Taylor (00:01)
I spent months in couples counseling trying to figure out if my marriage could be saved.
Rachel (00:06)
But what Taylor didn't know was there was a better option. Join us in today's episode to learn what tools you should really use to figure out if you should stay or go.
Taylor (00:16)
Welcome to the Divorce Queens podcast where real women get real about divorce. I'm Taylor Wins, divorce coach, family law attorney, and mom of four.
Rachel (00:26)
I'm Rachel Kennedy, family mediator, parenting consultant, and divorced mom of three. We are here to cut through the noise and bring you the legal, personal, and practical sides of divorce because getting divorced isn't just a legal process, it is a total life transformation.
Taylor (00:42)
So whether you're thinking about getting divorced, in the middle of the chaos, or trying to rebuild after it's all over, you're not alone. Grab your coffee, your wine, or your walking shoes, and let's get into it.
All right, so we're back for part two. ⁓ How do you know if your marriage is over? And no uncertain terms. And in this episode, we wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about counseling and therapy. So specifically, we wanna talk about what is discernment counseling? And how can that help you decide whether or not your marriage is over? And also, how does discernment counseling differ from couples counseling?
Rachel (01:00)
of.
Taylor (01:24)
So first, we're just talking about couples counseling, which theoretically, is focused on like improving the marriage. It's focused on bettering communication, maybe finding some areas that you can mutually work on together, solving problems and like getting over some of those hardships and humps in the marriage relationship. Also theoretically, couples counseling is for couples where both people actually like
want to be in this marriage relationship and have a desire and like a motivation to make it work. So in my marriage marriages, I went to couples counseling. So it started with I had really lost myself in the marriage relationship, which we talked about in part one. And I was like horribly depressed and like anxious and crying and having like panic attacks. I still have
the thing, right? But I had like developed this tick basically where my eye would twitch. It was super embarrassing, but I'd have this stress response and my eye would twitch. I get it every great once in a while now, but like it was like every other week. It was constant that I was having this like physical manifestation of being under all this stress. And my mother was literally like, girl, like, I don't know what's going on, but like you need some help. And a couple of people had kind of echoed that.
And so I went out and I found a therapist who's actually, she was so cool. My first ever therapist was so cool and she quit being an Egan. Her name was Kelly. I wonder if she's still around. Kelly Baccarra, shout her out. Kelly, get on the podcast. But that's who I saw. She was super amazing. She was super patient. She was the perfect first experience in individual therapy, right? Like she was caring, she was warm. She was all the things that I think most therapists are. And through dealing with her,
She kind of recognized that almost everything we were talking about in therapy, all the sources of my stress, all of the things were centered around the marriage issues that I was having, my relational issues. My depression was likely situational. ⁓ And so I did a lot of work with her and she was like, you know what? If this is something you want, I think you need to consider maybe trying.
some couples counseling. I don't know. Would you think about that? Like, would you consider that? Is that something you think might help? And really opened my eyes to that because I actually didn't have any concept of doing that. And I wouldn't have thought about that on my own. Like, I don't think I would have made it that far. And so I did. And I approached my ex and I was like, I want to go to couples counseling. Like, we have all these things to talk about and we're not talking about them here at home. So maybe somebody can help us talk about them. And of course, he said no.
Like, well, what do you want to talk about? Like, why? Well, then just talk to me about it. Well, I listened. Well, I answered. You know, it was just very like whatever. And it got to a point where I did what a lot of us do, where I gave the good old ultimatum where it's like, if you're not going to go, then I don't even see what we're doing here. Like we just need, I need to exit stage left if you're not going to go. And so then eventually we did go. So we had three different experiences in counseling. One was at like a, in a clinic setting.
Right? And we went to this counselor that was very short-lived. He didn't like the person. And so we found something else. And then we went to a church where the pastor was also a therapist. And then he did the sessions jointly with this female therapist. And that's how they worked with couples. We probably spent the most time in that setting where they, and it was very casual. I think if you're with somebody who is a little bit.
resistant to or afraid of going to couples counseling or going to any type of therapy, a setting like that was great because it was very informal, right? We were, and I still am religious, so going to church was just like going to church, right? So was in this church, in this front room, and it wasn't like when we had gone to this clinical building, right? Like if you know the feel of going to a therapist office like that, like you might get into the office and the office has like running water.
and wind chimes and background music and plants, right? And you feel really good there. But we had to like go into this clinical setting to get there. was like being in the hospital, it so gross. And so going into this church setting felt more at home to me and I'm sure to my ex at the time. We went and we saw these people and then there was like the woman who was, you if they're doing hetero couples counseling, like she was kind of working more with the woman to like be another voice to help.
kind of bridge the gap or maybe we weren't communicating and you know, the pastor's doing the same thing and it was, it was really good. I thought it went really well. I thought they were really in touch with us as people and I felt good about it. Unfortunately, it didn't go anywhere for us for a number of reasons that had nothing to do with the people that we were working with. But there you go, there you have it. We get divorced, we get remarried and almost immediately we have problems again. I wish I could snap. My five year old can snap. She's six, she can snap so good. Can't snap.
get remarried and like immediately we're having problems. Shocker when you remarry your ex. And I'm like, we did a couples group. We did a retreat at the church. Then we did this couples group through the church. And I'm like, none of this is working. Like you're not even doing the homework. We're getting these homework packets. They're telling us to go out and do these things. And they're telling us to read these books. We're supposed to be having these conversations. We're supposed to be going out on dates. You're literally not doing anything. And then you get to the...
group the next week and you're lying about how we did the things and you didn't do the things. And this is my last ditch effort. Let's try counseling one more time. Well, we get into this setting, we find this third guy that we had like we've been all around the block at this point with all like the save the marriage things. We find this third guy and we go through counseling with him and probably in wisdom of having done this a long time, we get like three sessions in and he says, you know,
we're trying to do this thing, like this work of rebuilding, fixing, communicating, you know, whatever. And I think the work we need to be doing is if we even want to be rebuilding, fixing, you know, doing the things. So we got into one session, like where we had transitioned into, I think instead of working on fixing the marriage, we need to decide if we even want to work on fixing the marriage. Like, so we get over into this session.
And I just remember like in that one session, the guy straight asked me, he said, is what would your ex have to do in order for you to want to stay in this relationship? And I said, he would literally have to be a completely different person. And the guy was like, like you want him to change his behavior? And I said, no, I want him to be somebody else.
And he was like, all right, we're done here. Like, so flippantly, right? But it was kind of like, hmm, like I want us all to sit with that for a second. Like, I want you to think about what you just said. And I want you to hear what she just said. And we walked out and we never went back.
Rachel (08:51)
Yeah. Well, yes, we, ⁓ I got lots of.
lots of couples counseling stories too, but I don't know that I can follow that up. ⁓ But I have a few thoughts. I'm going to just kind of give a couple of thoughts on specifically couples counseling and then I'm going to transition into ⁓ kind of what is discernment counseling and how is it different. So the only thing I want to say is my background is very heavy in domestic violence personally and professionally. so one thing that I think is really important to understand
is if like I would say overall I'm a huge huge fan of therapy. personal therapy, couples therapy, family therapy, whatever it is I'm a huge fan of therapy. and that said if you are in a relationship that either you know is abusive or you're questioning and you're not quite sure, couples therapy is a very bad idea. it's very contraindicated for
kind of a lot of reasons. One is the person might manipulate the therapist or whatever. But I'm actually honestly thinking about ⁓ what you just shared that you said, like he would have to be a completely different person. And then you guys walked out of there. If somebody in certain types of abusive situations said that in front of their spouse and then left, they would be in danger having to get in the same car and go back to the same house.
with that person that they just said that to because therapy should create a safe place to be vulnerable and say what we need to say. Like that's part of the point of it. However, if you say those vulnerable things in front of somebody who's not safe, you put yourself in danger. I'm not saying you did. I'm saying that's a big reason why people who are in abusive situations wouldn't want to.
So that's just kind of my caveat coming from a...
Taylor (10:55)
like my ex like his brand of all the things was not physical violence. It was we had some other issues that weren't that and one of them was the fact that I could say that in the situation and walk out of there and have him literally be like, so what do want for dinner?
Rachel (11:16)
That's a whole different problem of, you having conflict and all of that. ⁓ but yeah, anyway, so that's, I would say in general, if you have an intuition that you're not safe with your spouse, therapy is probably not the right option for you. ⁓ because there are plenty of people who would, you know, get violent after you spill your heart about.
I wish he was a different person or here are the ways that he's hurt me or things like that. ⁓ So that's always my caveat. Love therapy, it's just not a good idea in certain situations. ⁓ So now we're gonna kinda just transition into the next part of talking about what is discernment counseling? How is it different than regular couples therapy? So you said, kinda back at the beginning of what you were saying, couples therapy is
for the point of improving the marriage and working on communication and I don't know, figuring out date night ideas or all those different things trying to save the marriage. But it really, it's coming from the assumption that both people want to be there and both people want to save the marriage. So discernment counseling is coming from the place of, you'll hear a lot of discernment counselors use the terms the leaning in spouse and the leaning out spouse.
So you've got one person who's kind of leaning towards the other one. Then you've got the other one kind of leaning away, you know, and they're like, like the, the, you know, when you put the wrong sides of magnets together and they like repel each other, that's kind of what you got going on there. ⁓ And so that goes back to what that last therapist did for you guys is hold on, before we put all this work into saving the marriage, let's really dig into
you want to save the marriage in the first place? And kind of digging into the pros and cons of staying together or separating and really digging into what would need to change in order for you to want to stay. Is there even anything? Because some people, like you're talking about, are like, I'm so done. There's literally nothing you could do that could make me be not done.
Right. And so that's what the discernment counselors are trying to figure out. The other thing that I think is really important, particularly for the leaning out spouse to understand is that discernment counseling is a very limited, it's anywhere between one to five visits only. So you're not signing up for like twice a week for the next five years. It's like, it's a very, and the way they do it too, is you go to the first session. You do that.
You see how it goes at the end of the first session. Then you say, okay, cool. Do we want to come back for a second session? So really you're not even signing up for five sessions all at once. It's just, this still a good idea? Do I still want to be here working through this? ⁓ So I think that's really cool. And then once you get to the end of your discernment counseling, whether it's the one visit or the five or anywhere in between, there's really two options that you take. So one is we've decided we both
are feeling comfortable with divorce or we're both feeling like that's the right next step. And what I've learned in kind of my training with, ⁓ I've taken some really cool training led by kind of we'll say the father of discernment counseling, which I'll talk about that in a second. And then a real leader that I respect in the family law field and they have done some training together for family law professionals like us talking about.
You know, there's, there's some strategy in before you just charge ahead with helping a couple get divorced. There are times where it's wise to say, like, would discernment counseling be a good idea here? I actually just had one of those consults today too, where she was coming to me because she wasn't sure. She was just like, kind of trying to do her research and figure out, okay, if I wanted to pursue divorce, what would that look like? I'm sure you have some of those consults too, where people aren't sure. And those are the ones where you send them.
or where I send them to the discernment counseling. So anyway, one of two tracks. One is we are both in agreement that divorce is the next right step. And what the experts say there is if you've got a couple that comes to you for divorce, once they've reached that point, most of the time the divorce is more smooth, more amicable, just because they both feel peace about it. I mean, it's hard. Nobody's gonna say divorce is fun, but they at least like...
feel like they've done what they can do and they're not going to just spend the rest of their lives wondering if there was something else they could have tried or whatever. Or you decide, okay, yep, we both want to fight for this marriage. That doesn't necessarily mean forever and ever, but what that means is you're committing to going to couples counseling for six months and the word divorce is out the window just for those six months. So you do the work with the couples counselor to work on the communication.
the parenting, the trust issues, all those different things, you know, as far as why people are in couples counseling in the first place. So those are really the two. And then after the six months, you reevaluate, is this going well? Do we both want to keep going forward in this marriage or was that maybe kind of a bust and we've decided divorce is our next right step. So, ⁓ yeah. I'm going to just put in a quick plug. We both live in Minnesota and the University of Minnesota has, from what I understand,
really a top discernment counseling program. And Bill Dougherty is who I was kind of calling the father of discernment counseling. And he works through the University of Minnesota. The program is called the Couples on the Brink and it's a nationwide, maybe international program. That's as far as I understand, that's really the gold standard. So if there are people listening who are like, that sounds like a great idea, that's exactly what I need.
you're gonna really wanna look up couples on the brink at the University of Minnesota and they're gonna have lists of these discernment counselors who have gone through their training and really know how to work through these steps with you.
Taylor (17:36)
Yeah, that's great. think a lot of people would be, I think a lot of people don't even know that this is an option. I think the most powerful thing you just said is, yeah, if you don't give it a real chance to see is divorce what you really want, and maybe you're listening to your cousin's sister's brother who got divorced one time because his wife had a gambling addiction, like what if you made the wrong choice? What if you made the wrong choice? And then you have to live with-
Rachel (18:01)
when there are kids involved and you're putting their lives in upheaval too and like it's so smart to really like kind of go down all those rabbit trails and like to a point you don't want to keep questioning for 20 years or something but to really within reason just be like I really want to feel this is a big decision I need to feel really comfortable with what I'm doing even if it's hard I want to know
that this is definitely the right choice for my family.
Taylor (18:32)
Yeah, because indecision is its own kind of hell, right? Like if you stay stuck in indecision for 20 years and then you do decide to get a divorce, you just wasted 20 years of your life. And then if you get divorced, but you're not sure that you did the right thing, you torment yourself for years and years after it, or you rush back out and you remarry the person because you weren't clear on the decision that you made. Right. And so in like having all the facts,
to make a decision, all the tools, all the skills, all the resources to make a decision and then make the decision, right? And decide means in like old Latin or something from this like Instagram influencer I watch. Okay, actually he's more than that. Like Myron Goldman is a really cool guy. He's a business coach. He's several things, right? But I watched this thing and it was about decision, right? And decision actually means part of the word means to cut off. So when you're making a decision, you're cutting off.
all other options, right? So the power of decision making is very important. Cool.
Rachel (19:37)
thing
I want to say here really quick is I don't think I shared this earlier, but in my particular story, we did not go to discernment counseling. Didn't know that was a thing 10 years ago. ⁓ But what I did that was really helpful for me is we were in couples counseling, which in our situation was not the right move for reasons I mentioned before. But after we separated, I was in my own individual counseling. It took me 10 months.
don't even know if I've shared this with you, Taylor, but it took me 10 months really from the time we split up until I decided for sure, like, yes, divorce is what has to happen here. And in those 10 months, I would say towards the beginning of it, we were really trying to fix things and get back together. And then it turned more into, I don't know, nothing's changing, but I don't wanna get divorced, but what are we supposed to do? But I did have my own, I mean, it was a day.
It was a specific moment that is forever seared in my memory where I was like, all right, I know I'm done. And from that moment forward, I pursued divorce and it took another three years after that and it was awful. But I, ever since then, I've never looked back because I was able to get that clarity that I needed, which for me, it wasn't discernment counseling. It was individual counseling, but however you get it to be able to have that clarity to know for certain.
yes, this is what I'm doing and then move ahead and do it without looking back.
Taylor (21:08)
Yeah,
yeah, because I mean, I didn't really see it for what it was at the time. And if you are in a situation where ⁓ you're dealing with some of those silent forms of abuse, like ⁓ gaslighting, like manipulation, like you have, or you're in a relationship with a person who has a very disordered way of thinking, a way that they're controlling a way that they're cutting you off from other people a way that they're
doing, insert whatever the thing is, right? That they're doing and it's causing you harm. It is hurting you. ⁓ Sometimes it's so difficult to see what's going on in that relationship that like for me, I couldn't see it. Like I knew something was wrong, but I couldn't quite see it. And I also didn't have the support to feel justified in getting a divorce. Like I didn't have that support, which is a topic for a whole nother time, because we could spend an hour.
on family support, on the church, on all the things, right?
Rachel (22:09)
the religious piece of it. That was probably my biggest thing. Great family support, but it was the religious stuff that was like God hates divorce and that was all I needed to know about.
Taylor (22:18)
And I'm not going to say my parents weren't supportive, but they couldn't show up the way I needed. Right. My parents were supportive. When you talk about moving into their house, paying for things, like just doing all the things, they were supportive. Right. But for me, I couldn't see it for what it was. So even when I was doing the counseling and in that one session that was quasi discernment, like I still couldn't quite put it all together. And I did spend way too long after we got divorced the second time.
honestly, in the dark of night contemplating, should I go home? Right? And it wasn't even my home anymore. And like, you know, my ex, you know, all the things I complained about, it is a no, that is a no for me. there were definitely times, right? Where you're like, what am I doing? Did I do the right thing? Did I, you know, like, especially when you have a really difficult, difficult co-parenting relationship, something we'll talk about in the future.
Rachel (23:03)
You should not.
Taylor (23:17)
The weird things it does to the mind if you've been subjected to control for a long period of time is that when things get really, really difficult with the other person, you start to think maybe it was better when we were together. And maybe if I go back, this will stop. Right. And so we'll get into, got, we got 37 episodes. Just for you. But I definitely thought about it because I didn't always, I didn't stay consistent in my healing journey and in therapy and counseling. And I see that now.
Rachel (23:35)
I just have to talk about it.
Taylor (23:47)
But yeah, there's definitely a lot to it.
Rachel (23:50)
Thanks for hanging out with us on the Divorce Queens podcast. If you loved today's episode, be sure to hit subscribe and leave us a review. It helps more women find the support they deserve.
Taylor (24:01)
You can find me, Taylor, on Instagram at momlawyeredivorced and you can find Rachel at RachelTalksDivorced. Got questions? Need a pep talk? Wanna share your story? Slide into our DMs. We're here for it.
Rachel (24:14)
Divorce is not the end of your story. It is the beginning of your comeback. See you next week.
