What Is Marriage Counseling?

THE WORD “COUNSELING” is defined in many dictionaries as “giving advice” or “warning.” People in trouble in their marital relationships have always been the recipients of all kinds of well-meant advice, and in that “educational” sense marriage counseling is probably as old and as universal as marriage itself. It has been carried on through the centuries and in many parts of the world by interested relatives and friends, and by ministers, doctors, teachers, lawyers and others with varying degrees of professional formality.

In previous centuries any marriage counseling had as its primary purpose the helping of wives to make the best of difficult situations in male-dominated “partnerships”; or possibly, in some cases, inducing husbands to be a little more understanding, sympathetic and tolerant to their wives and children. In such autocratic marriages wives were largely forced to make the best of whatever kind of marital situation they were drawn into, and marriage counseling was largely concerned with giving direct advice-or even using coercion. This attitude to marriage counseling still exists in some quarters.

But the steep rise in the divorce rate, and the large but unassessable separation rate over the last half century, suggest that these traditional methods of counseling are not sufficiently effective in the face of the strains of modern marriage. And this is amply confirmed by the experience of workers in many special fields of social service who come into direct or indirect contact with marital and family conflict. This has sometimes led to the belief that the situation is not open to remedy, that the relationship between husband and wife is too private and too personal to be accessible to any community welfare project.

In recent years, however-beginning in America in 1929, in Great Britain in 1938, and in Australia in 1947—there has been a gradual emergence and development of a new and much more rational approach to the whole project of helping people in serious marital and family conflict. This newer approach has been and is still being based on the practical experience of people of varying professional backgrounds, and it is being continually tested by trial and error experience rather than by theoretical ideas. It has borrowed from many basic disciplines, such as psychology, religion, medicine, sociology, education, psychiatry, and anthropology, and has been helped greatly by the technical resource of the tape recorder (in research institutes), through which interviews can be preserved with many of their emotional overtones, and from which many lessons can be learned.

Tags: Counseling