Is a marriage intensive more effective than weekly counseling?
Most people are used to seeing their counselor once a week for several months to years to work through their challenges. When couples seek counseling, they assume that they will be working with their couples therapist once a week for 50 minutes. There is an emerging field in marriage counseling of therapists offering weekend or multi-day couple intensive retreats, condensing months of therapy into just a few days. Intensive couples therapy offers couples the opportunity to develop the traction they need in therapy, which many struggle to reach in weekly or biweekly therapy.
Increased Focus and Concentration
I have extensive experience with retreats–they have been my primary method of transformation in my life. I have gone on meditation retreats for 1-2 months every year for the past 6 years, so I am very familiar with what retreats have to offer versus continued daily practice.
Retreats and intensives offer couples the opportunity to break away from their daily life, put down their distractions, and give their relationship their full attention. The benefit of a singular focus for an extended period of time is that it gives the mind and the body the opportunity to develop a focus and concentration on what is most important. Developing the capacity to focus and concentrate for extended periods of time is the key to transformative change. When was the last time you put down everything, eliminated all distractions, and gave your relationship uninterrupted time and attention?
Many couples I see in therapy ask me to help them stop fighting, and when I ask them how much time they spend together in a week, they often tell me that the time they spend in counseling is the only time they spend on just each other–no wonder why they’re in conflict!
Without focus and concentration, couples cannot pay attention to their relationship and begin to notice what is going wrong, and how they can fix it. Intensive couples therapy addresses that, by building up the couples’ capacity to concentrate on and focus on their relationship, and thus create and protect their couple bubble.
Breakthroughs to the Emotional Unconscious
Because couples aren’t able to prioritize their relationship over the demands of daily life–work, the kids, the house, family, friends–their relationship begins to fall through the cracks. Simply by not paying attention or forgetting to pay attention, their relationship stops growing and starts deteriorating and decaying.
They begin to rub each other the wrong way (“Why’d you make that purchase?”), accumulate resentment towards each other and bury it deep down inside, which erupts into conflict. This surface level conflict between them covers over a deeper conflict inside of each of them.
However, without the ability to slow down and pay attention, partners feel negatively inside, are looking at each other, and see each other as the sole cause of their emotional pain. I’m sure you’ve heard the oft asked question in therapy, “Can you tell me about your childhood?” On the surface level, couples can agree that their past has contributed to their present relationship, however, in the moment, without focus and concentration in the midst of an emotional storm, everything seems to be his/her/their fault.
In meditative practice, this is called ignorance, delusion, or a curtain obscuring the truth. This curtain which lies between consciousness (what I know intellectually) and unconsciousness (what is buried deep inside of me, unknown to me) is the biggest barrier to progress in therapy. Ignorance of the curtain itself is what brings people into therapy.
What couples need is a breakthrough to the emotional unconscious. Intensive couples therapy is designed to create just that, and uniquely offers the opportunity to create a breakthrough to the unconscious, versus weekly or biweekly therapy for 50-90 minutes. To create this breakthrough, which is necessary for a couple to meet their goals in therapy, a couple needs motivation, time, repetition, focus and fortitude. A breakthrough happens for some couples weeks to months into therapy, and for others, it never happens and they drop out of therapy, only to come back later, or ultimately break up.
Reconnect with yourself and your partner in a marriage intensive
A breakthrough in couples intensive therapy is that “Aha” moment, where suddenly it all makes sense–the buried emotion bursts through the curtain and you’re able to feel your feelings, connect with yourself, and realize that in the midst of all of this, you’ve lost (and can now recover) buried feelings and memories which have been steering your life all of this time, without you even knowing.
An emotional breakthrough is what everyone is unconsciously seeking when they come to therapy on their own or with someone else. We all struggle with loneliness and feelings of disconnection and loss, without realizing that when we go through life with this curtain between us and ourselves, we’re leaving the most important parts of ourselves behind, and this loss creates a deep sense of loneliness and longing.
A marriage intensive is designed to help couples break through their inner walls to the depths of their feelings. When couples recover anger towards their partner and sadness inside of themselves, they also uncover the love that has been buried deep beneath their pent up feelings. Without breaking through their inner walls to the depths of feeling beyond, couples remain lonely behind their walls and wall themselves off from themselves and their partner.
These walls create a sense of disconnection and anger towards each other for the emotional abandonment that ensues each time a wall is erected. To stop neglecting your partner, you must first start by stopping neglecting yourself. Without taking down those walls, weekly couples therapy simply becomes about helping couples cope with the walls they’ve erected. It becomes about problem management rather than problem resolution, and the daily suffering is prolonged.
Develop Momentum and a Renewed Sense of Hope
Due to the need for an emotional breakthrough quickly in couples therapy, struggling couples should start with a couples intensive, and then start weekly therapy. A couples therapy retreat is designed to create an emotional breakthrough which can then be supported and built upon in weekly therapy. Without an emotional breakthrough, therapy feels like a slog.
It’s similar to having a dirty house–simply devoting an hour a week to cleaning a dirty house will mean that it will take years to get the house completely clean. When there is a backlog of tasks to do and the house needed to be cleaned yesterday it doesn’t make any sense to try to tackle things bit by bit.
Couples need momentum and they need a good foundation with new habits to use in their daily life. They need a weekend to clean house and tackle the biggest tasks (with some professional help), so that when they go back to their daily routine, they can keep the house clean with some weekly effort, rather than falling behind or taking one step forward and two steps back.
Start with an Intensive, Then Weekly Therapy
The renewed sense of hope a marriage intensive can offer can often be the difference between marriage and divorce. Research shows most couples wait years after a problem arises to go to therapy. That means that most couples are several years too late! Many relationships could have been saved with earlier intervention. If you or your partner are considering ending your relationship, it would be best to start off with a couples therapy intensive. It will increase the effectiveness of your weekly couples therapy. Don’t wait to save your relationship–book an intensive now!
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