One of the significant challenges of pastoral care ministry is supporting and helping couples. Watching couples move from the bliss of premarital counseling, where often couples are so “in love” that they do not anticipate problems, to the sacred beauty of the wedding and reception, to the reality that about 50 percent of marriages will fail can be discouraging. Watching discouraged couples in pain, and feeling unprepared to help, becomes painful and discouraging for you!
While church leaders are not trained to be marital therapists, nor do they have the time to devote to time-consuming marital therapy, practical principles in the Bowen family systems theory can be helpful in their ministry. Rather than seeing problems as occurring within individuals, he suggested we consider how problems exist and are maintained with family systems, literally between not within people.
Principle 1: The Only Person You Can Change is Yourself.
Most couples think they know their problems’ source: their partner. They believe that if only their partner would change, get some therapy, figure out their family of origin issues, be less critical, and learn to communicate, the marital issues would be solved. Their focus is on their partner, how they are the source of the problems, and how they need to change! Sadly, their contribution to the problem is largely overlooked, and they are frequently blind to the way their own behavior also contributes to arguments and marital pain.
Change comes when individuals focus less on their partner, explore how they themselves contribute to marital problems, and attempt to change their own behavior. This is a profound spiritual principle. Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:1‑5 speak powerfully to this principle. “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged. . . . Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? . . . You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
Principle 2: Couple Conflict Makes Sense if You Understand the Dance
Sarah complains that her husband Fred frequently watches ESPN while she desperately wants to talk. She constantly pursues him, asking for more conversation. The more she pursues, the more her husband distances himself. Furthermore, the more he distances, asking for space, the more she pursues. They have co-created a powerful dance which, not surprisingly, is referred to as the pursue-distance dance. In reality, their dance is so powerful that they inadvertently create the very thing they dislike in others. They blame each other rather than understand their roles in maintaining the weak interaction.
Church leaders can help couples look more broadly at their dance and recognize the pattern they are caught in. Rather than getting caught in the trap of attempting to make suggestions or come up with solutions for the presenting problem, the goal is to watch for the interactional dance. One of the most helpful interventions is to help couples recognize their patterns, which can create hope as they recognize patterns and are more likely to find hope for change.
Principle 3: The Role of Anxiety in Couple Conflict
Think of anxiety as putting predictable interactions on steroids. For example, if one spouse pursues their partner, their pursuit will intensify if they are highly anxious. As that anxiety-filled pursuit intensifies, the anxiety in the partner grows, and they may become even more distant. This is the same as the anxiety of the over-functioner. The normally over-functioning person becomes very anxious, and they can quickly become hypervigilant and over-function even more, feeling that if they do not manage everything in the world, or at least in their world, they will fall apart.
The over-functioning spouse begins to see their partner as lazy or as a child and responds accordingly, while the under-functioning spouse sees their partner as a control freak. These negative pictures begin to be cemented in place by repetitive interactions. As a result, partners begin to think they know their partners. They lose all sense of nuance and balance and form a black-and-white picture. They have lost sight of what initially attracted them and now hold a negative picture of their partner.
A key ingredient in helping to create change is to confuse the pictures couples have of each other and see a more complex, nuanced picture that creates hope and healing. Often one party will come to talk to you complaining about their partner with a very negative picture, and of course, not seeing any of their own contribution to the problem. We, in theory, stress that there are equal sides, meaning that both contribute equally. The leader needs to remember that no matter how convincing someone’s story is, there is always another side of the story.
In an emotional hijack, couples often feel hopelessness and despair. Christianity offers great hope, which you can convey in your prayers and by listening to the family. By clarifying the interactional dance pattern and beginning to help each partner see their part in that dance, you have offered hope for change. In this initial session, the essential task is to help make sense of the despair that the couple is experiencing by clarifying patterns, helping them see that their problem has a clear pattern to it, and as a result offering hope that the problem can be solved.
Taken from Ministering to Families in Crisis edited by Jennifer S. Ripley, James N. Sells, and Diane J. Chandler. Copyright (c) 2024 by Jennifer Sulouff Ripley, James Sells, and Diane Joyce Chandler. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com
