If you or your spouse are considering divorce but are not completely sure that’s the best path or the chosen path, you’re in a difficult place of uncertainty and stress.
One of you likely feels too little hope or energy for beginning or continuing traditional couples counseling. If so, Discernment Counseling is designed for you. It’s a chance to slow down, take a breath, and look at the options for your marriage.
Discernment Counseling is a new way of helping couples when one spouse is “leaning out” of the relationship is considering divorce and is resistant to couples therapy, while the other spouse is “leaning in”—that is, interested in saving and rebuilding the marriage.
When traditional couples therapy isn’t working or isn’t even an option, you need a different approach.
In Discernment Counseling, the therapist will help you and your spouse decide to take one of three paths:
1. Seek to restore your marriage to health
2. Move toward divorce
3. Pause, take a time out, and decide later
The goal of Discernment Counseling is for you to gain clarity and confidence about a direction, based on a deeper understanding of your relationship and its possibilities for the future.
The goal is not to solve your marital problems during Discernment Counseling but for the two of you to determine if your problems are solvable. You will each be treated with compassion and respect no matter how you are feeling about your marriage at the moment. No bad guys and good guys.
Sessions include time together as a couple with the counselor; but the most important work occurs in the one-to-one conversations with the counselor. Why? Because you are starting out in different places.
The counselor respects the expressed reasons for divorce while trying to open up the possibility of restoring the marriage to health.
The counselor emphasizes the importance of each of you seeing your own contributions to the problems and the possible solutions. This will be useful in future relationships even if this one ends.
Number of Sessions: A maximum of 5 counseling sessions. The first session is usually 2 hours and the subsequent sessions are 1.5 hours.
Discernment Counseling is not suited for these situations:
- When one spouse has already made a final decision to divorce
- When one spouse is coercing the other to participate
- When there is danger of domestic violence
Watch this 5-minute video from the originator and founder of Discernment Counseling, Dr. William Doherty, as he explains what discernment counseling is and is not.
