Broken Marriage

I asked the tough question, and sat in the silence watching the body language, waiting for someone to speak.

“So, how about it?”, I asked the battling husband and wife as they each looked down and away.  “Are you going to commit to saving this marriage, or are you going to just call it quits?”

It was a scene repeated too often in the counseling office.

A husband and wife, who are also often a mom and dad, sitting uncomfortably, waiting for the counselor to take charge of their dysfunctional lives and lead them out of the marital wilderness.

They’ve come for a last shot at “counseling”, as though it were a pill or a procedure one could undergo that would, in just under an hour, undo the damage may have been going on for years and that now threatens their marriage.

At that moment of put up or shut up, these angry, wounded people are thinking only of themselves.  One or both of them is focused exclusively on their contempt for the person they once loved, and thinking only of life apart from them.

At this point they are not thinking clearly of what lies ahead.

They aren’t considering how financially devastating their divorce will be.

They haven’t done the simple arithmetic to explain how two people working full time to barely afford one house will now pay for two.

They haven’t anticipated what will happen to their social relationships, and the damage it will do to their  family and friends.

Sitting in my office, they have no notion of the physical, emotional, and spiritual price they will each pay in the stressful weeks ahead.

In their selfishness they have not even given a thought to what their divorce will do to their children.  They have already rationalized away the fear and disruption their kids will experience, noting that many of their friends’s parents have divorced and all those kids seem to have survived it all right.

The sad reality is that a large percentage of struggling couples who come to a counselor don’t come to get well but rather to drive the final nail in the coffin.

And people who are about to pay thousands in lawyer fees and court costs to end their union balk at paying anything for counseling that might save it.

I was bemoaning all of this with my friend Amy Spegele, who has her own perspective on failed marriages.

Amy runs the DivorceCare program at Community Reformed Church, and the companion program DivorceCare for Kids.  In the six years she has counseled divorced couples and their children she has grown all too familiar with the personal pain and the high cost of splitting families.

Amy also runs a program called Choosing Wisely, a Christian program that in five weeks explores all the realities of divorce.  The no-cost program is for couples whose marriage is skating on the slippery slope, but who have not yet completely given up one one another or on the union that provides an umbrella of security for their children.

In the Choosing Wisely program the couple sits with Amy once each week for five weeks.  At the end they have gained a realistic perspective of divorce, and are prepared to make an informed decision based on something other than their inflamed emotions.

And because the reality of divorce is so sad and so difficult, their new reality-based perspective often leads them to give the marriage another go.  In fact, about 75% of the couples who work with Amy choose to reconcile and resurrect their marriage.

For that minority who decide to end their marriage, the split is more civil and less destructive.  Knowing how to end a marriage graciously makes for what Amy calls a “healthier” divorce, a parting with less collateral damage to family, friends, and children.

Aside from coming face-to-face with the sobering reality of what divorce really costs, couples who work with Amy come to realize that one partner can never change the other.  All they can do is change the way they view that partner and respond to them.

And in the tradition of bringing Biblical teaching into the equation, Amy spends one week on the topic of forgiveness and another on the process of reconciliation.

Amy teaches her couples that if they make the decision to stick it out, they are likely to need coaching and encouragement to change the way they deal with one another.  That’s where counseling comes in.

As a counselor, what a treat it would be to work with one of Amy’s couples who have chosen to save their marriage.

Steve Guthrie directs Christian Counseling Services, counseling by appointment at 231.675-4682.  Amy Spegele can be reached at 231.675-1925.