Help for Married Couples: What Can You Do When Your Marriage Is in Trouble?

If you’re searching for help for your marriage, chances are something important isn’t working.

Perhaps you keep having the same arguments and nothing ever gets resolved. You may have become distant from each other. One of you may be angry while the other has withdrawn. Resentment may have accumulated over years. Trust may have been damaged. You may have tried marriage counseling already and still feel stuck.

Or perhaps things have become more serious.

One of you may be questioning the marriage. Separation or divorce may have been mentioned. You may love each other and still wonder whether too much has happened to find your way back.

If any of this sounds familiar, the first question isn’t necessarily:

“How do we save our marriage?”

A better place to begin may be:

“What has happened between us, and is it still possible to change it?”

How Do You Know When Your Marriage Needs Help?

Every marriage goes through difficult periods. Having problems doesn’t necessarily mean your marriage is failing.

But some patterns deserve serious attention, particularly when they continue despite your attempts to resolve them.

You may need more help when:

• The same arguments happen repeatedly without resolution.

• Small disagreements quickly become angry or hurtful.

• One or both of you have become defensive.

• One partner shuts down or emotionally withdraws.

• You no longer feel emotionally close.

• Affection or intimacy has significantly diminished.

• Resentment has been accumulating for months or years.

• Trust has been damaged.

• You avoid important subjects because talking about them makes things worse.

• You’ve tried marriage counseling but haven’t made enough progress.

• One of you has begun thinking seriously about separation or divorce.

The existence of these problems doesn’t tell us whether your marriage can or cannot be repaired.

But it does suggest that continuing to handle the relationship in the same way probably isn’t going to produce a different result.

Why Do Married Couples Get So Stuck?

Many struggling couples assume their problem is poor communication.

Sometimes it is.

But often the communication problem is part of something deeper.

One person feels hurt or neglected and complains. The other hears criticism and becomes defensive. The first partner feels dismissed and becomes more forceful. The second becomes angry or withdraws.

Both people end up protecting themselves—and each person’s protection makes the other person feel even less safe, loved or understood.

Over time, the pattern becomes automatic.

You can love each other and still become trapped in a way of relating that gradually damages the relationship.

That’s why simply promising to “communicate better” often doesn’t work.

You need to understand what happens between the two of you when things go wrong—and learn how to change it.

What Kind of Help Does a Struggling Marriage Need?

That depends upon how serious and entrenched the problems have become.

Some couples can make significant progress in weekly marriage counseling. If the problems are relatively recent or the relationship is basically stable, an hour each week may provide enough time.

Other couples need something more concentrated.

If you’ve been stuck for years, are experiencing severe conflict or emotional withdrawal, have already tried couples counseling, or are approaching separation or divorce, 50 minutes once a week may not provide enough time to address what is happening.

That’s why my practice is different.

A Different Kind of Help: Private Couples Intensives

At Colorado Marriage Retreats, I work privately with one couple at a time for 5–6 hours a day over 2–5 consecutive days.

There are no groups.

There are no workshops.

You aren’t participating in a program with other couples.

For those several days, the work is devoted entirely to understanding your relationship—what happened, what keeps going wrong, what each of you needs, and what would have to change for the relationship to become healthy again.

Several uninterrupted days allow us to work differently than we can in a weekly appointment.

When something important emerges, we don’t necessarily have to stop because the hour is over. We can stay with it, understand it more fully, and work through it.

The following day, we can continue from where we left off.

What Would We Actually Work On?

There is no standardized curriculum because every relationship has a different history.

Depending upon what is happening in your marriage, our work might include:

• Understanding the cycle of conflict that keeps repeating

• Reducing criticism and defensiveness

• Learning how to discuss difficult subjects without escalating

• Addressing emotional withdrawal

• Working through longstanding hurt and resentment

• Repairing injuries that have never been adequately resolved

• Rebuilding trust when it has been damaged

• Helping each partner feel heard and understood

• Rebuilding emotional closeness

• Clarifying what each of you needs from the relationship

• Determining what would genuinely have to change for the marriage to work

We don’t simply talk about what is wrong.

When your familiar relationship patterns appear while we’re together, we can slow them down, understand what is happening, and help you practice responding to each other differently.

What If We’ve Already Tried Marriage Counseling?

Then you are certainly not alone.

Some couples who come to me have spent months—or longer—in couples therapy.

Sometimes they learned useful things. They may understand their patterns considerably better than they once did.

And yet they are still stuck.

That doesn’t necessarily mean therapy failed, and it doesn’t necessarily mean the marriage cannot change.

Sometimes the format is part of the problem.

An hour a week may not provide enough uninterrupted time to get beneath years of resentment, work through a major rupture in trust, or interrupt an entrenched pattern while it is actually happening.

A couples intensive gives us several consecutive days to work without repeatedly stopping and starting.

What If Only One of Us Wants Help?

This is one of the most difficult situations couples face.

One partner may desperately want to repair the marriage while the other is exhausted, discouraged or uncertain whether they still want the relationship.

You don’t have to arrive feeling exactly the same way.

I won’t ask a reluctant partner to pretend to be hopeful, and my role isn’t to pressure either person to remain married.

Instead, we can examine the questions honestly:

What brought your marriage to this point?

What would actually have to change?

What responsibility does each person have for creating that change?

Is meaningful repair still possible?

Sometimes an intensive begins not with two people saying, “We’re committed to saving our marriage,” but with two people asking:

“Before we end this, is there something important we haven’t tried?”

Can a Marriage in Serious Trouble Be Repaired?

Sometimes, yes.

But no responsible therapist can promise that every marriage can—or should—be saved.

Years of hurt cannot simply be erased. Trust cannot be ordered back into existence. And one person cannot repair a marriage alone.

What can be done is to look carefully at what happened, understand the patterns that brought you here, address unresolved injuries, and determine whether the two of you are willing and able to build something different.

Serious problems don’t automatically mean your marriage is beyond repair.

But meaningful repair requires more than simply wanting things to get better.

It requires doing something different.

Who Will Help Us?

You will work directly with me, Neil Rosenthal.

I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and have worked with individuals and couples for 46 years. I am the author of a #1 bestselling relationship book and more than 1,000 relationship articles published in newspapers around the world.

My practice is devoted to private couples intensives.

I have worked with couples struggling with severe conflict, resentment, defensiveness, emotional withdrawal, damaged trust, loss of connection and uncertainty about whether their marriage can survive.

When you come here, you won’t be assigned to another therapist.

You work with me.

How Does the Intensive Work?

Private couples intensives generally last 2–5 days, with approximately 5–6 hours of therapy each day.

Couples come to Colorado from across the United States.

The appropriate length depends upon what you’re facing and what you hope to accomplish. Before scheduling anything, I speak with you so I can understand your situation, answer your questions and help determine whether an intensive is appropriate.

Not Sure What Kind of Help Your Marriage Needs?

You don’t need to know the answer before contacting me.

You also don’t need to decide in advance that you’re ready to schedule an intensive.

Tell me a little about what has been happening in your marriage. I’ll answer your questions and help you determine whether the kind of work I do would be appropriate for the two of you.

Call Neil Rosenthal at 720-331-5564 for a complimentary consultation.

Not ready to call? Send me a private message describing briefly what is happening in your marriage. I will personally respond.