Christian Marital Counseling: Eight Approaches to Helping Couples
Book Review • Everette L. Worthington Jr., editor, Christian Marital Counseling: Eight Approaches to Helping Couples (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2000). 254 pp. $31.
Read time: 12 min
Everette Worthington’s classic edited work collates eight diverse marriage counseling methodologies in one volume. Worthington provides pastors and counselors with a survey of eight different approaches to helping couples through marital difficulties. As Christians and practitioners of psychology, each contributor aims to integrate secular therapeutic models with Scripture. My critical review evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, with attention given to the biblical, theological, and philosophical underpinnings of each model.
1. Psychodynamic Marriage Counseling with Christians
Strengths of the chapter written by professor and psychologist, Dennis Guernsey, center on his commitment to seeing couples as image-bearers of God and the conception of marriage as a covenant worth every effort to preserve (19–20). An imago dei anthropology informs his insistence that humans deserve dignity and that sin and evil fundamentally distort not only humans as individuals but as divine image-bearers in marriage.
Weaknesses of Guernsey begin with his remark that “there is no such thing as ‘Christian marriage counseling’ . . ., only ‘Christian people’” (20). He reflects this assumption, unfortunately, by avoiding any confrontation of couples about “sin” or behaviors that are immoral and deleterious to relationships (22), leaning rather on extraneous psychodynamic causes for marital conflict (e.g., attachment theory, narcissistic injury, and family of origin). He fails to see that conflict arises from sinful hearts (Matt 15:19; Jam 4:1-2). Effectively ruling out the relevance of much of Scripture to human problems, he admits “modest distain” for paradigms that address “feelings, doings, and thinkings” in clients (28).
2. Teaching Couples to Fall in Love
Strengths of William Harley’s approach include his organized presentations of relational habits that either promote romantic love or erode it, as outlined in His Needs, Her Needs (1986) and Love Busters (1992). He recognizes the need for intrinsic motivation in marriages rather than merely burdening couples with their failures and calls to try harder (42).
Weaknesses of his approach flow from his admitted pragmatism. He gave up on his prior “Bible study” format of marriage counseling because “It didn’t work!” (40-41). In its place Harley substituted “neobehaviorism” (44), which relies on “transaction theory,” where each party rekindles romantic love by agreeing to meet the other’s greatest need. What Harvey teaches likely improves the felt experiences of many couples, but he has successfully stripped marriage of its biblical vision as an other-focused (Phil 2:3), agape-driven (1 Cor 13:1–7), gospel-depicting covenant (Eph 5:31–32), and has reduced it to a pragmatic, personal-needs-focused, culturally shaped, consumeristic, transactive, conditional pact (45).
3. Foundational Understandings in Marriage Counseling
The strengths of Donald Joy’s approach include his emphasis on God’s pre-fall designs for humans as divine image-bearing rulers over creation (64). He also demonstrates a fallen-world realism and an understanding of the personal responsibility counselees have for their “fatal pattern[s]” of sinful behavior (65). Joy rightly recognizes the role that physical heath has on psychological experiences, without veering into bodily determinism (66).
Weaknesses of Joy’s approach involve his ultimate pragmatism, although he allleges solid theological foundations. Leaning more on Meyer-Briggs than biblical anthropology, he works to help couples celebrate their personality differences, and he delves into sexual histories and families of origin. In the process, he never seems to broach where the cross, the work of the Spirit, or one’s walk with God intersect with a couple’s struggles.
4. Couple Communication
Gary Oliver and Sherod Miller’s approach emphasizes the power of the tongue (in biblical terminology) for the health of marriages. They reason, “as goes a couple’s ability to communicate, so goes everything else in their relationship” (88). Oliver and Miller’s use of the Couple Communication skills-building program trains spouses to improve verbal intimacy (88), to argue towards conflict resolution (90), to grow in awareness of one’s emotions (91), and to listen attentively (95). Marriage counselors would do well to routinely incorporate such communication skill-building into a wholistic, biblical counseling approach to helping marriages.
If Oliver and Miller were to reduce marriage failures to misunderstandings owing to poor communication, they would have overstated their case and minimized more serious cognitive, affective, and volitional roots of marriage dysfunction. They are careful to admit, however, that their approach is only a subset of larger and more comprehensive marriage counseling (97). As such, I do not have a criticism of the limited scope of what they are trying to achieve, so long as biblical counselors who incorporate their approach also thoroughly address underlying heart issues.
5. Relationship Development
Les and Leslie Parrott’s approach is systematic, confident, and claims to be based on academic psychological research (110). A strength of their approach is their central insistence on the need for virtue formation in the individual married partners, which they call “self-differentiation” (112). They helpfully recognize “the paradox at the heart of relational process: to work on a relationship, one must work on oneself” (114).
The Parrotts state at the onset that “without a deep dependency on Christ as the ultimate source of security and significance, the marriage relationship cannot [meet] the deepest needs . . . of each partner” (110). However, they base their diagnoses and cures not on biblical anthropology, hamartiology, and soteriology but on a secular Family Systems Theory (110). Diagnosing the singular root of all marriage problems as “anxiety” (111), they set out to help spouses grow in self-differentiation and awareness of the influence of families of origin and birth order. While such theories may have some value in explaining formative influences on one’s intuitions and habits, the Parrotts fall short of providing a biblical vision of marriage, connecting the health of relationships to the role of repentance, or striving to work in synchrony with the Spirit’s commitment to make us (not merely self-differentiated but) conformed to the image of Christ himself (Gal 4:19).
6. Christian PREP: An Empirically Based Model for Marital and Premarital Intervention
There are several strengths of Christian PREP. First, as a cognitive-behavioral model (135), the authors recognize the role of new patterns of thinking for emerging new behaviors, and the reciprocal impact of new behaviors on patterns of thinking (142). Scripture affirms a link between beliefs and resulting feelings and actions (i.e. Phil 4:6-9). Their strategy teaches skills for avoiding harmful conflict patterns (137), conflict ground rules (139), the place and limitation of one’s family of origin (142), and the role of both expectations and forgiveness (152).
The crucial weakness of the techniques of Stanley, Trathen, and McCain, nonetheless, is that their anthropology overestimates the role of new “insight” (new thinking) on feeling and doing. The inadequacy of their cognitive behavioral therapy is that “affections” are largely treated as mere emotional byproducts of thought, rather than wild stallions to tame (or dragons to slay) in their own right (Col 3:6). Eve knew what was right but desired what was wrong. So, in marriage, the movement of hearts bent on selfishness towards gospel-humbled and motivated agape must be treated as the root—and not merely the fruit—of lasting change.
7. Marriage Counseling: A Brief Strategic Approach to Promote Love, Faith, and Work
Everette Worthington’s chapter has its strong points. Bringing everything back to faith, works, and love, Worthington casts a vision for couples living out the Apostle Paul’s commendation of “faith working through love” (Gal 5:6). As such, he insists on love tempering all interactions between couples. By “love” he means actions that “affirm, encourage, comfort, praise, admire, [and] respect” (160). Worthington values confession and forgiveness (161), communication skills (163), and positive emotions focused therapy (166). He sees an “emotional distancer-pursuer pattern” as a frequent pathology in marriages (168–170).
The flaw in Worthington relates to his largely behavioral approach to marriage counseling. Despite writing constantly about the centrality of “love,” he describes love in terms of positive behaviors that foster positive emotions, rather than heart-level, internal, affections at the level of holy and sinful desires. The closest he gets to the heart of the matter is when he addresses the need for one’s faith in Jesus for salvation (175). Beyond this, he skates the surface, attempting to promote changes in external behavior that reinforce positive interactive cycles. God’s word, however, envisions true obedience as stemming from the heart (Rom 6:17).
8. Marriage Counseling: A Christian Integrative Approach
Strengths of Norman Wright’s methodology are evident. He attributes all marital problems to “our sinful natures” (188). He helpfully perceives that most often presenting problems are not the real core issues (189). Wright’s approach includes “solution-oriented therapy” that begins with a Marital Assessment Inventory questionnaire. He, then, identifies problematic sources below the presenting issues, incorporates relational skills training, and equips the couple to continue marriage-enriching processes into the future (191).
Despite positing that all marriage troubles stem from “our sinful natures,” Wright’s treatment of “sin” is limited to helping people better manage personality differences, expectations, and relational techniques. Though Wright “stresses behavioral change reinforced by cognitive activity,” what seems missing is any address of errant beliefs and sinful desires in relation to God, oneself, others, and circumstances, especially as informed by the storyline of Scripture, the gospel, the biblical sanctification process, or Christian codes of conduct passages (194).
Conclusion
My critical review briefly engaged eight authors seeking to integrate psychological therapeutic models with Scripture in marriage counseling. Having evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, I conclude that each model, to varying degrees, fails to adequately apply the biblical, theological, and philosophical tenets of Scripture to couples in crisis—as if God has little relevant to say to couples in crisis. In the end, Worthington’s edited survey of Christian marriage counseling methodologies only strengthened my conviction that pastors and counselors should confidently and skillfully apply the word of God to human problems. For Scripture alone is sufficient, “living and active, . . . discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb 4:12). ❖
