How to Choose the Right Marriage Counselor: What Made Ours Work

I went to marriage therapy for more than two years, and our marriage looks very different today than it did when we started.

Eventually, I decided it was time to stop going.

Not because therapy wasn’t working.

It was because our counselor had given us so many ways to work through disagreements that somewhere along the way, we started doing them without him.

I would think, “Okay, this is something we need to talk about in our next session,” and then my husband and I would work it out before the appointment ever happened.

After that happened enough times, I realized we knew how to get ourselves unstuck.

The things we had been practicing in therapy had started becoming second nature.

I also had friends who had gone or were going to marriage counseling, and I would hear very different stories. They didn’t feel like they were getting anywhere. They were still having the same arguments. Sometimes counseling itself seemed to become another frustrating experience they were having together.

That made me think about why ours had been so helpful.

And I actually think we got really lucky.

Our counselor came from a referral we had received, and looking back, I can see several things he did exceptionally well that I wouldn’t have known to look for when we started.

But the biggest one is probably this:

He wasn’t on my side.

He wasn’t on my husband’s side either.

He was on the side of our marriage.

He Could Validate Me Without Helping Me Build a Case Against My Husband 

There were plenty of times I went into therapy upset.

I wanted to tell our counselor what had happened, why it bothered me, and why I reacted the way I did.

And he was very good at making me feel understood.

I think a marriage therapist absolutely should validate your feelings. Being on the side of the marriage doesn’t mean dismissing one person’s hurt in the name of keeping the peace.

Our therapist could understand why I felt the way I did.

What made him especially effective was that he could do that without making me more certain that my husband was wrong.

He would help me look at what might have been happening for my husband too.

Your therapist shouldn’t help you build a stronger case against the person you came there to reconnect with.

I think that’s one of the things I would pay much more attention to if I were choosing a marriage counselor today.

I would want someone who could understand me and validate what I was feeling while still being able to see the person sitting on the other side of the marriage.

He Helped Me Understand My Husband Differently 

This may have been one of the biggest changes for me.

My therapist helped me understand my husband in ways I had never understood him before.

And I do think the fact that our therapist was a man played some role in that for me.

He was living some of the same kinds of life experiences my husband was living. There were times he could explain how my husband might be hearing something or experiencing something, and I would think, “Oh. I never thought about it that way.”

That doesn’t mean a male therapist is automatically better for a heterosexual couple or that a woman couldn’t have helped me understand the same things.

It was simply something that mattered in my experience with this particular therapist.

There were things I interpreted one way that my husband experienced very differently.

Our therapist seemed able to translate some of that for me.

And then something else was happening at the same time.

I was reading a lot.

Two of the books I was reading during that period were How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It and The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.

That combination—therapy and reading—ended up being incredibly useful for me.

My therapist would suggest that I relate to my husband differently in a certain situation. Then I would read something that helped me understand more of the why behind what he was suggesting.

And sometimes I saw myself in those books in ways that were uncomfortable.

I could recognize ways women in the examples were relating to their husbands that weren’t getting the response they wanted.

Then I would realize:

I do that.

I could see why it wasn’t working.

That was very different from simply being told, “Try saying this instead,” or “Handle this differently next time.”

Once I understood why the way I was approaching my husband wasn’t effective, it became much easier for me to try something else.

And when I related to him differently, things between us began to change.

The books didn’t replace our marriage therapist. They helped me understand some of what he was already trying to teach me.

I Had to Be Willing to Hear Something I Hadn’t Considered 

This is probably the part of marriage therapy that I underestimated most.

You can have an exceptional therapist who sees both people clearly and offers another perspective.

But you still have to be willing to consider it.

An open mind was absolutely crucial for me.

If I had walked into every session only looking for confirmation that my interpretation was correct, I don’t know how much our therapist could have helped me.

I already knew my side.

I knew why I was upset and what I thought my husband had done wrong.

What I didn’t always know was what I couldn’t see.

That was where therapy became valuable.

My counselor could say, essentially, “Here’s another possibility.”

Then I had a choice.

I could immediately explain why that wasn’t what happened.

Or I could entertain the possibility that he might be seeing something I wasn’t.

That didn’t require me to automatically agree with him.

It didn’t mean my husband was always right.

It meant I became more willing to ask myself whether there was another reasonable way to understand what had just happened between us.

Love and Stosny, authors of How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It, have a term for something very close to what I was learning: binocular vision. Instead of seeing the relationship entirely through your own experience, you learn to hold your perspective while making room for your partner’s too. 

I like that description because my therapist wasn’t asking me to abandon my version of what happened. He was helping me realize that mine might not be the whole picture. 

That small amount of openness changed a lot.

Some of My Best Marriage Therapy Happened Without My Husband There  

This was something I never expected.

I assumed marriage therapy meant both of us needed to be in every session.

We certainly did a lot of therapy together.

But sometimes a session with both of us would turn into the same argument we had been having at home.

I would tell our therapist what happened. My husband would disagree with part of my version. I would respond to his correction. He would respond to mine.

Before long, we weren’t really examining the disagreement anymore.

We were having it again.

Just with another person in the room.

Some of my individual sessions ended up being much more productive.

I could tell our therapist what I was upset about, and he could listen without my husband immediately responding.

Then he could help me look at the situation differently.

Without my husband sitting there, I didn’t have anyone to convince.

There wasn’t a comment I needed to correct or a point I needed to defend.

I could actually sit with what my therapist was saying.

Sometimes that meant looking at my husband’s perspective.

Sometimes it meant looking at my own behavior.

Was I responding to what my husband actually said, or to what I assumed he meant?

Was the way I was approaching him helping me get the closeness or response I wanted?

What could I do differently?

I could see my own part much more clearly when I wasn’t in the middle of defending it.

That was another thing I never expected marriage therapy to teach me.

Sometimes working on the marriage meant working on how I was showing up in it.

Our Therapist Helped Us Feel Better About Each Other 

Looking back, I think our therapist did something else that was really important.

He helped us have better feelings about each other.

That sounds almost too simple compared with “solving marital problems,” but I think it was one of the reasons we eventually became so much better at solving them ourselves.

Problems feel different when you feel close to the person you’re having the problem with.

When my husband and I felt connected, a disagreement didn’t automatically feel threatening to the marriage.

It was something we needed to work out.

When we felt disconnected, even a smaller issue could become much bigger.

A comment felt loaded. A disagreement seemed connected to every other disagreement we’d ever had. It became harder to give each other the benefit of the doubt.

The paradox is that the time you feel least interested in being close to your spouse is often when you’re having a problem with them.

I used to think the order was obvious:

Fix the problem first.

Then we can feel close again.

What I started noticing was that sometimes getting some of the closeness back made the problem easier to solve.

Later, I realized there was language for what I had been noticing. Love and Stosny make the point that when two people feel connected, they can often solve the very problem that was producing resentment or frustration in the first place.

George Pransky, expert in relationship psychology, describes something similar: sometimes repeatedly working the problem makes it loom larger, while restoring the feeling between two people changes what the problem looks like. 

That was much closer to my experience than the idea that every disagreement had to be thoroughly analyzed before we could feel good about each other again. 

And I think our therapist understood that.

He wasn’t simply refereeing arguments or deciding whose version of events made more sense.

He was trying to help us understand each other well enough that we could get back on the same team.

What I’d Look for When Choosing a Marriage Counselor Now 

When we started marriage counseling, I don’t think I knew enough to recognize why our therapist was so good at what he did.

We had gotten a referral, and fortunately for us, it turned out to be a really good one.

Now I know what I would pay attention to.

I would want a therapist who could validate what I was feeling without automatically joining my side of the disagreement.

Someone who could see my husband’s perspective and help me understand it.

Someone whose work seemed to move us toward each other rather than giving each of us more evidence against the other.

But I also know now that choosing a good therapist is only part of it.

I had to become willing to see my husband differently.

Sometimes that came from something our therapist said. Sometimes I would read something later that helped his suggestion click into place. Sometimes I needed a session without my husband there before I could hear something without immediately defending myself.

Eventually, all of those experiences started adding up.

Our marriage changed.

And somewhere along the way, the things we had once needed our therapist to help us do became things we knew how to do for ourselves.

We still have problems.

The difference is that now, a problem doesn’t necessarily leave us stuck there.