Monday, January 28, 2008

Marriage Therapy: Caveat Emptor

Things are seldom what they seem
Skim milk masquerades as cream
Gilbert & Sullivan, H.M.S. Pinafore

Once you've convinced a divorce-prone couple to seek "professional help," you can breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that they will shortly enlist the help of a committed, skillful marriage therapist, right? Well, let's hope so.

But marriage counseling by an unskillful or uncommitted therapist can seal a marriage's doom. It speaks volumes that successful divorce lawyer and practice-building consultant Michael Sherman puts major emphasis on developing a referral network among marriage counselors, ministers and mental health professionals.

"For each group," the divorce lawyer writes, "we have systems in place to cultivate our relationships with them, thank them for their referrals every time, and keep in constant touch with them."

Sherman nurtures the marriage counselor relationship by sending them a newsletter every month, providing them articles of value to them in their practices, and developing a website at the divorce lawyer's expense, in which the counselors can participate and get client referrals.

Do you still feel confident sending your vulnerable, hurting couple down the street to Acme Marriage Counselors?

The University of Minnesota's William J. Doherty writes in How Therapists Harm Marriages and What We Can Do About It that there are two dangers lurking in North American marriage counseling suites. One is the uncommitted therapist. The other is the incompetent therapist.

The incompetence of a couples therapist may not be immediately obvious to the Therapeutic Family Law practitioner, especially if the counselor has earned a good reputation for skillful individual therapy. Counseling couples is not just individual therapy times two, or at least it shouldn't be.

In a 1997 national survey by the American Association for Family and Marriage Therapy, 81 percent of all psychotherapists in private practice reported that they do marital therapy.

"But only about 12 percent of them," writes Doherty, "are in a profession that requires even one course or any supervised experience. Only Marriage and Family Therapy as a profession requires any coursework or supervised clinical experience in marital or couples therapy. So most people who say they're doing this work picked it up on the side or not at all."

At minimum, then, the diligent TFL practitioner should refer to Marriage and Family Therapy professionals, not dilettantes or generic psychotherapists, whenever possible. These can be located via the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT) website, which is linked from TFL's front-page blogroll.

But Doherty describes a second menace to struggling marriages: "therapists, whether competent or not, whose individualistic value orientation leads them to undermine marital commitment when the marriage causes distress for an individual. In our consumer culture, some therapists follow the cultural script that regards marriage as a lifestyle to be abandoned if it is not working for either of its customers."

Referring your clients strictly to AAMFT therapists, lamentably, is no cure for this second menace.

But there is a second professional organization, whose site is also blogrolled at TFL, called the National Registry of Marriage Friendly Therapists. It provides a database of pro-commitment, pro-marriage therapists. If there are Marriage Friendly Therapists members available in the area, the Therapeutic Family Law practitioner can refer couples to them with confidence that the counselor will diligently work through the couple's problems with them, and not merely provide a pop psychological sheen of approval for the divorce option.

Posted by B. James Stinson at 4:15 PM

Labels: commitment, counselors, diligence, divorce, divorce lawyers, Doherty, referral, therapists, therapy

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