If your marriage is half as bad as mine, you don’t want to miss what I’m about to tell you. You can save your failed marriage even if you’re the only one trying! The information I am going to share with you was a life saver for me and my wife and it was not something we learned in marriage counseling. But it worked!
You’ve probably guessed by now that this isn’t your typical internet article written by a so-called “marriage expert.” I think my only experience comes from being there and figuring out the hard way NOT to save a marriage! After almost getting divorced, I was able to save my marriage even though my wife had no interest in saving our marriage at first. It turned out to be more effective and long lasting than anything I have come across.
The biggest shock came when I realized how much time and money we had wasted on marriage counseling. I discovered an amazing statistic; Traditional marriage counseling has a miserable success rate as a tool to save a failing marriage. Approximately 8 out of 10 couples who wait for counseling end up divorced! And these counselors call themselves doctors! If my doctor had an 80% failure rate, I wouldn’t be wasting my time with that doctor.
The biggest problem with traditional marriage counselors is that they are primarily trained in individual counseling. His training and focus is on the individual’s health and life satisfaction. There’s nothing wrong with this, it’s just that most counselors who operate with this model actually have very little training or experience in saving a marriage. His solution is to teach better communication skills. Communication is rarely the main problem.
The real solution, and this I promise you, is to focus on the marriage itself instead of the two of you as individuals. While this may seem like a radical or strange approach and certainly strange to most counselors, it works better than the traditional approach! By diverting attention from yourself and your spouse, you will learn specific things to say and do, and specific ways in which you can behave that will immediately begin to change the dynamics of the relationship. This isn’t rocket science, but many couples have claimed that it was the complete opposite of what they had been doing before. It certainly was for me!