New Approach to Marriage Counseling!
I have friends who do marriage counseling and marriage litigation. They sit down with the couple who has decided that the marriage isn’t working out. The first thing they tell them is, “Look, this marriage is not working out but neither of you is to blame. There’s not guilt here, because you’ve both given it your best shot, it’s just obvious there’s incompatibilities.
Don’t make it worse by becoming angry and dragging each other through court and with accusations and so on and so forth. Be adult, be humane, be intelligent; just recognize it didn’t work out.”
They’re just shocked, just shocked every time. They just look it him and look at each other, because all this time they’ve been so angry with each other and then they realize they’re not to blame. They gave it their best shot; it didn’t work.
The whole anger goes out of the relationship and they sit down and say
all right, “We’ve got children; we’ve got assets, and so on. Let’s find a happy way to divide them that doesn’t require pain, most of it to the lawyers, and so on.”
They go away and they’re friends for the rest of their lives, because they removed the element of blame.
You’ll find that most adults are still angry with their parents for not being perfect parents. In other words, their parents did or didn’t do something when they were growing up and 20 or 30 years later, adults are still angry over their parents. One of the first things we do is we say, forgive your parents. Forgive your parents for everything they did.