Marriage/Couples Counseling WON'T Stop the Violence!

Your partner may try to get you to go to couples counseling, telling you that you and he need to work on this together. He may encourage you to go to pastoral counseling with him. He may tell you that you have a "communication" problem. If he has done this, then he is refusing to take full responsibility for his abusive behavior. He may be manipulating you into staying with him by taking this approach. His abusive behavior is not likely to stop unless he acknowledges that you are in no way responsible and that he has a problem that he needs to seek help for regardless of whether you stay with him or not.

I tried couples counseling with the EX. Here are some of the things that I encountered:

~ If I kept quiet, then the counselor had NO CLUE that I was being abused by my husband, and took what he said at face value. My husband would use these sessions as his own personal soapbox... a place in which to vent all his frustrations and anger about me and my shortcomings.

~ If I spoke up and spilled my guts in the counseling session, then my husband would remain calm and I would look as if I were the crazy person in the room... and THEN when we left the counselor's office, there was HELL for me to pay for telling the truth. In fact, some of the worst fights we had were immediately following a counseling session.

~ If the counselor picked up on the fact that my husband was abusive, and stated that fact to him... the counselor was labeled a "quack" and we never saw that counselor again.

~ I ended up spending so much time and energy doing "homework" the various counselors assigned to my husband and me. And whatever I wrote down and later shared of these homework assignments would later come back to haunt me in the form of my husband's ability to twist my words and true intentions into something from a horror movie.

Don't waste your time and money going to marriage/couples counseling! Get yourself a good individual therapist who is WELL VERSED in domestic violence issues and get yourself emotionally healthy.