COUNSELING COUPLES WHOSE MARRIAGES ARE STRUGGLING

When you are doing pastoral counseling with couples whose marriages are in trouble, keep the following in mind:

1. Set wise, prayerful ground rules in a controlled situation. Be prepared for emotions to surface quickly and vehemently. Expect tears and anger.
2. Keep in mind that rarely is there a villain and a victim. There are normally two sides to the story, and both need to be heard. Listen carefully, lovingly, and impartially, and resist the temptation to take sides or pronounce judgment.
3. Realize a quick resolution is not likely. Couples in trouble have spent months and years building to this crisis. Crisis care can help them have resources and inner controls to communicate on a helpful level, perhaps for the first time in a long time.
4. Remember that you are there to facilitate communication, to help the couple really “hear” each other, often by reflecting back what they say. You are there to help the couple identify and pursue options.
5. Help each party recognize the need for personal responsibility. As long as each person focuses on what the other ought to do, the conflict will continue. When the focus turns to “what I can do to make my marriage work,” healing can begin.
6. Find out how both of them perceive God. This is important information for you to know in proceeding with care for the couple.

When You Meet with the Couple

1. Listen. Too often, pastors feel it is their duty to set a couple straight as quickly as possible, so they hand the couple formulaic, insensitive advice without listening. A simple listening technique is to rephrase what you hear the couple telling you. “Jean, the way you see it is that John has been emotionally distant from you for five years. Is that accurate?” If you cannot rephrase and report back to them what you were just told, you probably didn’t hear it.
2. Suggest that the couple speak to each other, rather than about or around each other, or to you.
3. Help the couple determine what the core betrayal is. Many couples assume that love (eros, being “in love”) sustains their commitment to their partner and must, therefore, be their focus. This misleading assumption builds a perfect stage on which the betrayal dynamics in marriage are acted out.

   Keep in mind that most marital struggles — whether emotional, sexual, or spiritual — are about betrayal, and betrayal is about expectations. There is something about dashed expectations — whether or not those expectations are reasonable, formal, or implied — that cuts to the core of our sense of well-being. We want to believe we can count on things, that there is a degree of certainty, safety, and security in our lives. When this security is threatened or violated, the response may be mild or severe, ranging from disappointment, sadness, and depression to outrage, vengeance, emotional sabotage, or even suicide. Marriage is especially susceptible to damage from betrayed expectations. Our response to these betrayals is almost always at the heart of what goes wrong.

   Marital betrayals are usually subtle and relatively innocuous at first. His wife knows that he likes to eat dinner at six o’clock, but she somehow manages to drag her briefcase through the door at six forty-five most evenings. Her husband knows how sensitive she is to criticism — especially in public — but can’t resist telling their friends about how bad she looks in the mornings. Over time, these “betrayals” increase in volume and intensity until they become “thematic” in nature (“He doesn’t have an emotional bone in his body!” “She expects everyone to do everything for her!”).

4. Don’t be misled by what sometimes appears to be a core betrayal that is simply the most visible manifestation of something even more critical (for example, the affair, which points to the more fundamental betrayal of both emotional and physical fidelity).
5. Help the couple “normalize” (not to be confused with “minimize”) the betrayals by saying things like “As difficult and hopeless as this situation may seem to you at times, believe it or not, it is quite common for couples to go through such things.” Help them see that neither party is innocent of being the betrayer, and that individual ownership (confession), restitution (atonement), and a significant measure of forgiveness and grace are the means by which restoration occurs. It is not your responsibility to mend the broken relationship.
6. Determine whether the couple is egg- or puzzle-oriented. We are usually taught that marriage is like an egg, the perfect receptacle for love; it is perfect in structure, but also intrinsically fragile. According to this view, it is the job of each spouse to ensure that the egg is neither dropped nor broken. The one who first fails in this assignment — either deliberately or inadvertently — is the principal betrayer. Egg couples usually try to make the case that it was the other who first betrayed the relationship. Egg-energy is all about determining who the primary dropper-of-the-egg is and finding creative ways in which to punish that person. (Most people see marriage this way.)

   The other model says marriage is more like a puzzle. We are given stewardship of a box (commitment to marriage). Inside are many pieces of a puzzle. The pieces are all there — a few, in fact, already linked together — but they must be handled, moved, turned over, positioned, and experimented with before the picture begins to emerge.

   The distinction between the egg and puzzle models is a significant one: The egg model assumes a defensive posture, while the puzzle model assumes a creative one. Simply put, the egg model is fear driven (“Don’t drop the egg!”), while the puzzle model is grace and creativity driven (“Working together, let’s see what kind of portrait we can create from these many pieces”).

7. According to 2 Peter 1:5-7, the natural progression of spiritual things is from faith to love; that love (agape) is the end product of faith. One can immediately see how this applies to marriage.

   With this passage in mind, suggest that the central challenge of marriage is to determine how each “piece” of their marriage might be handled, and that marriage is a relationship that progresses from faith to love.

8. Help them in any practical way you can. Don’t assume that every troubled marriage is the result of some deeply flawed relationship. Sometimes a good job lead can make all the difference. Help the couple tap the resources available to them, which might be anything from becoming involved in a small group or receiving ongoing pastoral support to having personal mentors or professional counseling.
9. Be appropriate and Christ-honoring at all times, fully aware of dependency and attraction that can occur between the hurting person and the caregiver.
10. Speak the truth in love, as the Scripture admonishes us.

This section has been used with permission from M. Wayne Brown, MDiv, LMFT, a private therapist living in Denver, Colorado, and the author of Living the Renewed Life and Water from Stone.