I'm trying to remember what exactly all of my/our counseling experiences were like. IC for me wasn't all that helpful with my first doc. It was the doc provided at the mental health center, and because I am a teacher it was free. They wanted to have me make graphs of my interactions with people and develop coping strategies for daily life, life remembering to pay bills when I was anxious. I know that is what many of the people there needed, but that wasn't what I needed. Another IC wanted to delve into my feelings of rejection from childhood, which made for some good tears, but it seemed irrelevant. At some point you have to suck it up and deal with the present. I poo poo the idea that a "bad childhood" dooms you to some stunted life anyway; I have friends whose current happiness flies in the face of that myth.

Our MC was one provided by the marriage and family counseling dept. of the university where my H goes. He really wasn't too bad. He did get a little frustrated that we wanted to keep talking about the affair after awhile. He wanted us to focus on learning new behaviors that would improve our marriage, which I think was good in intention. But we got hung up on the sex thing, and my H got uncomfortable.

Because I have had some extensive experience with counseling and psychologists now, being bipolar and all, I think sometimes modern psychology does little more than give us a buffer or security blanket. Here's what I mean. If my disease or incidents rfom my childhood are the keys to my affair, it lets both me and my H off the hook for any marital concerns. I had an affair because I was so sick I couldn't help it, and he wasn't accountable for any part of our marriage because I was so damaged there was no pleasing me anyway. Everybody's happy, and no one has to look at themselves. That is one reason I reject bipolar as a "reason" for my affair.

I love the MB principles, but I will say this. It is easy to say, why cheap out? Spend the money on the real thing! But I am a teacher, and maybe not for much longer. H is finishing school. Even before that, we do not have much extra, and we do not live extravagently. We are probably not ever going to have 195 an hour or 3500 dollars lying around. That is one of the reasons that I am glad there are so many books, and I am glad this forum is here.

I think psychological counselling in general is mostly bogus and rarely backed up by scientific studies or facts. It seems anyone can hang a shingle and call themselves a therapist. People have no trouble paying for this service either, because it means they don't have to take responsibility for messing up their own lives (I'm a criminal because my parents were incompetent etc.). These types of therapists and counsellors abound and have no shortage of "patients". Unfortunately, when someone who is otherwise normal truly needs counselling, how are they supposed to know that 90% of the counsellors out there are just a waste of time and money? Not to mention false hope? Few people find MB first when d-day occurs. Most make a whole slew of mistakes before they find it.

I posed this exact question to Marriage Builders and received a reply stating they do not take insurance. The reason being they offer a COACHING service not a COUNSELING service. According to Marriage Bulders, the primary differences between coaching and other forms of help is that coaching involves a more directive and educational approach.

As indicated in the Marriage Builders Coaching Center, Steve Harley and Jennifer Chalmers provide marriage coaching services not couseling.

The state of Minnesota, in which Marriage Builders is located, has a licensing requirement for counselors. According to the Minnesota Board of Psychology, in Minnesota you must be licensed to practice any type of therapy with the exception of psychotherapy and hypnotherapy. It is possible that there are some licensed therapists who may offer a type of life coaching service or may even, on a rare occasion provide a therapy session over the phone. To determine if your therapist is licensed, you can ask them if they are licensed and their license certificate should be posted in a visible place in their office. You can look for license credentials after their name, i.e. LP for License Psychologist, or LMFT for License Marriage Family Therapist. You can call any licensing board in the state and verify if the individual is licensed. There are several other Boards that license social workers, behavior analyst, drug and alcohol counselor. All are available to the public and you can check on the license of any individual before you use their service.

Marriage Builders stated to me that if I personally was concerned about meeting a license requirement I would then want to set up an appointment to coach with Jennifer Harley-Chalmers. But even though Jennifer does have the license, Marriage Builders still does not provide diagnostic code as there is no code for �coaching�.

I hope this explanation is helpful. It would be an individual decision for anyone to do coaching versus counseling as, according to the information I obtained, there is a difference.

Thanks for the explanation, sewingmom. Too bad being licensed is no indicator of the competence to save a marriage, much less an indicator of an understanding of the dynamics of adultery.

If anyone is interested in knowing how Dr Harley came to found Marriage Builders, it all began when he discovered that traditional "counseling" doesn't work. He worked at a large clinic in Minnesota and couldn't figure out why no marriages were ever saved. So he researched their case files and found this was the rule, not the exception. His article How Dr. Harley Learned to Save Marriages is quite informative.

Another example of how a license is meaningless. Drug and alcohol counselors, for example, send their own clients to Alcoholics Anonymous for help. They call US to pick up and sponsor their clients. These same counselors come to AA for their their own drinking problem. None of us are licensed in AA but the AA program can do what they cannot because AA uses a behaviorial approach, not a feeling based approach.

I've found ONE hour with Steve Harley to be worth MONTHS of time with psychologists and LMFT.

It was an LMFT who told me I needed to find a way to "get over" my H's EA or we'd never get anywhere.

I never went back to see him after that.

Non MB counselors tend to focus backward, rather than forward. As Luri pointed out, it's easy to blame behavior on other medical issues. As Mel pointed out, they like to let you compartmentalize, if that saves you from having to take ownership.
MB Coaching and the kind of "therapy" received in AA are similar in that they:
1. Give you some pretty specific recipes to follow (12 steps, ENs/LBs, etc.)
2. Focus on current behavior
3. Allow you to receive support from others who have been in your shoes.
I think I know which system is more likely to work.

Bump for noanswers

I haven't posted here for a while, but something made me log in and check this thread out. All I can say is "Holy Sh!!". I think I better go hide my head in shame because I'm a friggin Counselor. I have often been the first one to slam someone's therapist here on MB for not knowing anything about infidelity, but to slam everyone who is in the mental health profession (Counselors, LISWs, Psychologists) is ludicrous. There are good and mediocre people in every profession. The people I have met in my profession work their butts off for very little money, and actually get results. I do intensive in-home therapy and just spent 4 hours with a family in crisis. Ask that family if I suck at my job? Should individual therapists be doing MC? No, not if they aren't trained for it. Just like a family practitioner shouldn't do heart surgery.

My H and I had a great MC. I actually today was thinking I wanted to send him a thank you note. Was he a "MB" therapist? No! It's a disservice to tell people here that the only qualified therapists are followers of MB. There are wonderful MCs out there, but the key is finding a pro-M MC who understands infidelity. We coached with Steve Harley and he helped us a lot, but it was our MC who brought us home. If we had just done MB we probably wouldn't be Med right now because I was a very needy BS, and our MC helped us navigate through what I needed. And yes, it had a lot to do with feelings, especially mine. Our MC helped my H understand that he needed to do what I needed, which was sit with my horrible feelings, to help me overcome the PTSD I was experiencing. Our MC understood how my H got sucked into an addiction and helped him be whole again. It wasn't Fing easy either. For some people MB is all they might need. For others they need something more intensive. My H is a different, better man for having done some of that touchy feely, past work. I 100% believe in doing behavioral work, and I 100% believe it isn't all there is to good therapy. In fact, I see people making real changes every day by combining insight with behavioral changes. And if a person never fixes the original hole it's just going to keep biting them in the a$$.

Where are we now, as a result of seeing that non-MB therapist? We paid our dues and are on the other side of this mess.

CV, did anyone here slam everyone who is in the mental health profession? I didn't see anyone do this.

I did see people give their own experiences. Sadly, many of these were not good, and confirm your statement that individual therapists should not be doing MB if they are not trained for it. Surely you do not want people to deny their individual experiences?

Your experiences with MC was good, and I'm glad it helped you to get to the other side of this mess. I don't think that the unsuccessful stories here invalidate your good experience any more than yours invalidates theirs.

Have you been trained in pro-marriage MC? Would you help a couple with their marriage without that specific training?

CV55, my H and I went to a counselor that sent us to Marriage Builders and used MB principles that saved our marriage. It is doubtful our marriage would have made it otherwise. That being said, I know now that was a CRAPSHOOT and we are one of the few who ever reaped any benefit from a MC. One of the studies Dr Harley's cites most often is the Consumer Reports survey that was peer reviewed in Journal of Marriage and the Family and American Psychologist, that found that marriage counseling was the LEAST effective of all venues of counseling, with an 84% failure rate.

Dr Harley speaks of the dismal record of traditional marriage counseling and I believe him. Every week, some person shows up here who was the recipient of destructive, marriage wrecking advice. Just today, a woman showed up who has resigned herself to divorce after her MC told her that she would be "codependent" if she called the OW's husband. She is headed towards divorce.

One of Dr Harley's oft cited reviews comes from a review of a study published in the Journal of Family and Marriage by Dr John Gottman, who said "Recently some of our best scholars (e.g. Jacobson and Addis 1993) have contended that marital therapy has a relapse rate so high that the entire enterprise may be in a state of crisis. Consistent with these conclusions, the most recent Consumer Reports study of psychotherapy (Seligman, 1995) also reported that marital therapy received the lowest marks from psychotherapy consumers. Marital therapy may be at an impasse because it is not based on a process model derived from prospective longitudinal studies of what real couples do that predicts if their marriages will wind up happy and stable, unhappy and stable, or end up in divorce." [Predicting Marital Happiness and Stability from Newlywed Interactions: John M Gottman; James Coan; cybil Carrere; Catherine Swanson Journal of Marriage and the Family; Feb 1998; 60, 1

[I have the above article along with the The Effectiveness of Psychotherapy - The Consumer Reports Study; Martin E. P. Seligman; University of Pennsylvania; American Psychologist, December 1995 Copyright ı 1995 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.,
Vol. 50, No. 12, 965ı974 - email me at ohmelodylane@aol.com for these 2 articles on PDF]

In his article titled How Dr Harley Learned How to Save Marriages

So, while you and I did make it, the truth is that we are the EXCEPTION and not the rule. My experience on this board bears out what Dr Harley says when he says that traditional marriage counseling causes more harm than good. Every day we see the evidence of that.

A recent post from Saturday, May 15th, with marriage wrecking advice from a counselor, written by L46, a BH, about his wayward wife:

here

The wayward wife demands "privacy" and conducts a single party life, all with the blessing of the "counselor." The focus is all on the BH and his "angst" and never the destructive behavior of his wayward wife, who is well on her way to affair #2.

A post from today with marriage wrecking advice from a counselor:

here

This poster has pretty much given up and has filed for divorce while her H carries on his affair from the guest room. here The poster hasn't even exposed to the OW's husband because she has been told by her "counselor" that would be "codependent."

These posts are a typical example of what we see here day in and day out.

My WH is a Marriage and Family Therapist and I tried for years to get him to study MB principles so he could apply them in his practice. Unfortunately, just as he refused to apply them in our marriage, he refused to apply them professionally.

I cannot tell you the number of times he would tell me about a couple he was counseling and I would immediately be able to recognize there was an affair (and tell him so) and he would deny it and continue 'working' with the couple, until they eventually split up.

It seemed like his practice became one that ultimately guided the couple toward an amicable separation and eventually divorce vs. repairing the marriage.

On my own D-Day one of the things WH threw in my face was that I always assumed his clients were having affairs (trying to get me to see how suspicious I was, while he denied his own affair). Of course, in almost every instance with his clients he eventually discovered there was an affair, but he was too blind to see it until it was too late.

I do feel there are many helpful counselors and therapists out there, but unfortunately there are also many that completely 'miss the boat', especially when it comes to dealing with affairs, applying MB principles and actually saving marriages.

CV, I think you missed the point entirely. Basically, if you're going to make MB work, you have to work ALL of it. If you have an MC or an IC who are giving advice that counters MB, then YOU ARE NOT WORKING THE MB PROGRAM.
Not to say the M won't recover, because it might. Odds are certainly against it, though.
If you go to the trouble of learning the principles, arming yourself with the building blocks to make a bridge, yet decide to leave a few blocks out, guess what? No bridge. It's pretty basic.
Sorry to say, but it bears repeating--MB is designed to be worked as a package deal. Will your marriage improve if you employ only a few strategies? Maybe. But if you're depositing in the love bank, but draining with the love busters, it's not going to. If you're doing Plan A forever, it's not going to. If you do a half-arsed Plan B, it won't have the desired effect.
Point is:
MOST COUNSELORS WILL NOT REINFORCE THOSE PRINCIPLES.

Marriage Builders works as a "package" because it is really a model of how romantic relationships work. Rather than create a model in which individual components of a good relationship are compared to what might be a bad relationship and try to make a couple fit into the model that changes communication styles or negotiating methods or examining things that happened so long ago even God has to look at His notes to see what is being discussed, Dr Harley has put together a model that accounts for variability while still explaining why people fall in love.

While our mother's always told us that "love isn't enough" to keep a marriage together (probably at the urging of our father who had dreams of retirement filled with visits from his grandchildren and not dreams of raising those grandchildren himself because their parents were unemployed but in love) love is in fact the very thing that either makes us want to be together or to get away from each other.

Many other models claim to be based on science and latest research and bible principals and ancient Chinese philosophy and maybe even quotes from Graucho and Chico Marx or Chairman Mao. They might explain perfectly how a wonderful functioning marriage is supposed to work. Where they fail to accomplish much is when the marriage is not working and the couple is wanting to dissolve the marriage either together or one seeking to walk away from the relationship while the other wants to repair it.

And I think it is the repair part that stumps most logically based folks. I repair stuff for a living and the way I go about it is to first attempt to troubleshoot the nonfunctional parts of the system. I strive to identify what is broken so that I can then fix that part and then see if something else needs fixing beyond that point. It lets me work on only what is broken, replace only the parts that need replacing and saves money and time in the long run.

Most of the time...

Sometimes I find that no amount of tweaking and replacement of pieces can fix something and it very quickly reaches a place where a decision needs to be made whether to keep trying to fix it or dispose of it and start with a new one.

And this is the scientific method applied to romantic relationships, which is what a marriage is in our culture. A counselor that uses this kind of troubleshooting method looks ever deeper into the system in an effort to discover why it isn't working. They examine stuff that happened last week, last year, ten years ago, things going back to when we were twelve and five and what our grandfather experienced when he was 14...

And all the while the marriage is withering away, turning to dust and blowing off with the wind. Dr Harley asked why this was happening and through research and understanding of the actual science involved in the way the human brain works, not just some whim or some cultural example or some shallow reading of what he thought a good marriage might look like, he used actual research methods and documented those things he discovered along the way, he was able to come up with a model of romantic relationships that explains the science beginning with only one assumption. That assumption is that what we do affects others.

He doesn't work from a place of the biblical example of Man being created by God and Woman being created from the Man and both being made in God's image...See we now have to define what is in God's image and what is not and so now we have to see where people are not acting as if God's image was present and of course from that same biblical model we know that since sin entered the world Man has been sick and is pretty much helpless to fix himself by himself...

He doesn't begin with some ancient marriage contract or the way vows are made at a wedding in some long lost culture high in the mountains of Tibet where the average person lives to be 120 years old and the average marriage lasts 105 years and everyone is related to everyone because there are only 40 people living in this valley high in the hills and so we are actually only talking about 5 or 6 marriages at any given point in time...

With a bit of finagling, almost any model of marriage might be made to fit the majority of the data and many of the models might explain how it is supposed to work or even why it doesn't work when the model fails, but based on one simple assumption, that what we do affects other people, Dr Harley's model fits the observable data within each of those other models while also taking into account the variability of the observations.

Marriage Builders works as a package because it isn't individual parts at all. It is one model of how marriage works and the "parts" are really just steps that have to be taken in order to get us to be able to do what leads to falling in love with each other. THAT is what makes MB different. It doesn't look at why things aren't working, it says "Do what works."

If what I do can make other people feel anything toward me depending on what it is that I do, then what I do can be modified in order to cause people to feel a certain way about me if I can identify what will make them feel that way and then concentrate on doing those things. Anybody ever heard of Emotional Needs?

And if what I do can make a person feel some other way about me if I do things that make them have negative feelings instead and I can identify what things make people have negative feelings about me and avoid doing those things then I can be assured they will not have negative feelings about me.

Marriage builders is all wrapped up in trying to maximize the ability to produce certain feelings in my spouse by doing things that lead her to have those feelings and avoid doing anything that causes her to feel negatively about me. All the rest is just looking for what works and what doesn't and beyond this troubleshooting any efforts to identify broken parts is fruitless.

In Dr Harley's counseling model he does not discuss ways dig into the past to discover the root cause of resentment or to find the first worst case example of where a couple had a break down in communicating needs and desires. He simply instructs them in ways to do those things that make them want to be together and avoid doing things that make them not want to be together.

"Doctor, it hurts (my wife) when I do dis..."
So don't do dis...

"____ makes my husband happy and he can't get enough of it."
So give him more ____.

Marriage Builders doesn't work in pieces because it is all an explanation of a whole process. Without ANY of the pieces the model does NOT work. The model only explains the data when it is taken in its entirety.

All the data fits the MB model pretty well as opposed to most other models which require assuming certain things about the data or about how the brain works or about spiritual things. MB fits within all of those things because it does not contradict any of those models of marriage. Yet it does not require any of the things those other models need in order to make them work for the observable data. It does not require a religious experience in order to work. It does not require learning a lot of complicated exercises in order to gain understanding. All it requires is a change in what we do.

Assumption: What people do affects other people.

If what I do affects others, then I can choose to do things that make others to want to be with me and avoid doing things that make them not want to be with me.

Certain things make my wife want to be with me. If I do them consistently, she will find me hard to resist and want to be with me.

Other things make her not want to be with me. If I avoid doing those things, she will not want to get away from me and will not feel she needs to protect herself from my actions.

If I do only those things that make my wife want to be with me and avoid doing anything that makes her not want to be with me, she will want to always be with me and never want to be away from me.

If she wants to always be with me and never wants to be away from me, then I she will never want to leave me.

If she never wants to leave me and because of what she is doing and not doing I never want to leave her, we will be together forever (or until one of us dies in which case the arrangement will become invalid)

The rest are the tools needed to make it work.

I appreciate the discussion, but I think we may have gotten off track a little.

This isn't a debate of "MC or MB's", it's not an either/or question. The question is can a (good) independent MC be compatible with or even compliment the MB's program. Dr. Harley seems to think the answer is yes.

http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi7100_counselor.html

But you do realize that he says that MOST counselors are not good? Rather, he says most are HARMFUL to marriages. So sure, a counselor *CAN* be good, but in reality, most are not and actually cause more harm than good. That is the whole point of this discussion.

here

here

CV,

I'd guess this is a pretty difficult topic for you to be objective about, yes? I understand. I certainly have things that I am that way about.

Counseling. That's something that I've had a great deal of experience with since my father had Bipolar Disorder. I went to several different counselors over the years and I got VERY, VERY frustrated. I found that if a counselor didn't have specific, personal experience with Bipolar Disorder that I spent all of my time trying to explain why my father did the things he did ~ or trying to explain why "typical advice" that you might give someone dealing with a "difficult" parent, just wouldn't fit the bill. I also watched as my father was able to fool counselor after counselor that things were "A-Okay" with him - ahhh, Bipolar Disorder can be very cunning and convincing.

Anyway, finally [after several YEARS] I figured out that I needed to make phone call after phone call in order to find a VERY SPECIFIC counselor, one who had essentially lived what I had lived - and that took some time. Once I did that, I was able to find the perfect counselor for me. A wonderful Christian counselor as it turned out. I went to her on and off for several years - I found that I needed her most when my dad was in a manic cycle. She helped me immensely.

Once my father passed away in 2007, I went back to her for "grief counseling". I hadn't seen her since my affair (2005), and felt I needed to "catch her up". Now, while I was wayward, Mr. W had tried to make an appointment for us to go and see her and I flat out refused - made him cancel the appointment - pitched a nice little wayward tantrum to boot. Little did we know that was actually a "lucky break" for us. So in 2007, I sat and explained my affair to my counselor...To my utter shock and disbelief she said to me, "Mrs. W, you must have really loved OM a lot to have done that". I thank God that wayward me didn't have an audience with her, and that at that point I had 2 years of MB under my belt.

Now, that experience in no way changes that she helped me greatly with the Bipolar issues. I will forever remain grateful to her for that. Here's the thing though, she would have counseled me if I had gone to her while wayward - she WOULD have felt qualified to do so, and it's sure enough my opinion that she was NOT qualified for that!

Wayward me wouldn't have sought another counselor who specialized in infidelity - EVEN knowing all that I did about the need for specialized counseling. It was far easier for me to discern what I did about Bipolar Disorder - I'd had YEARS to figure that out. I would not have realized that infidelity required specialized counseling. Now, YOU did, but you had an advantage there being a counselor yourself - you would have thought I would have also had an advantage with all the experience I'd had, but I did not - my experience was very specific. Mr. W certainly did not - he'd never been to a counselor before in his life.

Here's the thing, the average BS doesn't have truckloads of experience with the world of counseling, and they certainly don't have the luxury of YEARS to figure it all out. Their marriage is likely to END at the hands of their WS and an unqualified counselor. This thread is GOOD for those BSs. And it's also good for any WSs reading - the last thing they need is to be enabled by an unqualified counselor, and I know you would agree. Most of these folks in crisis, don't have the know-how or the time it would take to find a qualified pro-marriage counselor who specializes in infidelity - and we certainly have no way of discerning that for them - until of course, some damage has already been done when they report their bad experiences to us here...It seems the easiest route is to refer them to people that we already KNOW specialize in infidelity and are very pro-marriage, right? That just seems the kindest and most responsible thing to do, imo.

This thread had a very specific intended audience. BSs here on MARRIAGE BUILDERS. These folks have presumably chosen MB as the program they want to use. The best advice for them is that they choose an MB coach to help with that. And it works out extra nicely that the MB coaches just happen to be VERY pro marriage. No one is telling them not to do as you did, and SUPPLEMENT the MB coaching with a more "touchy-feely" approach LATER, if they feel the need for that...Most that come here need EMERGENCY help with getting the affair to END - I can't think of a better place for them to learn that than here, and with an MB trained coach. I've no doubt that the purpose of this thread was to HELP SAVE MARRIAGES, and not to denigrate all counselors everywhere...

Anyway, I've rambled long enough. Hopefully some of it makes sense.

Best,

Mrs. W