Choosing A Marriage Counselor

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Marriage counselling is a common recommendation for anyone facing marital difficulties. However, it’s not as simple as just finding a therapist and you both going for three sessions and problem solved.

For many of the people I’ve interviewed marriage counselling didn’t work. It may have worked superficially but it didn’t get to the fundamental, underlying issues and ultimately the marriage ended.

If marriage counselling is to stand any chance of working, it has to start with choosing the right counselor.

Recently a participant in one of my teleseminars shared that he had been married for ten years and is currently preparing for divorce. It’s been a long process for ‘Jeff’ since his wife has bipolar and ADHD. In a separate interview Jeff shared what he’d learned about choosing a marriage counselor. Here’s Jeff:

We went through a few counselors and one of the key things I’d recommend is to get a marriage counselor that is familiar with the neurological problems that you’re dealing with in your marriage.

We had normal counselors who were just trying to spread the blame equally and all roads led back to her behavior and her issues.

We finally got to a marriage counselor that understood her issues—a Ph.D., a real one, like the high class, high level marriage counselor. We had a together meeting during one of my wife’s crises to initiate it. I talked to the counselor beforehand to give her a list of all of the medications and to describe the situation and she seemed to be very familiar with it. She’s been very helpful.

My spouse had an individual meeting with the marriage counselor for the second meeting. The third meeting was individual with me. That’s when she advised me to build an escape plan, because I confirmed that I was in an abusive relationship. My wife was not under control and it was worsening. I need to be able to take care of me and my kids should she really go off.

I have to maintain a relationship with my marriage counselor such that my wife doesn’t feel like she’s being biased. For example, my wife told me, “How come the counselor answers your emails but doesn’t answer mine?” I thought, “Because I send her emails asking specific questions and they are no more than six sentences long and you write six or seven paragraphs and at the end I don’t even know what in the heck asked, let alone what’s going on,” but I didn’t say that to her. 

I wasn’t going to criticize her. Instead I sent a message to my counselor telling her that my wife felt that she was being biased and I asked the counselor to raise it for discussions if my wife didn’t say anything and she did.

You have to have your own relationship with your marriage counselor. I did ask her if her ethics and her requirements allowed her to keep things from my spouse. As a marriage counselor she has certain responsibilities to both of us and would it be running afoul of her ethics and her responsibility if she knew that I was trying to leave?

She assured me that she can.

Another recommendation I have is even if your spouse is completely un-supportive and thinks it’s just talking and a waste of time, get your own support, get your own counselor who can give you guidance and help you with your resolve. You need someone you can confide in.

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For anyone who’s struggling trying to decide if it’s time to end their marriage, I would recommend starting with individual counseling or coaching rather than marriage counseling. I think the individual sessions will help to get to the fundamental issues in your marriage and once these have been clearly identified, then you can move on to marriage counseling.

How effective has counseling been for you? Do you have any tips on choosing the right counselor?

Photo Credit: 2014© www.clipart.com

Happy New Year!

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Happy New Year
Welcome to the new year! Wherever you are in your divorce journey, it will be a year of change.

I wish you strength and courage

… to change your life

… to take one step after another

… to believe in yourself

… to discover who you are

… to laugh and smile, again

… to make your needs a priority

… to follow your intuition

… to disregard judgments from others

… to forgive yourself and others

With love,

Mandy

How Will You Share Your Parenting Time This Holiday?

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If you’re in the throes of separating then chances are you don’t have a formal parenting agreement worked out yet. That means it’s time for you and your STBX to have some discussions about the upcoming winter break and the holidays, and what they mean for your parenting time.

With school-breaks, specific holidays and family traditions, this can get complicated. It helps to get a blank calendar for December and January and use different colors for you and your STBX. Print out a couple of copies because I guarantee you’ll want to make changes before you come up with a final version.

Start With The Key Days

A good place to begin is to identify the days that are particularly meaningful to you, such as Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Are there other days that are more meaningful to your STBX? This often happens because of a different faith or extended family traditions.  How could you share these? Map out a proposal and be as specific as possible including where the children will sleep and who will be picking up and dropping off,at what time. It might look this, for example:

Christmas Eve with Mom. Christmas Eve begins at 9 p.m. on December 23 and ends at 9 p.m. on December 24.

Christmas Day with Dad. Christmas Day begins at 9 p.m. on December 24 and ends at 9 p.m. on December 25. Dad will pick up from Mom’s at the beginning of his parenting time.

Don’t worry about trying to make the language look like a legal agreement. Write it in plain English that you and your STBX can understand.

Look At The Bigger Picture

With school-aged children, now look at when their winter break starts and finishes. How could you and your STBX share this time?

Do either of you want to travel to visit with extended family?

What do your children have going on? Any camps or sports activities?

How can you work your schedule to accommodate these plans. Even if you agree to share the break equally, it’s rarely going to be as simply as splitting it into two with you taking the first seven nights and your STBX taking the others. The key dates you’ve identified aren’t going to fall neatly in the middle and nor will the winter break fall conveniently at a normal changeover in any regular parenting schedule you’ve already worked out. You will have to do some juggling.

Put Yourself In Your Child’s Shoes

How will your children feel about the schedule? Does it seem like too much back and forth? Too rushed? Too hectic?

Parenting plans are often driven by the number of overnights because the overnights often figure into the calculation for child support. It’s unfortunate. In my opinion, this often means kids are shuttling back and forth too frequently or more than they want. They get exhausted and drained and it becomes more about the parents and money, and less about the children.

If you took the child support out of the equation, what schedule would work best for your child? Could you have parenting time during the day and then return them to your STBX to stay overnight or vice versa? This might work well if you’re in temporary accommodation and there isn’t a bedroom for your child. It would work well for a child who doesn’t handle change well.

Overnights don’t equate to being an actively involved parent.

Avoid the trap of thinking that all your kids have to have the same schedule. Younger kids will need to have shorter time away from each parent so more frequent  exchanges and possibly no overnights. Older kids are better able to cope with longer stays. The more flexible you can be, the better it will be for your kids.

This Is A Test Run

Try approaching this as a test run. Come January when the kids are back in school, be critical of the schedule – what worked well, what didn’t, what was ambiguous and what resulted in disagreement. Even more important, what did you children like, what didn’t they like. Ask them for their opinion.

You’ll be able to take this experience and incorporate it into your formal parenting plan. You’ll also be able to use this experience to help you construct the rest of your parenting plan.

You know your family best and that means you and your STBX are the best people to figure out your parenting time.