This is similar to my own experience, so I’m not sure how qualified I am to weigh in. We sought counseling after my miscarriage because we were both consumed by guilt over how poorly we handled it. Our therapist said it took her years with most clients to reach the point where we started on our first day. She said we were easy. We did it at least once before, back before we got married, and IIRC the hardest part was not letting the session be consumed by me and my issues (depression, PTSD) because, and I’m not really sure how accurate this is, I felt like so much of the problem was me. I don’t know how much we really got out of counseling, more than a formalized way of announcing we wanted to work on this thing and be a team. We had immediate progress both times just by setting up the appointment.
My wife and I are seeing one right now to help us work through some of our communication differences in front of a neutral third party. They aren’t threat to the marriage issues (now), but as first time parents of a toddler, who did the marriage and kids thing in our mid/late 30’s and were therefore pretty set in our ways, the outside perspective has been helpful.
I went to a few sessions with my ex wife that were terrible. She wanted to manipulate the experience to get me to comply with with her increasingly irrational demands, and I was slowly coming to the realization that it was ok to just be sick of her shit. The divorce was final a year later.
Well, I can’t speak from personal experience, but I have a friend who went to marriage counseling with her husband, and in the second session, the therapist suggested that my friend needed to be in treatment for depression, and some of their problems might resolve if she were under treatment.
She came out from that session complaining that the therapist was “on her husband’s side,” and not the neutral third party they needed, and she wasn’t going back until the looked for another therapist.
A year later he moved out (but didn’t file for divorce). She took an overdose of OTC sleeping pills, and booze, although I don’t know that it was an attempt at suicide; she called a third friend of ours when it made her sick and shaky, and scared the hell out of her. The friend called me for back-up, and we took her to the hospital, where they treated her, then put her on 72-hr. psych hold. Her husband visited her.
Making a long story medium length, she finally accepted treatment for depression, and this was 12 years ago. They are still married.
My point is, that sometimes one partner is the bigger part of the problem. In this particular case, it wasn’t that she was being a jerk-- a lot of people with mental health issues have a period of denial-- and I am not saying she should be blamed for their problems (which in the end they worked out). But it’s often part and parcel of being the problem that you can’t see that you are the problem.
I’m not surprised that a lot of MRA types have a bad experience in counseling.
I know some people who were already set on divorce, but didn’t know how to untangle, so to speak, and saw a therapist, because they has three young children, one with special needs, and wanted to come out of the situation amicably. Actually, they are so friendly, it’s kind of creepy. They are both remarried, and everyone goes to all the disabled child’s IEP meetings, for example. When one couple had a new baby, the other took over a meal. It’s like something on TV.
When I was in my mid-20s, I experienced almost exactly what is written in the OP.
My GF (we had been living together for about 2 years at this point) wanted us to go to couples counseling… with her therapist/counselor. (Big mistake!) I sat there for 50 minutes of the first hour and then told both my GF and the therapist that I thought the whole thing was bullshit and was designed to give GF a chance to bitch at me with a supportive backup while I had to fend for myself. I told them I would not be back but that if GF wanted to find a new therapist who would be neutral, I’d consider it.
She never brought it up again. Eventually, she broke up with me (a year or so later, IIRC). Apparently her father (and his wife) have told her repeatedly that breaking up with me was a mistake*. 
*We’re still in touch once or twice a year. We broke up but don’t hate each other, ya know what I’m sayin’?
Of course, I suspect that most couples don’t attempt counseling except as a last resort when the marriage was destined for divorce anyway.
It’s probably not that unusual. My ex and I did that, we were legally separated for five years. The divorce cost something like $150 and we never went to court once. We both remarried, and the four of us did go to IEP meetings for our daughter a couple of times. The hard part was all four being available on any given date, not the fact of being all together.
No, what’s weird is that my ex’s stepson and my youngest daughter are the same age, and they’ve become good friends. They’re in elementary school now, but still, that is way more amicability than I ever planned on having.
I had what I would call a good experience in that the counselor seemed about as unbiased as you could possibly be and I learned quite a bit.
She was a hard-ass that opened our first session with the following:
"I’ve been doing this a long time and have seen the delicate and warm/fuzzy approach fail over and over and have reached the conclusion that the only chance of success is:
1 - If I call both of you on your crap
2 - If both of you learn to worry about the other person’s needs and let the other person worry about your needs
Do you still want to work with me knowing this is how I operate?"
Regarding point number one:
She was amazingly good at seeing through our excuses and manipulations and calling out both of us for anything that was immature or selfish behavior in any way.
Regarding point number two:
Although our marriage ended, I did learn from the process and my current marriage uses the formula in point #2 much more than my first marriage did (requires both parties of course).
Heh. One of my best friends and her husband went to our Catholic parish priest for counseling. The priest listened to them, asked a few questions, and then said, “get divorced, you should have done it long ago.”
They did. He was right.
My great-grandmother hated Catholics, but she had an issue with having too small a sample. A neighbor of hers used to get beat up by her husband regularly, and my great-grandmother would tell her to leave him. The woman would say that her priest told her G-d wanted her to stay and be a good wife.
The woman finally got widowed, and after my great-grandmother had been very kind to her during her hellacious first marriage, to the point of even letting her stay over sometimes after a bad beating, when the woman went and married a second asshole, my great-grandmother said she was done with her.
Too bad she couldn’t send her friend to that priest.
Yeah, I think that’s a lot of it. For some couples, marriage counseling is just one more thing on the list to check off, somewhere between deciding who gets the better car and which friends they’ll voluntarily give up.
I’m convinced my first wife went to counseling only because she could say “I tried so hard to save this marriage.” By contrast, my current wife and I were sincere about counseling, made adjustments, and have lived reasonably happily ever after.
In Saskatchewan, that kind of parenting session is mandatory for any couple breaking up with kids. It’s not focussed on whether or why the partners are breaking up. It’s all about the kids, trying to help the parents understand what effect the break-up will have on the kids, what techniques they need to learn to help the kids through the break-up and afterwards, and so on.