How To Get The RIGHT Help For Your Marriage

Doing nothing feels safe.

It isn't.

When your marriage starts falling apart, most people freeze. You don't want to make it worse. You don't want the conflict. You don't know what to say. So you wait and hope it settles on its own.

It almost never does.

You really only have three options when trouble shows up. Do nothing. Get the wrong help. Get the right help.

In this video, Dr. Joe Beam walks through all three, and why the second one does more damage than most people realize.

The wrong help is rarely obvious. It's the friend who's still angry about her own divorce. It's family who love you too much to be objective. It's a counselor carrying bitterness she's never dealt with. It's a good-hearted couple online who saved their own marriage and now assume yours looks like theirs.

None of those people are villains. They just aren't equipped to help you.

A testimony is not a method. Caring is not a plan.

He also covers what to actually look for. The right education. Values that match yours, or at least get respected. Someone who treats the marriage as the client instead of picking a side. And the questions to ask before you book a single session, including how they calculate the success rate they advertise.

One warning worth repeating. If someone diagnoses your spouse without ever meeting your spouse, walk away.

Most people don't wait because they stopped caring. They wait because they're hoping it resolves itself.

Get help early. Even if your spouse isn't there yet.

If you're struggling in your marriage, don’t wait. Get our FREE resource: The 7 Steps to Rescue Your Marriage 👉 https://marriagehelper.com/free

📞 BOOK A CALL WITH OUR TEAM: https://bit.ly/4fhb9Yz

🔗 Website: https://marriagehelper.com
📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marriagehelper
👀 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@marriagehelper

Follow our other channels!
📺 https://youtube.com/@kimberlybeamholmes
📺 https://youtube.com/@drjoebeam

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

A Crisis Hits And Now What

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What do you do first when your marriage is in trouble? Hi, I'm Dr. Joe Bean with Marriage Helper. I've been working with marriages in crisis for the last three decades, over 30 years. We've seen just about anything and everything that sometimes people do. We've seen the things that work and the things that don't work.

The Hidden Cost Of Doing Nothing

SPEAKER_00 0:17

But when you first find out that there's trouble going on, you basically have one of three choices. Choice one is you're going to do nothing. You say, really? Some people opt for that? Sure. Well, some people opt for that because they don't know what to do. They're caught off guard and they're shocked. My spouse just told me he or she doesn't love me anymore. I just found out about the affair, or whatever it might be. And we're in trouble, but I I don't know what to do to fix this. I never expected this. My spouse is not even acting like the person he or she used to be. And so I don't know what to do. Therefore, you do nothing. That's actually not a good choice most of the time. Or some people do nothing because they worry, well, whatever I do, it's just going to make things worse. We run into that all the time. My spouse is already angry with me. And if I try to do this or try to do that, he or she's going to get angrier with me. And so maybe I'm better off to do nothing because of the fact that it's just going to make things worse. I'll just need to keep my mouth shut. Or sometimes some people do nothing because they hate conflict. They just can't stand up anything that smacks of conflict. And if you try to do something, there may be conflict. And then there are some people that don't do anything because they just don't care. I saw a Facebook post a couple of years ago where a guy said, Well, we've been married 15 years, but she's decided that she needs to move on and find somebody else. And because I love her so much, I'm setting her free so that she can be happy. And I read that and I thought, oh, you fill in the next word. You're not letting her go because you love her and want her to be happy. You're letting her go because you don't care. If you genuinely loved her, then you wouldn't want her to walk away and leave you like that. If you genuinely loved her, you would do something. But here you're just saying, no, I'm going to do nothing, let her do whatever she wants to do. Don't tell me, don't tell me that's because you care about her. What I'm reading into that, and I've got a lot of experience here. That indicates that you really genuinely don't care about her. Or maybe even that you have something else in mind yourself. Well, is it ever wise to do nothing? It can be. No, if the conflict is minor, if it's not just a big deal, don't make a mountain out of a molehill. And so you don't react to every little thing. If your spouse says this or does that and you're not happy about it, sometimes you just let it go because it's just not that big a deal, and you don't want to make that mountain out of that molehill. But if the conflict is major, or if it's heading towards something that's going to be major, and you do nothing, here's the great likelihood it's going to get worse. It's going to get bigger, it's going to get badder because of the fact that now, because you're doing nothing, the other spouse will read that as either that you don't care, or that you don't genuinely love them, or that they have such influence over you that you're going to let them do whatever they want to do and they're free, and there's going to be no negative consequence at all. And so therefore they read that as freedom, which becomes encouragement, which means they do it more and more. You see, doing nothing is kind of hoping that the pig will learn how to fly. I'm not going to do anything here, but maybe the problem will resolve itself. And on rare occasions, it does. I've been seeing that over the last 30-something years, but those occasions are rare.

How The Wrong Help Wrecks Progress

SPEAKER_00 3:48

Well, here's the second thing you can do. Your second choice is you can get uh wrong kind of help. Now, nobody says that's what I'm looking for. Help me find the wrong kind of help. It's just that they don't realize that the help they're going for is the wrong kind of help. Uh several years ago, for example, in one of our workshops, we had a guy who was there. His wife had had an affair with another man. Actually, this particular guy was a minister, and his wife had had an affair with another person in the church. And they came to our workshop to see if they could potentially put the marriage back together. But everybody in his world had advised them against that. His mother, his father, his brother, his sister, his friends, his church leaders, everybody in his world had said, don't do it. You're a fool if you try to put that marriage back together. But he came anyway. And he told me, sometimes I feel like a fool. Well, you see, they're biased. Not because they're bad people, they're good people, they love you, they care about you. But they're biased because she has hurt you, and therefore they're hurt because you're hurt and they want to see her punished. And that's why they're doing and saying these things. One lady told me once, she said, My friends and family are trying to get me to emasculate him. I said, I hope that's figurative. She said, Yes, it is. I said, Are you going to do it? She said, No. Why not? I'm not going to take their hurt on. I've got enough hurt for my own. So be careful about listening to your family and friends because they love you too much. And particularly be wary of friends who are divorced, who are bitter, or angry. We have witnessed this so many times over the years. Let's just say it's a woman who's having marriage difficulties. And so she starts hanging out with her friends who are single women because of the fact that they have been through divorces. Now, it could be a man hanging out with single men who've been through divorces, but we see it more often with women. And those women listen to her talk about how bad the marriage is and how the husband has hurt her or offended her or whatever it might be. And rather than being understanding and saying, well, you know, he's a good guy, we've known him for years, you might find a way to work this out, they're not giving that kind of advice. What they're saying is, get him. Now, I'm getting a little psychological here. But most of the time when it happens, it's because if you, the new person in a group who's having marriage problems, if you wind up divorcing your husband, it validates the decisions we made when we divorced our husbands. Therefore, we want you to do it so that we feel better about ourselves. Now, are they consciously thinking that? Probably not. But is that a factor? You know it is. It happens so often. And so if you're having marriage problems, whatever you do, I beg of you. Don't get the wrong help by hanging out or talking to people who have been divorced and are still bitter about their marriages and those kinds of things. Those people won't help you. And on that sake, sometimes people go to a marriage counselor, which is we recommend marriage counselors, by the way, but they go to one who's angry, one who is bitter about his or her own life and what has occurred to him or her. We've actually run into over the years, for example, I'm thinking of one particular female counselor right now, and I'm not beating up women, I'm just thinking of the specific person. She hated all men because of her bitterness toward the husband she had had earlier in her life. And because of the bitterness toward him, nearly every woman who came to her for advice and help about putting the marriages back together wound up being divorced. Now, after a while, you see there's a pretty strong pattern there. The person that's supposed to be trying to help you save your marriage is actually giving you advice or feeding back things to you that make the situation worse, and whether she's doing it consciously or subconsciously, she's definitely doing it hurting a marriage. And so if you're going to go see a marriage counselor and we think the good ones are worth their weight and gold. We really do. But but ones who are angry, ones who are bitter, they probably are gonna advise you towards a range of punishing your spouse or divorcing your spouse. And so if you're gonna find a marriage counselor, find one with a high success rate and make sure you understand what that success rate is. I'll actually mention that here in a good minute. Here's another thing. There are people out there now, good people, good-hearted people, who went through some kind of marriage difficulty and they figured out how to save it, and now they're advertising on the internet, on Facebook, and other places. Hey, we figured out how to save our marriages, we'll help yours. No, let me say this first about those folks. Thank God they want to help other people. I mean, what a great heart that is. We worked it out, we saved our marriage, we'd like to share that with other people, and I give them kudos for that. But understand that a testimony or caring is not the same thing as a method or a plan. And these people typically are best helping people who go through situations just like theirs. But when the situation is different, and you understand the majority of them will be, it's like, well, we don't really understand that nuance. Now they may not say that to you. They just say, well, no, no, here's what you do because this is what worked for us. And what they tell you to do doesn't really fit your situation. As a matter of fact, might even make your situation worse. But not because they're bad people, they're not trying to hurt you, they're good people with good hearts. But their education, their training, their understanding, their experiences are limited. And so if they're just being mentors to you, that can be a really good thing. That can help you a lot. But if they're going to be the people that are going to help you figure out how to save your marriage, make sure they really know how to do that and love them for what they want to do, but don't follow their advice if it's not good, solid, valid advice. And then sometimes there are well-intentioned other people that want to help you. One lady called me once and she said, we went to see our pastor. We were trying to put our marriage back together. We'd been separated for a while, and then he gave us the Myers Briggs, and then he looked at that and said, According to this, you should have never been married to begin with. Therefore, I'm not going to help you try to put your marriage back together. You need to stay separated and go ahead and divorce. Now, that was the minister, the pastor in her church. She called and she said, Well, what do you think we should do? You know, I was a little facetious, but what I said was, I think you ought to find a pastor who's a Christian. Don't let somebody, just because they have a certain position, like pastor or an elder in a church or a deacon or whatever it might be. I actually know of a church, a big church here in the area where I live, who had a counseling center and not a particular person, not one, in that counseling center, had any education when it came to the social sciences. No counseling education, no psychology education, no social work education, none of that. It was just good people who had a good degree of Bible knowledge, and that's good. That's an important thing. But those are not the people because they don't have the experience, they don't have the understanding. Well, that leaves you option three.

How To Choose The Right Help

SPEAKER_00 11:27

Get the right help. You might be saying, okay, then you're trying to say that we should call you Dr. Beam. Well, yeah, if you wish, but if you don't want to do with us, that's fine. We're just saying you need to find the right help. What we're saying is you need to find the right help. If it's us wonderful, if it's somebody else wonderful, if it's the right help. Because what we care about most is you. And you're saving that marriage for the sake of you and your spouse, and if you have children for their sake as well. Now, find somebody who has the right education. Typically that means at least a master's degree, if not a PhD, in the right area. Not just a PhD in in uh engineering, but somebody who has a PhD or a master's degree in the right area learning how to help people. And then before you actually sign up with them, interview them. You say, what do you mean? Find out what their value system is and make sure that their beliefs and values are compatible with yours. Because I heard a lady on television once. She was angry, she was striving, she was a counselor, and she was saying, I'm sick and tired of these people coming in here who have been tainted by their religions to believe they should try to put their marriages back together. Religion should never tell them what to do. I should be the one telling them what to do. Can you believe that? You know, if she had been trained properly, they would have trained her. You don't impose your beliefs and values on your clients, but she was a flat out saying it on national TV that she would. I think she was just being strident so she could get on TV. But I'm saying there are people out there who really do believe that. Make sure they have the same beliefs and values as yours, at least that they will respect your beliefs and values and operate within it. And then don't let them tell you what to do. We run into some counselors and therapists who say, well, in my opinion, you guys don't need to live together, so you move out and you'll live over here and you'll live over there, and and and each will continue to come to see me individually. And after a few months, when I decide it's okay, I'll tell you to move back in together. How arrogant can a person be? Who gets to make that decision for you? Somebody who says I have a degree, do what I say. If they're doing that, run. Oh, another thing you should run from is if they are making diagnoses of your partner, your spouse, but they've never met him or her. We run into that all the time. Well, my counselor said my husband is a narcissist. Really? How many sessions did your counselor have with your husband? Well, she's never met him. First of all, it's unprofessional. It's also unethical. And if she's making those kind of decisions about your spouse just based off one side of the story, which is what you're telling her, then she doesn't know what she's doing. And it doesn't matter if it's a female counselor or male counselor. I'm not trying to make a difference between the two. There's just a whole lot more female counselors than male counselors out there. But if they're making a diagnosis of your spouse that they've never met, they're not professional. They're not even ethical. And if you're going to go see them in the interview up front, ask them what their success rate is. And then ask them how they figure that success rate. We had a counselor who ran a counseling center in Dallas, and she said we have a 90% success rate. 90%? Wow, that's higher than we have, and ours is remarkable. We have a 70% that people who still stay together for up to two years after the marriage, and that's better than the statistics from marriage counseling by far. And so we were loving that we could prove that 70% of them were staying together, even though they came to us in major crisis. And you're saying 90%? How? Tell us how, teach us. She said, well, if they do everything we tell them to do. Oh, I see. Well, if every person who came to see us about their marriage did everything that we teach them to do, we'd have 100% success. So if you're going to ask about their success, ask how they come to those numbers. And even this, there's a guy in Atlanta who's well known, and he advertises that I consider success not just saving a marriage, I consider success. Sometimes the fact that I help you decide to divorce and split up. Look, if you're going to work with a marriage counselor, and some of them are awesome and they're worth their way and go, find somebody who makes the marriage the client. Not you, not your spouse, but the marriage the client. And who will work hard to help you put that back together. And of course, we're here. We'd love to help you as well. We've worked with thousands. As a matter of fact, 25,000 just in the last 10 years or so. And we'd love to help you. We care. And we don't work just with thousands of people. Every person is individual and inclined to us. We can help let us

Act Early Before It Gets Hard

SPEAKER_00 16:30

know. But look, do something now. The first thing you should do when you're having a marriage problem, don't do nothing, unless it's a minor thing, then let it go. Don't get the wrong help. That'll make things worse. Get the right help. And the reason you need to do it early, even if your spouse is against that, even if your spouse is saying, no, let's not do that. The reason you need to get it early is because we often run into people who wake too late. And we'll do everything we can to help them. But everything's gone to a very bad place by then, and it's very, very difficult to help. Don't wait. If you love your spouse, get help now.