Unless President Monson is your personal marriage counselor, I suggest you not use him in that capacity; his schedule does not allow for it, and he’s not in your priesthood line of authority anyway. Your bishop – upon request and by way of referral – can refer you to professionals who actually KNOW what they’re doing…otherwise, do not volunteer any more information than ABSOLUTE MINIMUM to your bishop about marital problems unless it affects the temple worthiness of either you or your spouse. It is NOBODY ELSE’S BUSINESS!!

If you go see a Bishop about anything personal like marriage counseling, you also need to remember that this guy has not professional training, but that his term as Bishop is going to be up in the next couple of years. If you and your wife have gone to him with many personal issues, what then? What about seeing this guy at neighborhood pot-lucks for the next 10-15 years, not knowing what he tells his wife about things. Also, you have a bunch of time invested with him and then he gets released, do you just jump to the next Bishop and hope to keep things moving along or do you stay with the same (non-professional) (now ex-bishop) that you’ve been seeing.

My opinion, having been in ward leadership, having counseled couples because of my ward position, and now going through it with someone who actually has the skills to help, is that people should just generally run away from taking any counseling issues to their ward or stake leadership. These people have no skills and “gut feeling” or “mantle of authority” is not sufficient to advise you about matters related to your relationship. I feel terrible about the times in the past where I’ve actually thought that I had the God Given Authority to advise couples 10-20-30 years my senior as to what they should do to make their relationship stronger. Or how to fix major holes in the marriage that went so many layers deep it would take months of professional help just to uncover the issues.

I am glad to hear counseling is working for you. as I have said before, not all counselors are created equal. my $100 counselor actually made divorce seem palatable (which was not his intention.) I fired him. I am curious about eft and these other methods, and I hope are as good as adam suggests.

Thanks for the comment George. Glad your therapy is working out. I think you offer some sound advice. For the quote above, I agree, there are some bishops who try to meet with these couples weekly and help the marriage. Some of it may be due to financial motivation – i.e. if they use less of the fast offering funds, they look better, have a tighter budget, etc. When my father was a bishop he learned rather quickly that he was not qualified to do any kind of therapy with couples, and he used family services religiously (no pun intended). Leave the counseling to the professionals, and bishops should know their role.

I must say that I find this answer to be lame and unprofessional. I think it is exactly this sort of thing which causes so many couples to have issues in their marriage. They work with a Bishop or a Stake President (my bishop is a commercial roofing contractor) who have ZERO professional experience counseling couples in relationship issues. Suddenly they get “then mantle” and they think the are God’s gift to marriage counselors. This is just pure bull crap.

Or, as you suggest, lets bring Brother and Sister OldTimers in and they can share the success of a their marriage and how if they prayed each night, no matter how mad they were, things would work out great. Again, pure bull crap. What works for 1 couple has so little in common with what will work with another couple that the pure idea blows my mind.

This is exactly what professional counselors learn to do. They take their personal experiences out of the equation and give advice that is rooted in human behavior , not person opinion.

I’m currently in marriage couples therapy with a counselor that charges approx $100/hour. It is very well worth it and I NEVER come away from a session thinking it wasn’t worth the money.

My advice: STAY AWAY from untrained church leaders or members who are not professionally trained.
RUN TOWARDS professionals who can truly make a difference in your life.

Stephen – that’s one of my favorite books!

#7 – “many of us will realize that each of came to the marriage altar a little underdone”

Agreed, and some more than others. Some of that personal growth can happen outside of marriage, but sometimes it’s just going to be hard anyway, e.g. for trauma survivors. I have seen those types of situations you described as well, young marriage, multiple kids, graduate school, and a marriage on the rocks. Kids are really hard on marriages, you can’t really explain that one away. 2/3 of wives have a significant drop in marital satisfaction with the birth of the first child. The other 1/3 stays the same or gets better. It’s usually the husband’s fault (I’m not kidding—they usually aren’t on board with having the new baby like the moms more often are, or are forced to be by circumstance).

“had these engaged couples received some training”

I think premarital education should be a requirement, or maybe strongly recommended, for a temple sealing. Actually, engagement is the perfect time for prevention-based educational classes or learning about relationships. Prevention really is the best when it comes to relationships. These classes aren’t as effective once the marriage has started slipping… In a perfect world (according to me) ALL engaged couples would A) consider their own and their potential partner’s history and family context, and assess the impact of any trauma could have and how they will deal with it or even heal, B) would receive as an engaged couple some form of in-depth education on relationships (John Gottman has a GREAT weekend seminar for this, it’s been very effective as prevention, specifically), and C) after they’ve been married for 2 years (or whenever the “limerence” is gone (e.g. honeymoon stage and or intense infatuation etc has calmed down to reality, they get some good therapy for 10-20 sessions. Nevermind the “young age” of marriage or “having kids young” or “being in school” or etc. Those are all huge factors, but I think if every young couple in the church did the 3 things above there would be A LOT less divorce, and MANY happier marriages. And good for your Institute teacher. If education causes couples to split, that’s probably a good thing. If education causes them to marry, that’s good too.

Actually, the other is really two techniques, behavioral marital therapy and integrated behavioral couple therapy. The latter is an attempt to improve on the former, which had about 50% recovery rates and woeful relapse. IBCT is probably a successful treatment as well, and seems to have near 2/3 recovery rate, with less relapse. While I did mention EFT has 7/10 for recovery, you can’t really compare the studies. What matters most is probably that the therapist has a clear map to help a couple, has experience and specific training, and that each partner really buys into the particular process. Here is a site for IBCT: http://ibct.psych.ucla.edu/, and it lists some research as well I think. The creators of this model also have a self-help book called “Reconcilable Differences” (Andrew Christensen & Niel Jacobson). I haven’t read it yet, but have been meaning to. It looks pretty good.

#4 anon – “what’s your thought about couples each seeking individual therapy?”

This can be very helpful, in terms of working on individual issues, just as you mentioned. There are some things to be cautious of here though. Many novice (and/or less effective) therapists may suggest individual therapy when couple therapy isn’t going well, or when there is too much negativity, etc. This is a mistake. They just need a better therapist. Sometimes couple therapists will do some individual sessions for specific purposes (e.g. building the relationship or assessing for abuse or affairs or addictions), but the focus should be on the COUPLE and the RELATIONSHIP rather than on the individuals. You can’t treat the relationship specifically without both people in the room. All that being said, I agree with you anon, therapy in general helps, and is effective, and if you change any part of a system (e.g. the individual) the whole (e.g. the couple) is probably going to change. I just generally prefer to work with an audience.

#5 Paul – “many therapists… don’t treat the marriage as if it has intrinsic value.”
Those are some lame-o “marriage therapists” imho. As I said above, individual therapists will (for good reason) sometimes value their individual client over the relationship (which is why it’s probably not a good idea if one spouse is seeing a counselor, to then later see the same counselor as a couple—too much bias and a strong alliance with only one partner in place, etc.). ALL of the couple therapists that I know work on the RELATIONSHIP more than anything else. The relationship/marriage is treated as the most important factor, and is seen as the “client” rather than each partner. Personally (and I know many who would agree) I would almost never suggest to a couple they should separate, if they indeed wanted to try to work it out. If the relationship was SO bad and we tried in therapy for long enough to no success, I might say “I don’t know how to help you two” but I would probably not say “you should get divorced.” Glad your friend found someone who had their brains working right, haha.

July 31, 2010

WARNING: May contain dialogue that some may find bothersome, and others may find refreshing. Saddle up and enjoy the read! — The Author

I have heard this said and that said over the years about marriage counseling and the Church; so, if any intelligent person is going to take a serious look at this issue, let’s go back to Square One and at least try to be a little more objective, shall we? Granted, and in fairness, all of us have 20/20 hindsight, and I freely confess that I have my weak spots over the years to include surviving divorce — with the percentage of men and women enduring this change increasing in number — however, the fact is, that if we look honestly at ourselves, and do so without beating the snot out of ourselves, many of us will realize that each of came to the marriage altar a little underdone; in other words, we had not advanced sufficiently in our character development to appreciate the covenants we were about to make one with another, the Lord, and our future posterity. Suffice it to say—and pardon the pun—when a marriage goes KABOOM!, it is usually only the children who get ‘screwed’, if you know what I mean.

Part of this originates from our own youth; some of it from parents and others from peers about the same age as returning missionaries, who, with their peers are eager to see the children marry, make grandbabies, and bring them over so they can crap on Grandma and Grandpa’s brand new carpet. Another part of the reason everyone either pushes these newly returned missionaries and/or servicemen to marry so quickly after coming home is so these comparative ‘young adults/’kids’ can get laid without fearing church discipline hanging over them like the Sword of Damocles.

Keep in mind I am not advocating premarital sex by saying this. What I AM saying is that there must be a sense of balance in all things, and that everything has its time, place and season. How many of us know about the RM who attends BYU as a sophomore four months after his mission, meets a hot babe at Family Home Evening on Labor Day, has his first date with her the next night, takes her (or she takes him) home for Conference weekend, only to have the entire families hoping they will ‘close the deal’ with a ‘Christmas time’ wedding before December 31, so they can enjoy the massive increase in what would be their otherwise paltry tax refund?

After the wedding, comes the pressure to ‘multiply and replenish the earth’, often at rates faster than faith, finance, prudence, good health and sanity would prefer. All too often, I have seen marriages begin in the temple, have four children in five years, and after seven years — and the guy has FINALLY finished his degree — she divorces him because he is NEVER home because of all the hours he has to work at ‘rookie’ entry level wage in order to feed everyone sufficiently.

On the other hand, had these engaged couples received some training from their stake leaders in the form of eight two-hour classes taught by spiritually mature and seasoned couples covering eight areas of successful marriage such as communication skills, relatives and family issues, career choices, child raising and rearing, financial, preparing for retirement (count as two), sexuality and intimacy in marriage, and the importance of continuing to date after marriage…along these lines, and signed off the cards of these couples, by the time these couples see the stake president for their temple recommends, then he will KNOW they are both worthy and qualified to marry in the temple.

I had an Institute teacher at Cal-State Fullerton who taught the Celestial Marriage Class. On the FIRST day of the class, he had EVERYONE in the class place their scriptures under their desks, saying we knew the scriptures well enough that he was not going to discuss with us anything new from there in our particular class.

Instead, he chose to concentrate on interpersonal skills; how to live with one another without killing one, the other, or both, in the process. He also bragged that the previous semester, he broke up eight engaged couples, reasoning (correctly, I might add), that it was easier to deal with a broken engagement than a broken marriage.

So, if this provides us all with a great lesson in hindsight, and helps out either a friend, an adult child of ours or those of a friend, then hopefully what I have said here tonight makes a little sense.

If anyone gets their knickers in a knot, if anyone’s tight whiteys get themselves in a bunch, they might want to take a long hard look in the mirror and see the source of the problem there.

Thanks for letting me post. ***

“Going to therapy doesn’t mean you have failed, it means you care.”

well said.