Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack

Marriage Counseling or Marriage Coaching? How to Choose

• Jack Ito PhD, Psychologist, Author, and Relationship Coach • Season 4 • Episode 3

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On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.

On today's episode, Coach Jack teaches men how to choose between marriage counseling and marriage coaching.

After listening to today's episode, you may want to:

Marriage Counseling or Marriage Coaching? How to Choose

(Podcast Transcript)

(0:00)

[Introduction to the podcast]

Announcer: On the Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito, will help you to build and restore your marriage. By learning just a few relationship skills, you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more, while getting more love and affection from your spouse. Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage both you and your spouse will love.

(0:29)

Coach Jack: Both marriage counseling and marriage coaching can play a pivotal role in reconciling, but they are not interchangeable.

Counselors use words like heal, guide, and transform. These words have kind of a warm, fuzzy feeling to them, but what do they really mean? I spent half of my career doing marriage counseling before switching to marriage coaching, so I know much about what actually happens in each. The more clearly you can see what each provides, the better you can choose between them.

(1:00)

The goal of marriage counseling

Many people choose marriage counseling with the belief that the primary focus of the therapist will be to reconcile the relationship. This is not true. The primary goal of the therapist is the mental health and happiness of each of the clients. If the therapist believes that one of the couple or both will be safer, more self-fulfilled, or happier divorced, then the therapist will help the couple to move in the direction of an amicable divorce.

This is not a bad thing. Many couples would be better off divorced and a counselor working with a couple is much better able to see whether there are irreconcilable differences or not. A therapist can also help the clients to continue to get along in the process of separation and divorce, making easier what could be a very stressful process.

The goal of marriage coaching

While many people portray themselves as coaches, they actually do counseling. A trained coach is very different. 

(2:03)

What a marriage coach does is to:

  • Help set goals. 
  • define the steps necessary to reach the goals,
  • provide skills training where needed, and 
  • assign skills practice between sessions.

It may help to consider a non-relationship example of coaching. Someone might hire a fitness coach to help them lose a certain amount of weight and to be able to reach a specified fitness level. The coach will help the client to have a step-by-step training program to reach those goals. Additionally, the coach will provide training in fitness exercises and diet required to reach those goals. 

There is an expectation that goal achievement will require daily effort and willpower. If the client does not do the exercises between days of meeting with the coach, there will be no progress. The coach trains the client in what to do on his or her own, helps to determine the right steps, and the right pace, and provides encouragement as the client progresses.

(3:04)

The benefits of marriage counseling

Marriage counseling offers a safe space for open communication between a husband and wife. Both will be encouraged to share their thoughts and feelings, whether positive or negative. They will also be helped to listen and clarify what their spouse is telling them. Many people cannot do this on their own due to difficulties in expressing their thoughts and feelings, reactivity to their spouse, tendency to argue and get off track.

Counseling helps couples to stay focused on a single topic. With problems that have resulted from misunderstanding, confusion, and lack of important information, this approach can save a relationship. Optimally the couple will learn how to talk and listen to each other without the need for a therapist so that they can prevent future misunderstandings.

(3:59)

The benefits of marriage coaching

The assumption in marriage coaching is that relationships have broken down because people did not use good skills to maintain them. Typically clients have not made it a priority to spend daily quality time together, go on weekly dates, be good sexual partners, and use boundaries to keep respect.

Rather than teaching clients to talk about their disappointments with each other, coaching focuses on creating enjoyable interaction through talking and behaving that interests, reengages, and attracts the other spouse. Because of this, coaching is much more useful than counseling when a marriage is to the point of rejection by one spouse. Such a spouse is not motivated to do couple’s work and usually will sabotage the counseling if they do go.

Examples of the use of marriage counseling and marriage coaching

Scenario one: husband and wife both want to improve their relationship, but frequently have conflict.

(5:00)

In this situation, counseling will be the best choice. The counselor will help the couple to identify their issues and talk about them in a nonconflictual way. Because both of them want to improve their relationship, they will have some loving feelings to express to each other in addition to their problem issues. 

A good counselor will help clients to express those loving feelings as well. The counseling sessions can be a safe space for the couple to talk about problems while they are also encouraged to spend more quality time together outside of the sessions.

Scenario two: one spouse wants to divorce while the other wants to reconcile

In this situation, coaching will be the best choice. The coach will help the spouse who wants to reconcile to learn skills for drawing the other spouse back into the relationship. The client learns how to approach and respond to their spouse, as well as how much to interact. The relationship is thus built more organically, much as it did when the couple first met. 

(6:03)

Attraction, connection, and healthy boundaries are the main skills learned. In addition, clients learn to transition through the relationship stages of acquaintance, friendship, romance, and commitment. Because reconciling can happen without any need to discuss problems, it is conflict-free. 

Success depends on the ability of the coach to identify the correct skills needed and provide training. It also depends on the ability of the client to apply those skills without falling back on needy behaviors such as convincing, pressuring, or arguing. 

Scenario three: One spouse has a problem behavior (verbal abuse, affair, neglect, etc.)

The couple’s marriage counseling approach

Couple’s counseling would help to clarify why the problem behavior is disliked by the other spouse and why it is damaging to the marriage. However, it would not motivate the spouse with the problem behavior to stop the problem behavior. 

(7:07)

For example, a man who is having an affair, but attends marriage counseling with his wife is not going to be motivated to end his affair as a result of counseling sessions. He could understand why his wife doesn’t like it, but it wouldn’t motivate him to end the affair.

The individual counseling approach

If the spouse with the problem behavior is motivated to change, then individual counseling for that spouse is a good choice. The spouse without the problem behavior can be involved in the process if only to provide support and encouragement. 

If the spouse with the problem behavior is not motivated to change, then individual counseling would not help to reconcile the marriage.

Individual counseling would only encourage him to leave his wife since it promotes the health and happiness of the individual receiving the counseling.

(8:01)

Individual counseling for the wife would provide a place of emotional support, but not the necessary skills for ending her husband’s affair. Most counselors can guide someone through confronting their spouse and writing a letter expressing their feelings. This aids in helping their clients to let go but tends to be ineffective for reconciling. 

Beyond this, most counselors have no additional skills to offer. This goes for other problem behaviors as well. As a result, counselors focus on helping their clients to accept their situation and become more independent and assertive. 

Many times, this is actually a good choice. Not everyone who has a spouse with behavioral problems should work to reconcile. There are many interpersonal factors to consider and counseling is a good place for a client to explore whether they should remain in the marriage.

(8:55)

Some counselors recommend women to be submissive to their husbands no matter what. While this prevents conflict, it continues the problem behavior and leads to resentment and emotional distancing.

The marriage coaching approach

The marriage coaching approach for this situation would assess whether the relationship was strong enough for boundaries to be effective. If so, then the client would be taught how to use boundaries to stop the other spouse’s damaging behavior. 

Marriage coaches are trained to be able to use boundaries for many different behaviors. For example, ending verbal abuse typically takes two weeks using consistent boundaries in an otherwise good relationship, even if the abuse has gone on for years. Compare that to a client attending counseling for months to get support for her spouse’s abusive behavior and you can see the counseling/coaching difference for a spouse’s damaging behaviors.

(9:52)

If the relationship is not strong, and unless the behavior is dangerous, the client is first trained to improve the relationship before using boundaries. This is the same approach that is used with parenting. If parents have a bad relationship with a child, their efforts to end the child’s bad behaviors will increase parent-child conflict without making the relationship better. 

Parents are helped to connect positively with their children first. Spouses must do the same if their boundaries are to be effective. Many spouses and parents fail to improve their relationship because they focus on changing the other during a bad relationship. Of course, if a behavior is dangerous, it must be dealt with right away–regardless of the risk to the relationship.

As with other coaching, if a client is unable to remain emotionally stable, continues to use needy behaviors, or does not put relationship-building skills to use between sessions, coaching will not help. Such clients are better off getting support in individual counseling.

(10:59)

Marriage retreats have a place as well

An alternative to marriage counseling and marriage coaching is that of a marriage retreat. A marriage retreat is best for couples when both spouses want to improve their relationship. They won’t work with a counselor or coach, so retreats do not focus on individual problems. They are more like seminars. 

A marriage retreat is excellent pre-marital training or for those who wish they did receive such training.

Let me summarize and put this all together for you.

When deciding between marriage counseling and marriage coaching, it is important to consider:

  • The desire of both spouses for improvement, 
  • the ability to follow through with skills practice between sessions, and
  • the ability to consistently use skills without pressuring or creating conflict.

If you have understood these differences between marriage counseling and marriage coaching, then you will understand why I work with one spouse only for three of my coaching packages:

(12:00)

These are all situations when a spouse would not be motivated to work as a couple, and which are more effectively dealt with by the spouse who wants improvement. 

Couples wanting to work together should seek out marriage counseling if they are having conflict, or a marriage retreat if they want general marriage skills. 

It is easy to be confused about whether to use marriage coaching or marriage counseling. Let me offer a word of advice that may take some of the stress out of the decision. If you really can’t decide whether to use marriage counseling or marriage coaching, just get started with either one. Either way will be better than delaying and trying to make the perfect decision.

For counseling it will take at least a month to determine if the counseling is helpful. For marriage coaching you should be able to see some progress after the first session, applying the skill or skills you learned in the first session.

(13:05)

[Podcast wrap-up]

Announcer: Thank you for listening to Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack. Visit coachjackito.com to learn more skills for reconnecting with your spouse and restoring your marriage.