When you face a difficult decision – one that permanently changes your life and impacts many people, you need clarity and confidence. Perhaps the most difficult decision that many people will ever face is whether to stay in a marriage that is not working for them or to divorce. Since divorce is such an important and challenging decision – you would think that there is a lot of excellent support for people facing this decision. Unfortunately, the kind of help that I often hear about is strong advice: either to leave the relationship (“Why should you put up with that?”) or to stay (“You just have to work it out – think of your children!”). Facing a divorce/ stay in the marriage decision you need unbiased, flexible support, not simple advice.
Where can someone facing a decision about divorce go to get unbiased support? How can they gain clarity and confidence in their choice? Is this a decision that an individual must make, or should it be part of dialogue within the marriage?
I am launching a website: IsDivorceRightForUs.com to help individuals and couples struggling with these decisions. It highlights a variety of new counseling strategies that I have trained in over the past several years. I have experienced first-hand how these new strategies bring meaningful help to those at the crossroads of their relationship. Here are some of these innovative tools profiled in more detail on the site.
- Discernment Counseling – a process to help a couple decide between getting a divorce, committing to rigorous marriage counseling, or not making any changes in the relationship.
- Closure counseling – when a couple has decided to divorce and wants to learn skills to communicate effectively for co-parenting or other reasons they need to be able to agree.
- Individual Counseling – Focused on the Relationship. This is counseling with only one of the couple partners, but with a goal of improving the relationship.
- Making the Decision: A Guided Workbook – a new workbook I wrote to help people struggling with making a relationship decision. The book will be offered soon on the website.
I am still offering individual counseling and traditional marriage and couples counseling but supplementing my practice with the newer strategies mentioned above.
If you, or someone you know, could benefit from these services, please let them know about the website and me.
Michael Winters is a Psychologist in Houston focusing on marriage counseling and therapy. Michael received his PhD from the University of Memphis and has been practicing since 1991.