Further clarification in the “intra-personal” area

As we have seen the marriage counselor as such is mainly concerned with offering help in the disturbed relationship between the partners rather than in the inner personality dynamics of either of them. This intra-personal area is much more the province of the psychotherapist, and the marriage counselor as such is not trained to do psychotherapy in this sense.

But it is generally impossible to draw any sharp line between the “relationship” and the “intra-personal” areas in the majority of marital problems that come for help, and if every intra-personal disturbance discovered by the marriage counselor were referred to a psychiatrist there would soon be an oversaturation of the available time and energy of all the psychiatrists in any country.

It is therefore part of the training of marriage counselors, and indeed of social workers, to keep predominantly within their own fields, the marriage counselor within the relationship field and the social worker within the environmental field; but to be able to deal with the less intense and complex elements of their clients’ problems which may encroach to some extent into the associated fields. In any such extension they are under an obligation to recognize their limitations and to seek appropriate referral whenever it seems at all advisable or in any case of doubt. In fact many social workers find that their knowledge and experience enable them to use the rapport they gain with clients to help them greatly in their relationships and in their inner personality disorders. In some clinics this is done with the full approval of the psychiatrist in charge. The same spread into related fields cannot altogether be avoided by the marriage counselor.

In an earlier chapter we have considered some of the most common intra-personal factors which can contribute to marital disorder under four headings, ignorance or misinformation, immaturity, illness, physical and mental, and irreligion; and some account has been given of the main indications of these factors and of their possible effects on the marital relationship. We may now consider how the counselor sets out to elicit and to clarify his clients’ attitudes and feelings in this area.

Many of the more obvious indications of intra-personal disorders will come out spontaneously in the progress of the counseling, especially as the counselor looks with clients at their role perceptions, their habitual attitudes and responses, their uncritical assumptions and emotional needs, their background “conditioning” and their personality types. By the kind of “creative question” already discussed, asked at the most appropriate point in the discussion to follow out the clients’ trains of thought the clarification can continue.

As we saw in the previous section on “further clarification in the relationship area,” many intra-personal disorders and distortions will come up so closely interrelated with the relationships that they cannot be separated from them, even if that were desirable. But if the counselor has some kind of orderly arrangement in his own mind he can save himself from confusion of thought and help the client to more ordered thinking too. All of these classifications are mainly for that purpose, and to some extent to assist in orderly description.

Keywords: Marriage, Marriage Counseling, Marital Relationship, Marital Disorder, Marital Conflict