s only added to the “stigma” she feels around her role. When Thompson took her fiancé’s youngest daughter to get a haircut, the stylist mistook her for a nanny. At the girls’ birthday party, one parent assumed she was the driver of the van that would take the kids to the event. The experiences made the long, slow process of blending a family seem even more impossible. At one point, Thompson took a step back from all of her relationships, including those with her fiancé’s children, so she could care for herself for a few months instead. 

Thompson says she can see herself in Biden and Harris. While a stepfamily in the White House won’t stop people speculating about her role in her fiancé’s children’s lives, Thompson says that seeing the differences in how Biden and Harris approach their relationships with their stepchildren has reinforced her commitment to charting her own path — one in which she’s free to be neither witch nor martyr. 

Stepfamilies are an intricate and intimate arrangement, as any member can tell you. But in politics, thrusting these relationships into the spotlight is standard practice, says Jennifer Lawless, a politics professor at the University of Virginia. 

For candidates, family provides a logistical and psychological support system during the campaign. They also offer a humanizing effect — vouching that the candidate is a good and trustworthy person. “Voters want to hear from a family the kinds of things they wouldn’t hear from a surrogate,” Lawless says, including details about their past, their personal relationships, and their capacity for love. 

“I think that’s why Trump’s use of his family has been so odd and jarring to people,” Lawless adds. “His children aren’t saying, ‘He’s a great father.’ They’re saying, ‘He’s such a great businessman.’”

The expectation of family participation in campaigns is now so ingrained that “the absence of a candidate’s supportive family is glaring,” Lawless says. But she says what that family looks like is more flexible than ever. Candidates can use close friends, parents, siblings, and stepchildren to boost their credibility. 

In the lead-up to the election, it’s clear that Harris’s and Biden’s family members have been primped and prepped for their starring role. But they are real families, and their presence on a national stage has the potential to amplify existing conversations about how Americans create and maintain some of the most important relationships in their lives.

In more than two decades working with stepfamilies, Deal, the author and therapist, says he’s never met anyone who grew up wanting to be a stepmother or stepfather, but he’s worked with plenty of people who have found joy in the role. 

“It’s not the primary narrative people want to write for their lives,” he says. “But there can be a second opportunity for love and family that is beautiful.” And, in the right hands, it can be politically advantageous, too. 

Eleanor Cummins reports on the intersection of science and popular culture. She’s a former assistant editor at Popular Science and writes a newsletter about death. She previously wrote about the “death-positive generation” and the people hell-bent on ignoring social distancing for The Highlight.