A Proposal to Reduce Unnecessary Divorce - Razorplanet

34. Mike McManus, How to Cut America’s Divorce Rate in Half…A Strategy Every
State Should Adopt (Potomac, MD: Marriage Savers, Inc., 2008).
35. Linda J. Waite et al., Does Divorce Make People Happy? Findings from a Study
of Unhappy Marriages (New York: Institute for American Values, 2002), http://www.
americanvalues.org/UnhappyMarriages.pdf.
36. The first author of this report is a marriage and family therapist with decades
of experience as a counselor, teacher, and trainer of marriage counselors. He believes
that marriage counseling when done well can be a good, healing modality for marriages,
but that too often it is not done well.
37. William J. Doherty, “How Therapists Harm Marriages and What We Can Do
about It,” Journal of Couples & Relationship Therapy 1, no. 2 (2002): 1–17. Licensed
psychologists, counselors, psychiatrists, and clinical social workers have no required
coursework or training in marriage counseling. Licensed marriage and family therapists
have required coursework, but no clinical experience requirements in working with
couples per se; state licensing requirements refer to working with “relational units,”
which can mean parents and children. Although in practice marriage and family therapists
are more likely than other licensed professionals to have experience in marriage
counseling, some have little experience.
38. John Wall et al., “The Ethics of Relationality: The Moral Views of Therapists Engaged
in Marital and Family Therapy,” Family Relations 48, no. 2 (April 1999): 139–49.
39. Poll conducted by random digit telephone techniques of 384 married Minnesotans
in 2000.
40. For an alternative approach, see Michele Weiner-Davis, The Divorce Remedy:
The Proven 7-Step Program for Saving Your Marriage (New York: Simon & Schuster,
2001); and William J. Doherty, “Couples on the Brink: Stopping the Marriage-Go-
Round,” Psychotherapy Networker (March/April 2006): 30–39, 70. Even among experienced
marriage therapists who want to help couples reconcile if this can be done
without risk for either spouse (a pro-commitment stance), many lack adequate ways
to manage the familiar scenario when one spouse wants to save the marriage and the
other is leaning towards divorce. They either hold back from helping the marriage because
one spouse is resistant, or they side with the more committed spouse and alienate
the ambivalent one. Even the major evidence-based models of couples therapy are
not particularly useful in this situation, because they are based on studies that require
both partners to be interested in working on the relationship.
41. An exception is pastoral counselors credentialed by the American Association
of Pastoral Counselors, who have high levels of training, although not necessarily in
marriage counseling per se.
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