A new approach to counseling

The new approach differs from the older methods in many important respects.

In the first place it is conceived and carried out more as a therapeutic or healing than as an educational activity. It may, of course, still include some education; about, for example, the main principles underlying human relationships, and especially the most intimate relationships of marriage and parenthood.
This attempt at the healing of a “sick” marriage, like the healing of a sick person, rests on the conviction, confirmed more and more by experience, that the essential factor in all healing is a natural healing force with which the “healer” seeks always to cooperate.

It is found that the giving of advice, which is implied in the definitions of “counseling,” does not generally achieve the desired end, however much the partners may be anxious for it. In almost every case the troubled partners will already have had a great deal of very “good,” plausible, but often conflicting advice, which they have found to be either impossible to carry out, or ineffective when they have carried it out. Even then many of them come for counseling in the belief or hope that the “expert” will be able to hear what they have to say, and then give them better advice than any they have previously had.

On the other hand it has been abundantly confirmed that when a counselor can achieve with troubled people the kind of personal relationship in which they can progressively unburden their strained affronted and conflicting feelings, they then come to see themselves and their conflicts more clearly and objectively, and are in a much better position to make their own decisions about what they shall do. Marital disorders are practically always dominated by emotions, and emotions are “blinding” things, “which distort people’s judgment. Until people in the grip of intense and conflicting feelings can pour them out to someone who is willing to give them a full, genuine, attentive and accepting hearing, they will generally be unable to apply “sweet reason,” either from their own thinking or from even the most “expert” advice.

The “sick” marriage can best be healed when the partners are helped to help themselves, when the counselor can sit down patiently with them and give them the chance to “see” themselves and their partners through the previously blinding mists of emotion, and then to apply “sweet reason” freed from the distortions of upset feelings, to their common task of rebuilding -or, if they see fit, dissolving-their partnership. Their decisions may be assisted by the offering of information when it is desired and seems appropriate, but the modern counselor feels very diffident about giving advice except in very special circumstances which will be discussed in later sections of this book.

A second difference from the older methods of marriage counseling is that modern counseling does not set out to interfere in people’s marital troubles, nor does it indulge in coercion of any kind. Help is offered, but as in all healing it is more likely to be of value when it is sought and accepted by a willing “patient.” Marriage counselors are not in any sense “managers” or “do-good-ers,” and they will never “butt in,” even when requested to do so by an anxious relative. They will offer their services, and then leave it to the people to decide whether or not they will accept them.

This fact, however, needs to be considered in relation to the growing conviction that the community has a definite stake in the success or failure of marriage, that marriage is a community as well as a private affair. To the extent that this is so the community has some responsibility to many people who are in great need of help, but who, for various reasons, are unwilling to seek counseling. There is a growing feeling in many communities that community organizations, such as the courts or possibly the Church, may have the public responsibility of putting judicial or moral pressure on some such couples to discuss their conflicts with a trained marriage counselor. Such discussions, although most appropriately conducted by a trained marriage counselor in a reasonably permissive atmosphere, are not quite the same as marriage counseling because the people come under external pressure. They are distinguished from counseling by being described as “conciliation.” To conciliate is defined as “to gain, or win over; to gain the love or good will of such as have been indifferent or hostile; to pacify” (Chambers’ Twentieth Century Dictionary,1932)-

When two people are persuaded to come for marriage conciliation, for example, by a divorce court judge, the first task of the counselor is to try to win their confidence-if possible to such a degree that they come to desire counseling. Then the conciliation gives place to counseling in its best sense. This winning of confidence of two previously unwilling or indifferent people requires more general skill, experience and patience, and other good qualities of personality than are even required for counseling.

A third difference between modern counseling and the older traditional methods is that the modern counselor does not feel competent or in any way disposed to judge either of the partners in conflict, or to impose his own moral values on them. He may ask them what they think the possible consequences of any attitude or action may be, and why they would want to do what they are doing, but in general the counselor sees his function as that of looking with each of them at the problem and the whole relationship, and accepting their feelings and their attitudes, and their conduct within the law. In this way their ultimate attitudes are dictated by their own consciences and by their views about the total situation.

Modern counseling then seeks to offer a service of such a nature that people are helped to help themselves; to provide an accepting relationship of a kind that will encourage each person to express his feelings in a permissive atmosphere, and progressively to achieve better insight into many aspects of the marital relationship. In this way each of them has the opportunity to make his own decisions as to what to do about it in an atmosphere of realism rather than of distorted emotion.

Such counseling has proved itself by far the best approach to people in marital conflict, as long as it is carried out by adequately trained people of suitable maturity and emotional stability. But it is not regarded as the only solution to marital problems. It is obvious that in this field as in others “prevention is better than cure,” and modern marriage counseling is conceived as one important part of a comprehensive project for promotion of better marriage and family living. This project includes first-class universal comprehensive education and preparation for marriage and parenthood, which is so far in the earliest stages of its development, and also continuing research into marriage and family relationships, and into human relationships in general.

Tags: Counseling