Marital Counseling

Paper Summary:

Due to the astounding body of evidence suggesting that marriage failure generally results from a breakdown of communication and from unrealistic marriage expectations and/or on spousal perceptual biases, it seems that marriage counseling and premarital counseling could in fact be highly useful tools for assuring the survival of a marriage. By performing a literature review on several sources on the subject of divorce statistics and the history of marital counseling, the paper suggests that couples who received marriage counseling during marriage or pre-marital counseling before marriage report a lower rate of divorce than those who never had the benefit of counseling. The paper then describes the methodology and findings of a research project performed to prove this hypothesis.

From the Paper:

"If divorce is usually caused by some force for which counseling cannot really provide an answer, such as social or economic pressure, then there is less support for a hypothesis regarding the power of marital and premarital counseling to prevent divorce. However, if divorce is based on preventable or treatable flaws within the relationship, than the hypothesis may stand. Secondly, one must address the issue as to whether or not couples inside a therapeutical setting show any signs of being better adjusted than couples outside a therapeutical setting, and if past evidence has shown premarital counseling to be effective. If it has not, then the hypothesis as currently stated may still be correct, but it will have to be far more conclusive to prove its point. Finally, one must address the issue of whether or not counseling may in some cases be seen as evidence of impending marriage dissolution rather than marital health, and as such be seen as a negative relational sign. (For example, it is possible that most people approach counseling as a last-ditch effort to save their relationship, or that most of the people enrolled in premarital counseling are in very high risk groups and already undergoing problems. If so, it is further possible that the situation is not so much one of the efficacy or inefficacy of counseling programs themselves, but rather concerns itself with the way in which counseling programs segregate failed from non-failed relationships)."

More papers on Marital Counseling:

• Research Paper # 110568 : "Marital Counseling"
• Term Paper # 140423 : "Marital and Premarital Counseling"
• Essay # 122416 : "Biblical Analysis in Counseling"

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