Marriage Counseling and Mental Illness

We spent several years with different marriage counselors without making progress. I tried soooo hard! Our last counselor was an answer to prayer. She was skilled, compassionate, Spirit-filled, and dedicated. More than once she reminded us, "I spend more time on you than on any of my other clients." But even that was not enough. The script was always the same: I came to counseling to learn but my spouse came to blame. When we finally reached the end of the road I asked the Lord,

"Why didn't any of our marriage counseling work?"

"It didn't work because she didn't want it to work."

I'm not alone. Dr. Shari Manning wrote a popular book, "Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder." Her website contains a large archive of questions that people have asked over the years. She noted that the question that was asked more often than any other was:

"Why didn't marriage counseling work for us?"

The following is a summary of Dr. Manning's response to all of these disappointed people.

Traditional marriage counseling is based on the premise that both individuals are willing to discuss the issues and that both are willing to make changes. But when one spouse has a personality disorder:

• They aren't able to accept any responsibility for the situation. (They only blame.)
• They aren't able to do any self-evaluation.
• They don't have the relational skills to be compassionate or offer empathy.
• They can't take their eyes off their own internal pain long enough to think about anyone else.