No it doesn’t work for most people. My ex-wife and I went to several different marriage counselors. My ex has never been wrong about anything in her life (just ask her if you don’ believe me) so it was fruitless exercise and a huge waste of money. I still like my ex-wife just fine and we still spend lots of time together. We just weren’t meant to be married. Neither of us have remarried and that is probably for the best.
However, I can give one example of when going to a counselor can be potentially harmful (I actually have many but this one was the most blatant). While we were going through the divorce process, the clinical psychologist asked to speak to our then 6 year old daughter. She asked her a bunch of questions including “has your father ever touched you in a way that made you feel uncomfortable?” My daughter answered “Yes” because we had recently gotten back from a beach trip where she got sunburned and I made the mistake of patting her on the back where she was burned. Of course, the psychologist didn’t ask any of the simplest follow-up questions to clarify what she said and notified CPS .
That is the time when it is really useful to have a really aggressive ex-wife. She took my side immediately and called them all a bunch of malicious, troublemaking idiots that only cost money to do the exact opposite of their job. I suppose that did serve some purpose to unify us again temporally but that is not the way it should work.
In all honesty, I have never been to a counselor or psychologist that has been useful at all aside from one very caring female priest that knew us well. The vast majority of them are like bobbleheads sitting behind a desk that offer nothing and then demand payment after a strict 50 minute limit. It is a huge waste of money and I have extreme skepticism for the entire profession despite having an academic psych background myself.
But when things are emotionally difficult, many people don’t have a buddy to share intimate feelings.
So you hire a buddy, for 55 minute sessions. It costs a lot more, and you don’t even get a beer.
Our marriage counselor flat out told us, that she thought we were never meant to be married, but just friends. I wish someone had told me that before I’d been married for 15 years.
We are very good friends now, by the way. We have been for the whole 10 years we’ve been divorced.
It can. But just like anything else, it depends on lots of factors… how good the therapist is, how much both people want to work at things, how willing everyone is to step up to the plate and attempt to get at what’s needed, versus hammering out some sort of agenda.
If, for example, one won’t talk or the other tries to monopolize the session (and the therapist doesn’t take the lead and control things), then it probably is a waste of time. It’s absolutely crucial that everyone is on the same page and that both parties trust and respect the professional that’s there to help you.
Get to your issues and try not to be sidetracked by minutia and pettiness. Realize what will and won’t work for you as a couple, then truly listen and put yourself in the other’s shoes. It just takes a lot of humility, care, determination and loss of self to make it work, but it can be done. In my opinion.
A close friend of mine and his wife were about ready to kill each other … 10 years of counseling and they’re still together, happy and loving. They both dearly wanted to work things out and they did, the counselor only help them, they did the actual work.
I’ve done quite a bit of pre-emptive family counseling at the local university. Dirt cheap rates for a grad student. Yeah, imagine a 22-year-old little girl telling a big bad mean construction worker how to be a better father … LOL … I wanted to be better so it actually was very very helpful. She said she preferred family counseling because the 6 and 7-year-olds brought a much higher level of maturity than married couples did.
My ex-husband and I tried counseling for a short while, and it didn’t help However, I don’t blame the guy we used, he seemed OK. My ex insisted that we not tell him the real reasons why our marriage was in trouble or that I was already wishing to separate because he didn’t want the counselor to “gossip” about us to the other mental health professionals in town. My ex was sure they got together and talked about their patients to each other.
Now that I write this down, I realize that this is another example of my ex-husband being cray cray. Nothing would have saved the marriage.
I don’t have any personal experience with marriage counselors, but ISTM from what I’ve seen of others that a lot depends on who the real unhappy partner is, who is dragging the other one to counseling. Whatever issues that person has with their partner are going to be the focus of the therapy, and the therapist will focus on trying to resolve those issues. The other partner might have complaints of their own, but if they’re willing to live with those complaints while their partner is not willing to live with their own complaints, then the focus will be on the latter.
As a practical matter, this has the effect of demonizing the more compliant partner. Because to the extent that they fail to make their partner happy, then they will have failed to satisfactorily address their issues in the eyes of the marriage counselor, and of course in the eyes of their spouse.
That’s why you see so many exes discussing the end of their marriages and saying some variant of “… and even the marriage counselor agreed with me that …”. It’s not that the other guy was really the bad guy - it’s just that the focus in this marriage counseling was on the other guy making this one happy, and if this didn’t happen they were naturally in the role of failures.
In that sense, I think marriage counseling can make marital troubles worse, in that the focus on one spouse improving their bad habits can reinforce the mindset of the other one that they are the blameless ones, and cause them to measure the success of the counseling by the extent to which their spouse - and not them themselves - has succeeding in modifying their behaviour.
[This is not to say this is always how it goes down. But ISTM that this happens a lot.]
In theory it probably works for some people somewhere. It didn’t work for my first marriage. I’m actually still pissed at the counselor because he was so incompetent. He didn’t help. The main problem though was my ex-wife. Not that I was perfect, far from it…but there were two outcomes from each counseling session we had:
-If the counselor sided with her on something I needed to improve on, she’d give me I-told-you-sos and get all smug about it for the rest of the week.
-If the counselor sided with me on something she could improve on, she’d get super pissed and barely talk to me for days.
I havne’t been in marriage counseling, but one of my, um, “just me” counselors said something that struck me: the longer a couple (married or not) is in counseling together, the less likely it’s going to work. If two willing, capable adults enter counseling with the goal of genuinely resolving their differences, any decently competent person can help them do that, and the couple will get the direction they need and soon be on their merry way. If one or both partners isn’t able to do that, for whatever reason, counseling just ends up prolonging the agony.
It is not complete nonsense. It is a profession like any other and their real job is to sell services so that they can exploit to make a living. In fact, it goes well beyond that because most of them are in private practice just trying to make a buck. Most of the marriage counselors I have seen have all been divorced (sometimes multiple times themselves) and are not very stable individuals that you would want to socialize with. Almost all of them use the terms ‘detached’ and ‘objective’ when they really mean burnt out and disinterested in their chosen job. However, they all suddenly get really interested when it comes down to the payment process and strict time limit to kick you out. Honestly, most people would have better luck going to the nearest fortune teller. It is cheaper and they tend to give better service.
You may luck out and find a good one just like you might win the lottery tomorrow. In my experience, it is a complete sham profession. The only good marriage counselors are people that do it as a secondary role like members of the clergy that know both people involved well and do it for free as part of a larger role.
They’re all the same. We went twice, at the wife’s insistence. I told her, “If we spent this money on ourselves on a nice afternoon out, sushi, a couple beers and ice cream, we would probably not fight so much”.