Marriage Intensives: When Weekly Therapy Isn’t Enough

Over the nearly 50 years I’ve been working with couples, I’ve learned something important: for many relationship issues, an hour of marriage therapy a week simply isn’t enough.

This is especially true when a marriage is in crisis.

Maybe one spouse has announced, “I love you, but I’m not in love with you anymore.”

Maybe there has been an affair.

Maybe the word “divorce” has already been spoken—or papers have even been filed.

Or maybe you’ve spent months, sometimes years, in marriage therapy and you’re still having the same arguments, feeling the same resentment and wondering whether anything is ever going to change.

These are the couples I have spent much of my career working with.

And they are also the reason I became such a believer in marriage intensives.

What Is a Marriage Intensive?

A marriage intensive is exactly what it sounds like: rather than meeting with a therapist for an hour each week, a couple sets aside a concentrated block of time to work on their marriage.

My marriage intensives take place over two days.

But here’s what’s important: a marriage intensive isn’t simply months of therapy crammed into two days.

It's an entirely different process.

The advantage of having two uninterrupted days is that we have time to really understand what has happened in a marriage—and then determine what to do differently to reach each partner's goals.

In traditional weekly therapy, just when you finally get to the heart of an issue, someone looks at the clock and says, “We’ll have to pick this up next week.”

Then you go home. Sometimes, you're not in the best place when the session is over.

You take bad feelings home with you.

Then life happens.

You have another fight.

Someone shuts down.

And by the time you return the following week, you may spend half the session talking about what happened since the last appointment.

It's hard to get any traction.

An intensive allows us to stay with something long enough to get somewhere.

What Do You Actually Do During a Marriage Intensive?

People sometimes imagine two days of talking endlessly about difficult feelings.

That's not how I work.

Although sometimes we do talk about difficult feelings, the goal isn't simply to talk about feelings.

I want to know why the two of you have been feeling stuck. I want to understand what has caused these impasses.

But understanding the problem is only useful if it helps us figure out what needs to change.

I want to know:

What caused the two of you to become so disconnected?

What are the patterns you keep repeating that aren’t working?

What does each of you need that you haven’t been getting?

What have you tried to fix things—what hasn't worked, and what has worked, even briefly?

What needs to happen for hope to return?

And, most importantly:

What can each of you do differently when you go home?

I have always been a very practical, solution-oriented therapist. I don’t believe people should spend months or years simply becoming experts on why they’re unhappy.

Insight is important.

But insight without change isn't enough.

What If My Spouse Doesn't Want to Save the Marriage?

This is one of the biggest misconceptions about marriage intensives—and about marriage therapy in general.

People often assume that both spouses have to be equally motivated to save their marriage before anything meaningful can happen.

They don't.

In fact, many of the couples who come to see me have completely different goals for their marriages.

One spouse wants the marriage to work. That person may be willing to do almost anything to prevent divorce.

The other spouse wants out.

That spouse may feel hopeless. They may believe they’ve tried everything. They may be emotionally exhausted. They may even be coming to the intensive primarily so they can say, “I tried one last thing.”

And I take both people's feelings and goals seriously.

I've learned something over the years about hopelessness:

Hopelessness is a feeling. It isn't a fact.

Feelings can change.

People can change.

And relationships can change. I’ve seen this happen time and time again.

Does that mean every marriage can or should be saved? Of course not. Sometimes couples use our time together to determine whether their marriage can be repaired. And sometimes they use it to identify ways to separate more amicably.

Often, even when there have been long-standing problems, this process leads to a desire on both spouses' parts to reconcile—or at least to slow things down long enough to make the best possible decision.

However, when an intensive doesn’t lead to reconciliation, couples often express appreciation for having participated for other reasons: finding greater peace with the decision to separate and having an opportunity to discuss difficult next steps, particularly when children are involved.

What If There Has Been Infidelity?

Infidelity is one of the most devastating crises a couple can experience.

The betrayed spouse may be overwhelmed with questions, anger, images they can't get out of their mind and an almost desperate need to understand how this could have happened.

The spouse who had the affair may feel remorseful and want desperately to move forward—or may feel so overwhelmed by the betrayed spouse's pain and questions that they begin shutting down.

Then couples get trapped.

One person needs to talk about the affair in order to heal.

The other wants to stop talking about it in order to heal.

And neither understands why what seems so necessary to them feels so destructive to their spouse.

I've worked with infidelity for decades and wrote Healing from Infidelity because there are very specific things couples need to understand in order to recover from an affair.

A concentrated marriage intensive can be especially useful after infidelity because we have enough time to address the crisis without having to stop every 50 minutes.

But affair recovery isn't simply about discussing the affair.

Ultimately, we also need to understand the marriage, rebuild trust and help both people decide what the relationship needs to look like going forward.

If infidelity is the crisis that brought you here, you can learn more about my 2-Day Infidelity Marriage Intensive.

Are Marriage Intensives Worth It?

That's a fair question.

A two-day marriage intensive is a significant investment of time, money and emotional energy.

And no ethical therapist should promise you that two days will magically fix your marriage.

I certainly won't.

What two days can provide is something that's very difficult to get in weekly therapy: enough uninterrupted time to identify the real problems, interrupt patterns that may have existed for years, learn and practice different ways of interacting and develop a concrete plan for what happens next.

For couples who have been stuck for a long time—or who feel they are running out of time—that can make an enormous difference.

What Happens After the Intensive?

The real test of any marriage therapy isn't what happens in the therapist's office.

It's what happens when you get home.

That's why I want couples to leave an intensive knowing specifically what each person needs to do differently.

Not:

“We need to communicate better.”

That's too vague.

I want couples to understand what “better” actually looks like in their marriage.

What should you do differently the next time your spouse gets angry?

What should you do instead of withdrawing?

How can you ask for what you want in a way that makes it more likely your spouse will listen?

How do you recognize the old dance before you're halfway through it again?

How will your spouse know—not because you said so, but because of what you actually do—that something has changed?

Those are the kinds of questions that matter.

And regardless of what happens next, doing a deep dive to better understand how you got to this place in your marriage can be extremely useful.

Sometimes that understanding helps couples find a way back to each other.

Sometimes it helps them make difficult decisions with greater clarity.

Either way, two days gives us the time to ask the questions that really matter—and to listen carefully to both answers.