Marriage and Relationship Counseling

Intimate relationships and marriage relationships, along with the relationships we have with our parents and children, are the deepest, most intense connections we will ever have with another person. Our partners see us at our best and, unfortunately, at our worst. We share children, our homes, finances, our proudest moments, our successes, our grief, and our failures. We’re both present at our children’s graduations, their weddings, each other’s parents’ funerals.

Divorces, according to social science research, are believed to be some of the most stressful or devastating events life can bring to us. Spending decades, or facing death, in an unhappy marriage is less well understood because it’s not a discrete event. Years of unhappy marriage is so intertwined with every other life event that its effects are impossible to isolate. But it can’t be good.

The positive potential of any relationship, and the hope for that relationship, is that there are exactly two decision makers: ourselves and our partners. Two people, determined to get past their differences, have remodeled entire houses, have survived shipwrecks, have even escaped from prisons together. When two people agree on a goal, they can leave the past in the past and achieve all kinds of things they could never have achieved on their own, including peace and harmony.

Jack Kilpatrick approaches marriage and relationship counseling as a completely different process than individual therapy. Individual therapy is about intra-psychic phenomena, everything that goes on inside a person. Marriage counseling is about inter-psychic phenomena, everything that goes on between two people who each have a complex intrapsychic life that the other person will never fully understand. This is a very common sense and realistic approach. Intimate relationships are about our highest, most spiritual selves. They are also about things that we wouldn’t want anyone else to know about us. Relationship counseling needs to encompass and balance these two extremes.