Marriage Counseling and Coaching
August 1, 2009
After going through unproductive and harmful marriage counseling of my own many years ago, in the beginning of my practice, I developed a kind of marriage counseling and coaching that has proven to produce 99% positive results. The one couple in which it failed was not meant to be together, in my view, because it was a chronically abusive relationship.
The way I work is to talk confidentially with each partner (spouse/parent/child) individually as many times as is necessary to get from that person what is really going on in the relationship and what issues he or she are putting on the other person. Then, in a controlled, safe environment (no abuse, no yelling, no walking out of the room or hanging up the phone) I lead the participants in a two plus hour session to share things with each other. I introduce structured ideas that I asked them to share, and then I have each share something that is really bothering them in the relationship while looking directly at one another. Each person may only reply “Thank you. I hear you”.
The process proceeds from there to some kind of resolution and goals for that particular session. Then we repeat the process of individual sessions until another joint meeting is indicated. This process may be repeated two or three times or many times depending on the severity of the problems and the willingness of each person to be fully clear about his or her needs, wants, and concerns.
I love doing this work, because I love to see people work out their difficulties so they can be happy together again and are able to feel the closeness of clearly resolved issues. At the end of this process, their codependency becomes interdependency.
