Couples On The Brink
Are you or your partner on the brink of ending your relationship, but not completely sure it’s the best choice? If so, Discernment Counseling is designed for you.
Discernment Counseling For Couples On The Brink by Robin Sesan, Ph.D. is a brief (one to five sessions) intervention that gives you a chance to slow down, take a breath, and fully consider your options.
Often, one partner wants to pursue couples therapy while the other is not sure it will help, or is too exhausted from fighting or disconnection to put more energy into the relationship. Discernment Counseling is a new way of helping couples decide whether to try to restore their relationship to health, separate or move toward divorce, or take a time out and decide later.
The goal of Discernment Counseling is not to solve your problems, but to help you decide if they may be solvable. It is not couples therapy, but a process that will help you decide if you want to pursue couples therapy to improve your relationship.
Dr. Sesan will treat each of you with compassion and respect no matter how you are feeling about your relationship. Her goal is to help both of you gain clarity and confidence about a path forward, based on a deeper understanding of your relationship and its possibilities for the future.
You will come in as a couple, but much of the work will occur in one-to-one conversations. Dr. Sesan will respect your or your partner’s reasons for considering separation or divorce while examining the possibility of developing a happier and healthier relationship. As part of this, she will help identify your own contributions to the relationship problems and possible solutions. This is a useful process for future relationships, even if this one ends.
Counseling will begin with a two-hour session in which Dr. Sesan will talk with both of you together and each of you alone. At the end of the session, you will decide whether to continue the process for a second session. Subsequent sessions will run for 90 minutes. If you are interested, you will continue this process for a maximum of five sessions.
At the end of this process, you will decide whether to commit to a six-month all-out effort to work on the relationship in couples therapy, begin the process of separation/divorce, or keep things the way they are for now.
Watch as Bill Doherty, creator of Discernment Counseling, discusses how the process can help you:
Discernment Counseling is not an option when:
- One partner has already made a final decision to divorce
- One partner is coercing the other to participate
- There is danger of domestic violence.