Saturday, November 24, 2012

My Marriage Is In Trouble - Can I Fix It?


My marriage is in trouble.  Can I fix it?  This question is asked by thousands of people every day.  The difficult part is that many couples have only one partner who realizes or is willing to admit that there are big problems in a marriage.

There are many, many products and ebooks available that claim to deal with the problem of failing marriages.  Unfortunately, many of them are written by people who are not qualified to deal with the unique problems of the dynamic of two people in a relationship.

Lee Baucom, PhD., is a very highly regarded marriage counselor with well over twenty years of experience saving marriages. Dr. Baucom’s non-traditional approach has saved thousands of marriages.  He is a member of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists.  The industry average success rate is approximately 20 percent, but Dr. Baucom claims a success rate of approximately 90 percent.  He states that his phenomenal success rate is due to his unique approach to the problem of how to fix a relationship that is in trouble.



Many self-styled marriage counselors deal only with the actions that a couple should take in order to save their marriage.  This can be viewed as closing the barn door once the horse is gone – that is, it’s already somewhat too late.  In order to save the relationship, it’s important to know what things a couple must not do in order to keep the relationship intact, before either partner begins to think of divorce as the only solution.  In other words, Dr. Baucom’s approaches are much more proactive than those of many other products and therapists.

Dr. Baucom claims that his straightforward approach has saved thousands of troubled marriages since the development and first application of his program. His website contains quite a few video clips where the doctor delineates the contents of his innovative program.

The information is helpful, well-organized and easily actionable, and it’s presented very clearly.  Dr. Baucom criticizes the unprofessional and unqualified self-styled “marriage counselors” who abound on the internet. He states that much of the material offered by these people is not correctly tested and is unproven.

Dr. Baucom admits that when he first began to practice, he began by applying the archaic principles he had been taught.  Distressed because they didn’t work very well, and that his clients were frustrated at not getting the answers to their question “How do you save a relationship?” he researched and developed his own unconventional approach and his success rate rose dramatically.

Surprisingly, most practicing psychologists are not trained specifically for marriage therapy.  They start in working with individual clients, and add on couples therapy later on in their practice.  Naturally, they try to use the general individual techniques they were taught in school to help married couples to fix their marriage.  This sounds like a good idea, but it doesn’t work, states Dr. Baucom, and this explains the low success rate.

Like most other current marriage counselors, Baucom began in practice by applying the principles he had been taught in school.  Unfortunately, these techniques were outdated, especially for modern couples where the division of labor within a marriage is so different now than it had been in previous decades.  Add to that the truth that a marriage is not merely two individuals with their own psychologies, but the marriage entity is a unique thing with a blended psychology which has to be addressed in a very special way, and the complexity of the problem increases dramatically.  He found some unique and especially effective ways to help couples to fix a relationship that’s in trouble.

Part of Doctor Baucom’s approach is first to show you the “Four Myths of a Successful Marriage.”

These myths are:

- Communication is critical.

- There is only one path to a successful marriage.  (The author claims there are at least eight paths)

- You can’t save the marriage if your spouse isn’t trying.

- Time heals all (wounds, plus everything else).

Dr. Baucom claims that, many times, when one partner files for divorce or otherwise claims that there are big problems in the marriage, the other partner is taken completely by surprise.  Somehow, the second partner had no idea (or claims to have had no idea) that the marriage wasn’t going along just fine, and suddenly, divorce is in the picture. 

Dr. Baucom claims that more marriages die from neglect than any other cause.  Often a partner will feel devalued and lonely simply because there is no positive work going on in the marriage, and this makes the unhappy partner feel like saying “My marriage is over!” and makes them want to end the relationship.

People who are surveyed consistently rate their marriage as one of the top three or four priority items, yet ironically, very few people spend time working on their marriage.  Often the other partner sees this unintentional neglect as indifference, and the result is separation and/or divorce.

In the work arena, when someone is faced with a similarly difficult situation, many people simply change jobs rather than try to change the work situation to suit themselves better and make themselves happier where they are.  It’s part and parcel of our current disposable society.  Also, our society has diminished respect for the institution of marriage.  These two factors can contribute to a partner starting down the painful road to divorce.

Separation or divorce, of course, are not short-term, clear-cut events.  There is a long emotional process involved before and during the actual legal decisions.  Dr. Baucom states that a couple must know what stage their relationship is in.  There are different treatments in his program that can be applied at different stages in a couple’s relationship breakdown.  This is very helpful and makes Dr. Baucom’s methods tailor-made for each couple wanting to fix a relationship.

As with any product, Dr. Baucom doesn’t promise 100 percent success.  Whenever you deal with people and their psychologies, things are always changing and sometimes a marriage will fail despite people’s best intentions and efforts.  Dr. Baucom’s techniques do have an astonishing success rate, however, and there are many life stories on the site to prove the validity of his techniques.

Doctor Baucom closes by saying that his program isn’t just about your marriage, it’s about creating the relationship of your dreams.   As long as both people want a fulfilling and happy future together, with a little work and loving attention, they can achieve it.