Discernment Counseling for Couples
on the Brink
When One of You Definitely Wants to Stay, and the Other Really Wants to Go
If you or your spouse are considering divorce but are not completely sure that’s the best path, you are in a tough spot. And Discernment Counseling is designed for you. It’s a chance to slow down, take a breath, and look at your options for your marriage.What is it?
Discernment Counseling is a new way of helping couples where one person is “leaning out” of the relationship (i.e., not sure that regular marriage counseling would help) and the other is “leaning in” (that is, they are interested in rebuilding the marriage). This special kind of counseling will help you decide whether to try to restore your marriage to health, move toward divorce, or take a time out and decide later. The goal is for you to gain clarity and confidence about a direction based on a deeper understanding of your relationship and its possibilities for the future.The goal is not to solve your marital problems, but to see if they are solvable.
You will each be treated with compassion and respect no matter how you are feeling about your marriage now. No bad guys and good guys. You will come in as a couple, but the most important work occurs in the one-to-one conversations we will have as part of the session. Why? Because you are starting out in different places. I always respect your reasons for considering divorce while we also try to open the possibility of restoring the marriage to health.What will we learn and how long will it take?
In Discernment Counseling, we emphasize the importance of each of you seeing your own contributions to the problems and the possible solutions in your relationship. This will be useful in future relationships even if this one ends. Discernment Counseling is not open-ended like therapy. It usually consists of five-to-seven counseling sessions. At each session, we decide whether to continue with another, until you feel that you have arrived at a decision. The first session is usually two hours, and the subsequent ones are 1.5 or 2 hours. Discernment Counseling is not suited for these situations:- When one spouse has already made a final decision to divorce
- When one spouse is coercing the other to participate
- When there is danger of domestic violence