The phone rang on a Friday afternoon. The desperate voice on the other end said, "Doctor, when can I see you? My pastor suggests I need to talk with you. Do you have a minute now?"
In the following minutes he poured out a story of torment. He had been married fourteen years and had three daughters, but in the last ten years he had been intimate with his wife only three times. He understood that the terrible abuse she had suffered at the hands of her father and cousins had placed terrible scars on her emotional being. Yet after fourteen years, he was wondering if he could continue in this relationship.
I wondered what her side of the story was and what role this man played in their nearly sexless relationship.
"Would your wife come along to see me?" I asked.
"Oh, no. She refuses counseling. She says it's my problem."
He continued, "She's in Canada now visiting her family. I don't know for sure when she'll be back, but before she returns I think I need to decide whether to see a lawyer or to hold off. Do you think you can help me?"
I paused, wondering how many pastors were hearing similar stories at this very moment. Why don't people ask for help before it's too late? Why do they wait until they're considering divorce before they seek a pastor or counselor?
I thought of the three girls. I thought of the photo album of family activities that would never make sense again. I thought of two extended families, wounded and confused by the tragedy of these torn lives. I thought of the pain and bitterness I could already sense in the untold part of the story. I thought how angry I was at adults who abuse children and expect the scars to be easily erased. I felt a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach as I remembered how I dreaded these first meetings with couples in seemingly hopeless marital binds.
However, I also remembered other couples who had fought selfishly and ruthlessly to carve their mate into a person of their own expectations-turning their marriage into shambles-but then had come to a shattering awareness of how impossible it is to live with another person unless we let go, receive and grant grace to those we love, and above all, experience the grace of God. And they turned a hopeless situation around. They sought and gave forgiveness. They learned to communicate, to compromise, to care again. Now they smile and touch and hold hands. Not by magic, but by lots of hard work they are on the other side of the valley of despair. I know from experience that deeply troubled marriages can be saved.
"It would be best if you and your wife could come together to see me," I said. "But since she's not here, I don't think we should wait. We'd better get started now. When can you come to my office?"
The Hopeful and the Hopeless
Some years ago during my clinical training at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., I sat in front of a shy, sensitive man of profound intellectual capacity, but one who knew intimately the scars of emotional wounds. He spoke quietly yet deeply about how important it is for the mentally ill to be able to sort the hopeful from the hopeless in their life situations. How often I have thought of Father William Lynch's comments in my work with married couples. To be able to discern the hopeful from the hopeless is a critical issue in marriage intervention.
Indeed, it is a critical issue in being a good spouse as well. The day I decided it was hopeless to expect my wife to be like an old flame from my adolescence, our marriage took a big step forward. Then I had a chance to draw upon the uniqueness of the woman I married. That was hopeful-and very exciting, I might add!
Every marriage is built in hope. People marry because they hope that life together will be more effective, satisfying, and purposeful than life alone. People marry expecting it to be successful, regardless of what friends or relatives may say. But nearly every marriage also goes through a period of disillusionment. Some authors call it "The Fall." What they had hoped would happen is not going to happen. Sadness, hurt, and anger replace hope. Innocence is gone. They feel hopeless.
Karen said, "I thought when we got married we had entered into a joint contract and that I'd have a companion, somebody who was interested in the same things I was interested in, somebody who wanted to share the burden of life's day-to-day chores as well as the fun times. Instead, I married a little boy, someone whose mother had taken care of him all his life and who expected me to do the same. … And he expects me to be grateful in the process!"
Hopelessness.
And hopeless feelings are contagious.
When people tell us stories like Karen's, we often share the hopelessness. As pastors and counselors, we hear story after story of troubled marriages and dashed hopes, and we are tempted to join in the despair. We value a community of strong marriages, but we often find ourselves painting a bleak picture about the modern pressures against marriage. We come to believe that marriage is a choice between grimly enduring against incredible pressure or giving up entirely and escaping into divorce. Such hopelessness ignores the hopeful fact that people can change, people can grow, miracles can occur, and changed attitudes and perceptions (by even one person) can significantly alter the relationship of a couple.
Actually, disillusionment is a step in the right direction. It helps sort the hopeless (that Karen's spouse "will be the buddy I dreamed he would be") from the hopeful (that "here is someone who is facing a different way of living, and he will have to give up some expectations as I will have to give up mine").
One night the youth director of a large church called me at home. He had a crisis on his hands. One of the teenagers in his youth group had just "caught" his father, a prominent physician, in a suspicious liaison at the home of his office nurse. As the story unfolded, I learned that the boy's mother, a controlling, possessive woman, had sent the son out to comb the town to find his father's car. When he succeeded, the mother believed she had incontrovertible evidence of unfaithfulness. She insisted, with screams and accusations, that the father leave home that very night.
In moments like these, hope is dealt a serious blow. What remains is at best a fragile glow. The task of the pastor or marriage counselor is to communicate an appreciation of the agony people are going through, and yet to keep alive a flicker of hope and to protect that flame with our best skill, beliefs and prayer.
In the last five years, I've discovered what I've wanted to believe for a long time-that marriages in trouble don't have to break up! It is possible to rebuild a marriage.
Jon described it this way: "Our marriage was OK at first. It served us well. But as time wore on, it showed some wear and tear, and our needs changed. Like our house-we loved it at first, but there came a time when we either had to remodel, build an addition, or leave it altogether."
Jon and his wife, Margaret, were able to renovate their relationship. Today they're part of a ministry called Recovery of Hope, which helps other couples on the brink of divorce.
Recovery of Hope
Believing a marriage can improve is the essential first step in restoring a deteriorating relationship.
Using that premise, two couples who met while counseling and teaching at Friends University in Wichita, Sheldon and Lillian Louthan and Floyd and Nelda Coleman, developed a program to help seriously troubled marriages. The program, to which pastors in the area often refer counselees, centers around a Saturday morning seminar and follow-up counseling. But I've found the principles transferable to other settings where pastors are trying to help struggling couples.
Recovery of Hope seminars provide a chance for attending couples to hear the stories of other couples, like Jon and Margaret, who were ready to divorce but who were able to rebuild their marriage. (These couples have been trained in sharing authentically.)
The attending couples listen in a nonthreatening and confidential setting. They are encouraged to identify for themselves in private what has caused them to lose hope and what would help them recover that hope. They are given an opportunity to meet with a professional counselor to spell out a plan to work on the specific issues that have caused the most stress. They are also encouraged to postpone divorce action for three to six months in order to give them time for the work. The couples are encouraged to identify someone who can pray for and support them as friends in the time of need.
The five essential and transferable elements:
1. Hearing the stories of other couples whose marriages have undergone a similar crisis and survived.
2. Utilizing a trained counselor who understands marital therapy.
3. Experiencing a caring community.
4. Discovering the possibility of change.
5. Beginning to understand that "I can be responsible for my own behavior and let go of the past in order to build a better future."
The ingredients seem simple. But they can have a powerful effect.
Hearing the Stories of Others
Bob and Dawn attended a Recovery of Hope seminar. They listened to three couples tell the story of their marriages: built in hope, tested in disillusionment, regrouping through the creative struggle to understand one another, and being rebuilt through a long but significant process into a strong and enduring relationship.
Afterwards as they met with the counselor, Dawn said, "You know, we've got a lot of problems. Our families are a mess. All of Bob's brothers and sisters are divorced. His father has been married three times and now has taken a male lover. My father abused me, and my mother hated me. I know we have been terribly cruel to each other, but when I heard today what those couples have been through, I believe we can make this marriage work, too. I don't know yet how to go about it, but I believe we can find a way. I'd like to tell you what I think some of our problems are. Maybe you can help us with them."
The responses of Bob and Dawn are not unusual. To hear someone else speak about the unspeakable-personal failure of a marriage contract, the death of dreams, the despair and pain-yet with a message of hope is a powerful encouragement. Again and again, I've seen couples find they can begin to believe in the possibilities of the future. That's what hope is about. It's the necessary ingredient for people to do the hard work necessary to rebuild.
Utilizing a Counselor
In times of crisis, people need someone with authority and skill to lean on, someone who understands marital therapy.
People in trouble have already tried their own problem solving. Now they are looking for someone who has more knowledge and skill than they have
Jim and Gina came to see me because I had helped Gina's cousin. When Jim called he said they needed an appointment "right away." They'd been married only four years. Jim had kept his relationship with most of his bachelor buddies alive and spent a fair amount of time outside the home. After their first baby was born, Gina felt increasingly trapped by his other interests and his unwillingness to share in what he perceived to be "woman's work." Jim was raised in a traditional farm home. His dad never helped with the inside work. Jim had no reference point to deal with this kind of problem. So he ignored it. He came home one day to find their mobile home empty. She'd gone to live with her parents.
When I told him he should ask Gina to come along for the first appointment, he seemed skeptical. He was surprised when she said yes and accompanied him to my office. He began to believe I knew some things he needed to know. He started to trust me. With some encouragement, he tried some new behaviors. He found out he could do some important things to make his marriage better.
Physicians have known for a long time that a particular aura surrounds the office of the healer. They call it the "time-honored doctor-patient relationship." That relationship has a kind of healing quality in itself. Pastors can also exercise that aura of authority and hope.
Not all counselors, however, are trained in marriage therapy. In my own practice, I realize now that in the past I was sometimes very helpful to individuals who came for counsel but perhaps inadvertently harmful to their marriage. Unless I work with couples with the understanding that I'm committed to develop the relationship, the marriage may fail as the counseling succeeds. Individual growth often drives a wedge in the relationship. If the marriage is already weakened the marriage relationship may be perceived as the enemy of individual growth instead of a true catalyst for personal development.
When Kirk and Jan came, in the first session I saw them each alone. She was just out of law school and trying to establish her practice. She had made a big investment in the training. She wanted a chance to try her wings in the best possible place. She was also having difficulty letting go of a secret affair she had been having during her last year in law school. Kirk, an accountant, had a much more conservative approach to life. He had never wanted her to go to graduate school. He thought she should be content at home. His family, immigrants from Europe, had very conventional expectations of women. Kirk resented his parents' control, but he more often expressed his anger at his wife, who acted out the freedom he wished he had.
After that first hour, I told them I was interested in the marriage and most of the time I would see them jointly. I sensed that if I had seen either of them alone, as individual counselees, I would only have contributed to the death of the marriage. Two years later I shared, with their pastor, in Kirk and Jan's recommitment ceremony.
Finding a Caring Community
Working with troubled couples, I have rediscovered the power of the caring community, something I should have known all along.
Following the pattern of Marriage Encounter, each couple in Recovery of Hope who makes a recovery plan is helped to find another couple who will care for them. This other couple may pray for them, perhaps visit, but at least represent the bond of a caring community. If possible, we try to find this couple from the troubled couple's congregation.
Two years after their Recovery of Hope experience, Don and Noreen reported that their caring couple had become their best friends. Noreen said, "We hardly knew Pam and Jim, but when they consented to be our caring couple, we knew at least they were aware we were having problems. We were too embarrassed for other people in the congregation to know. But we could talk to Jim and Pam. We didn't have to pretend with them."
Too often congregational concern is expressed in a way that is interpreted by troubled people as gossip. But when the care is clarified and a contract established, the powerful healing resource of the body of Christ can help the rebuilding.
The chairperson of the deacon board in one congregation called me to report they were sending a couple to Recovery of Hope. Loved ones, members of the congregation, and the pastor all were concerned for this marriage of twenty-five years that continued to be marked by hostility and bitterness. Now, with the children gone, the sullen stubbornness was being replaced by concrete plans for separation. The congregation paid the thirty-five-dollar seminar fee and promised to help with the cost of follow-up counseling. Here were people surrounded with love and prayer instead of gossip and malice. Without that atmosphere, the couple would not have even tried to salvage their marriage.
Discovering the Possibility of Change
A recovery plan is a specific agreement about the problems in the marriage and some remedial steps to be taken. This often leads to some concrete agreements to try to modify some behavior that has been a source of irritation. Often these behaviors are not big things, but they are the stuff of relationships.
Lyle and Betty had been struggling. One problem was that Lyle had been raised with four sisters, and he had never learned to take any household responsibilities. Lyle had an affair, and he and Betty separated and finally divorced. After two years, Lyle came to visit his children, who were living with Betty. The conversation was polite and guarded.
Betty was cautious, but inside she was praying for a miracle. As the family spent the evening together, Betty noticed how delighted the children were to see their father, and how much like old times it was, but she noticed one other important difference: he carried his own dishes to the kitchen, and he emptied his own ashtrays.
Eventually they decided to try again and were remarried. Now they are a "presenting couple" who share their story at Recovery of Hope.
Seeing even small changes enables people to see the potential of negotiations made in good faith. This provides the loamy soil in which hope grows.
With Ted and Andrea, the problem was communication. He was in sales, she in education. She would talk about her day at school, and he would respond with advice. She thought What does he know about it? She wasn't after answers, only understanding. She grew more and more silent at home. He would try to dig and probe, but of course, you can never make someone else talk.
We examined the habits and patterns of their interaction. He agreed to "invite" her to talk about school. She agreed to try to share something. He agreed to LISTEN and withhold advice. It was tough at first. He felt obliged to "help her out." But gradually he began to change. Then she had the courage to deal with the bigger things in their life.
Learning to Be Responsible
Many times people in a painful marriage need to learn that "I can be responsible for my own behavior and let go of the past in order to build a better future."
Terry and Anne had been married twelve years. They had three children, ages seven, five, and three. Ever since the birth of the third child, sex had been a battleground. Terry, feeling somewhat insecure around his friends who bragged about their own sex lives, felt he had to maintain a macho image. As often as not, however, his wife discouraged his sexual advances. In response he would alternate between sullen pouting and brutal demanding, punctuated by accusations that "something must be wrong with you." This did not make his wife more responsive.
Anne developed such a seething resentment that when she would "give in," she would often rush to the bathroom and vomit as soon as her husband had satisfied himself.
In counseling, they each began to wonder about the origins of their behaviors. She began to explore why sexual behavior was so fraught with double meaning in her life. He began to explore his insecurity and why he believed that he was OK only when someone else gave in to his whims. As both began to trace the patterns of their behavior in their personal histories, some understanding and respect began to replace the blaming and accusations. He had to give up the expectation that she should respond to his every whim so he could match his friends' tales of sexual prowess (which, of course, were not nearly as impressive as he led her to believe when he was angry). She had to let go of an understanding that sex was always a power play. Instead she began to see it as a gift she could share at times of her good will. These lessons did not come easily. Time, work, tears, prayer were all part of the process.
But most important, there had to be forgiveness, a letting go of the past, a turning over to God of the hurts, bitterness, and anger that fueled the fighting for so long. Getting on with forgiveness is crucial to nurturing hope. Because I have seen couples forgive each other of sins and offenses I would find hard to forgive, I have more faith than ever in the possibilities of marriages to find and restore a wounded and battered love relationship. It takes this kind of miracle.
Marriage hope comes as people learn to forgive and to be forgiven. All of us have dreams or expectations that damage the personality of those with whom we live. Being willing to give up those expectations and humbly ask for God's forgiveness and the forgiveness of our spouse is to open up the possibility for love to grow. It allows the other person to be what God intended him or her to be, rather than what we intended them to be.
Even when hopelessness fills the air, we can point to the power of God to restore and rebuild.
I remember reading once about a man who stood on a hill above Hiroshima on the day of the fateful atomic explosion. Although he escaped the immediate blast and was sheltered from the firestorm, he watched with despair the vaporizing cloud that engulfed life as he had always known it. As the hours passed he sat immobilized, nowhere to go, no one to turn to. Finally the smoke began to lift from the black, sooty covering of what had been his city. As he watched, he saw green grass on the hills on the other side of the city, more than fifteen miles away. "You know," he said as he told the story, "the color of hope is green."
I often feel as counselor that my primary responsibility is to help people see beyond the immediate awfulness of their present moment and discover there is color again on the other side. The couples who share their stories in the Recovery of Hope seminars are, for me, the keepers of the green. They have helped me believe in possibilities I used to doubt, and they have helped many couples find "strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow."
Robert J. Carlson is a pastoral counselor with Prairie View, Inc., in Wichita, Kansas.
A WIFE IS NOT A HUSBAND
Reprinted by permission from The Mystery of Marriage: As Iron Sharpens Iron by Mike Mason ((c) 1985 Multnomah).
It is a dangerous thing in marriage to forget, even for a moment, that one's partner is a person of the opposite sex. This may sound like a preposterous unlikelihood, but in fact it is precisely what tends to happen in a marriage: just as cohabitation can at times serve to heighten the psychological differences between people, so also can it serve to flatten the anatomical ones. That very depth of intimacy which is the soul of a relationship can become its most insidious enemy, as a couple may be lulled into assuming that they are far more similar, in every way, than they really are. Continual togetherness, predictability of behavior, and just the routine sameness of everyday life are all factors that constantly threaten to blur that compelling distinction between man and woman which is the salt of marriage and which was the reason for the whole drama of attraction in the first place. The result is that couples can end up arguing over some of the very differences which initially fascinated them, or else assuming there is agreement in areas where agreement is not even desirable.
So it can be an important thing for a husband to remember that his wife is a creature vastly different from himself, not simply a different person, but a woman: almost, indeed, an alien being! Of course the woman is not an alien being at all, but a human being. Still, she is a different kind of human from the man, and that means she is bound to have a different way of looking at things, different categories of thoughts, different shades of emotion, some different needs, and so on. Naturally many things about her will be strange just because she is a different person from her husband; but the strangeness will be augmented, or lifted onto another plane, by the simple fact that she is a woman and not a man. When people forget that the opposite sex is opposite, it can result in men actually resenting women for not being men, and vice versa. Ultimately this is just one aspect of the way in which people are continually being hoodwinked into assuming they are in relationship with one another, when really all they are relating to is themselves. And there is neurosis in a nutshell.
-Mike Mason
Hope, British Columbia
Copyright © 1986 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
