Considering divorce ?
If you or your spouse are considering divorce but are not completely sure that’s the best path, you are definitely in a tough spot and Discernment Counselling is designed to help. It’s a chance to slow down, take a breath, and look at your options for your marriage.
Discernment Counselling is not couples therapy.
It’s a new way of helping couples where one person is “leaning out” of the relationship—and not sure that regular marriage counselling would help–and the other is “leaning in”—that is, interested in rebuilding the marriage.
If it’s not couples therapy, what is it ?
The counsellor will help you decide whether to try to restore your marriage to health, move toward divorce, or take a time out and decide later.
The goal is for you to gain clarity and confidence about a direction, based on a deeper understanding of your relationship and its possibilities for the future. It is not intended to solve your marital problems but to see if they are solvable.
You will each be treated with compassion and respect no matter how you are feeling about your marriage and you will come in as a couple but the most important work occurs in the one-to-one conversations with the counsellor. Why? Because you are starting out in different places.
The counsellor respects your reasons for divorce while trying to open up the possibility of restoring the marriage to health.
The counsellor also emphasises the importance of each of you seeing your own contributions to the problems and the possible solutions (this will be useful in future relationships even if this one ends).
How many sessions are needed ?
Depending on the length of the session, five to seven counselling sessions. The first session is usually two hours and the subsequent are 1.5 or 2 hours.
This video will give you a better idea of what Discernment Counselling is all about.
Discernment Counselling is not suited for these situations:
- When one spouse has already made a final decision to divorce
- When one spouse is coercing the other to participate
- When there is danger of domestic violence
- When there is a protection order in place