“Don’t the two of you get sick of psychoanalyzing each other all the time?” After almost 16 years of marriage to another counselor, what we are sick of is this question! To begin with, although we are psychotherapists, we are not psychoanalysts; and secondly, by the time we finish an intense day of counseling and teaching, the last thing we want to do is more therapy! Nonetheless, even such a naive, uninformed question does address a valid underlying issue: A marriage where both spouses are counselors does have unique challenges! One of the pitfalls of our profession is the stress it puts on our intimate relationships. So when two counselors fall in love, the stressors can be intensified. However, we also know that a degree of similarity between partners helps cement a pre-marital relationship and fosters marital stability. So it makes sense that those of us who find our life passion in helping others would be attracted to others with the same longing. It would also be expected that a couple with specialized skills in helping others resolve their interpersonal difficulties would have a distinct advantage in growing a healthy marriage themselves. The challenge facing dual counselor couples is to find a way to maximize the potential opportunities available to them without falling into destructive patterns. Following are some of the danger areas as well as the potential assets that we have observed in marriages where both partners are committed to counseling ministry.
Facing the Challenges Examining your spouse through pathology-colored lenses. Training in diagnosis and identification of dysfunctional intrapsychic and interpersonal patterns is a valuable professional skill better left at the office. The skills more likely to produce better results in your home are your abilities to see the strengths and potential in others. Colluding in your illusion of your own health and maturity. One couple we know were so absorbed in finishing doctoral studies and establishing practices that they were able to distract themselves from their unresolved personal issues as well as how those issues were damaging their relationship. Sadly, divorce followed. The task is to celebrate one’s growth while keeping a biblical perspective on one’s own fallibility and propensity to selfishness. Competing professionally, educationally, and financially. She has had a book published; he struggles to write his client notes in legible sentences. He has a doctorate, she a master’s. His male ego struggles with the fact that his wife earns more than he does. Her area of specialization results in low income potential (e.g., working with long-term trauma clients) while his specialization results in much higher earnings (short-term marital clients). Whatever the case, the marital task is to encourage and actively support each other’s unique interests and opportunities. A perspective that recognizes the achievements of the couple rather than competitively evaluating these factors produces a healthier marriage. In our marriage, Fred’s higher income in marital counseling frees Heather to focus on her fascinating work with dissociative clients. Analyzing your friends and family members, particularly your in-laws. Consciously choosing not to view others through professional lenses, to leave work at work, will help in all your family and social relationships. Most of us can’t resist the temptation to comment on the obvious dynamics, but prolonged case conferences, especially about your family of origin and initiated by your partner, will often lead to defensiveness. Loyalty to friends and family, despite their pathology, must be respected. Couples who learn how to keep healthy boundaries and to choose carefully who should be the object of their therapeutic expertise will probably fare better over the long run Relying exclusively on each other to provide emotional and relational needs. The reality is that therapists often have difficulty forming relationships, perhaps due to the automatic distancing that seems to occur when you introduce yourself as a counselor. For counselor couples it can be very difficult to find friends who understand their mutual dedication to counseling ministry and who are not intimidated by their competence. Actively seeking to enrich your personal and relational life by finding individual and couple friends with whom you can relate deeply may help to decrease the exclusive dependence on each other to meet these needs. Having a professionally rewarding relationship without connecting deeply on other levels.
Work or career intimacy can be the basis of the relationship, however, this type of intimacy will rarely be enough to maintain and deepen a healthy marriage. Spiritual, recreational, and other facets of intimacy help to broaden and deepen the vocational focus of the relationship. The goal is to bring your own expertise on what constitutes a truly intimate relationship into your own marriage and work toward becoming best friends. Experiencing simultaneous burnout. When you can so easily identify with your spouse’s crises and stress, it becomes very difficult to differentiate your own stress from your partner’s, thus compromising each other’s ability to cope. Perhaps this could be considered a new variety of vicarious traumatization. Ultimately, monitoring and coping with your stress level is not your spouse’s responsibility.
Reaping the Benefits Aside from the already mentioned dangers, there are definite advantages of dual counselor marriages. One advantage is that your spouse has both a cognitive and experiential knowledge of the life of a therapist. A deep understanding of what each other experiences in his or her work helps to deepen the relationship. Another advantage is that peer supervision/consultation is readily available. While there is the danger of the leakage of personal/relational issues into professional discussions, your spouse may have some brilliant insights into your therapeutic practice because of his or her intimate knowledge of both you and therapeutic processes. The built-in access to reflection on gender issues is another advantage that consistently benefits the counselor couple. While that happens to some extent in all marriages, the training and sensitivity to gender issues that should be part of the counselor’s worldview makes this a particularly rich source of reflection. The bottom line is that counselors need to forsake the assumption of relational health and practice what they preach in their own marriages: humility, openness, active listening, and self and couple reflection on individual and relational growth issues. While in our own marriage it has been easy to fall prey to the assumption that we are beyond the need to examine our own communication patterns, we distinctly remember the situations in which we have had to consciously begin active listening and using conflict resolution skills in order to process difficult issues.
One additional opportunity for ministry exists for counselor couples: While people may expect unreasonable levels of marital bliss from such couples, the opportunity is there to become a model of mutual affirmation and of relational and conflict resolution skills. This is a unique aspect of ministry available to those of us counselor couples who want to model Christlikeness in all facets of our lives.
