How to Find a Good Marriage Counselor - What to Expect During Treatment with a Marriage Counselor

Written by Willard F. Harley, Jr., Ph.D

What to Expect During Treatment

From the third session on, you're guided by the treatment plan that you agreed to follow. Each week you report your successes and failure to the counselor. He/she guides you through the emotional minefields, motivational swamps and creative wildernesses. If your counselor is right for you, you'll come to like and respect him/her more and more as time goes by. You'll see your marriage improve in fits and starts. Some weeks will be blissful while others will be unbearable.

Its common for couples to experience a crisis between appointments that requires a counselor's mediation. I've usually been willing to have couples call me at the office or at home for emergencies because I realize that I'm working with couples in crisis. Sometimes a call is simply for clarification of an assignment. But I've also had threats of suicide, violent arguments and irresponsible browbeatings that need to be dealt with at the time they occur. If I get too many calls from a couple, I schedule their appointments closer together.

Both you and your spouse should be the judge of your need for continued treatment and when to terminate treatment. I usually use the success of the treatment plan to determine how to phase clients out over time. I will see them once a week in the beginning, twice a month after they are on a steady course, and once a month when they are nearing the end. Its not uncommon for couples to return after six months or a year just to check on their status.

Men generally want to get out of therapy as soon as possible, even when they were the ones that wanted it the most in the beginning. They don't like the idea of reporting to someone regarding their behavior, and my role as a counselor is to see to it that they follow through on what they promised. They often agree to anything to get their wives back, and then once she's home, they go back to their old habits.

With that type of problem in mind, don't abandon therapy unless you both enthusiastically agree to do so. If one of you wants to keep the door open, reschedule once a month or less often just in case problems arise. In the end, you and your spouse will be very much in love with each other. I have couples repeat my test for romantic love every few weeks so I can be certain we're on the right track. You might want to do something similar to measure the success of your program. But when you're in love, you don't really need a test to prove it!

About the author: Willard F. Harley, Jr., Ph.D. is best known as author of the internationally best selling book, His Needs, Her Needs: Building An Affair-proof Marriage. Dr. Harley is the founder of Marriage Builders, a marital therapy program designed to save marriages.

next: Getting the Most Out of Marriage Counseling