Discernment counseling: when one of you wants to leave

What is discernment counseling?

Discernment counseling is a short piece of work for deciding what happens to a relationship when the 2 of you want different things. It came out of an American university project for couples on the brink of divorce, and the spelling comes with the name. It is deliberately brief: one session at the shortest and 5 at the longest, with most of the time spent with each of you alone rather than facing each other¹. You agree to one session, then decide whether there is another.

Three paths go on the table at the start, and neither of you picks one in the first hour.

• Path one. Carrying on as you have been.
• Path 2. Moving towards separation or divorce.
• Path 3. A 6-month effort in couples therapy, agreed at the start, with divorce off the table until that period ends.

What separates it from couples therapy is that nobody is asked to show improvement while the decision is still open. The one leaning out is asked what part of the trouble is theirs. The one leaning in is asked what they would change, and whether they would want it for a reason other than keeping their partner.

Why does couples therapy stall when one of you wants to leave?

Couples therapy assumes the 2 of you want the same thing, and in this room you do not. You are having 2 different conversations and calling it one. If you are leaning in you bring solutions, because what you want is repair. If you are leaning out you bring conclusions, because what you want is to be understood about why you are going. Each of you hears the other as an attack, and each of you is half right.

Something else sits under that room, and most couples feel it long before they find words for it. Your partner tells you plainly that it is over, and then books the time off work and sits in the chair at the agreed hour, week after week. You offer to change everything, and feel something go cold behind your ribs as you hear yourself, because you would not have offered any of it if the threat were lifted. Both of those are happening at the same moment, and each keeps the other going: the offers grow because the door is open, and the door stays open partly because the offers keep arriving.

What exhausts you is not the arguing but the hour of acting as though you want the same thing, which leaves you flat and irritable for the rest of the day. Some couples give up on therapy a long time before they give up on each other.

Are you the only one who still wants to stay?

Being the one who still wants it is lonely in a particular way: you are grieving something your partner seems to have finished grieving. Clients in that position describe a hunger they are ashamed of, reading their partner for small signs, bracing in the stomach at the sound of the door. The loneliness is not evidence that you misread the whole relationship.

Among parents already well inside the divorce process, about one in 4 still believed the marriage could be saved, and in about one in 9 of the couples surveyed as a pair, both of them believed it². That is one American survey of parents taking required parenting classes, so read it as a shape rather than a rate for Copenhagen. Hope goes unsaid on both sides, which is a reason to ask your partner outright rather than infer it from their behaviour.

Why does the one leaning out need to be asked what they own?

A person who has decided to leave is rarely asked anything except to reconsider. Every conversation turns into a bid. Family, friends, the partner, sometimes the therapist, all want a particular answer, so the leaving partner stops saying anything real and manages the room instead. That is when they go quiet, and the quiet gets read as coldness by the person it frightens most.

Ask them instead what part of this is theirs, with nothing attached to the answer, and the conversation changes temperature. Someone who has been defending a decision for months starts describing a relationship rather than a verdict, and some hear their own reasons properly for the first time. That does not reliably lead back to the relationship. It leads to an account each of you recognises, which is more useful afterwards.

My own work draws on emotion-focused therapy for couples in Greenberg’s sense, and on attachment thinking after Bowlby, which is why the long withdrawal interests me more than the announcement that ends it. I do not assume the trouble divides evenly between the 2 of you. Sometimes it does not, and saying so plainly is worth more than being even-handed.

Do I offer discernment counseling?

No. I am not a trained Discernment Counselor, and I do not put another practitioner’s trademark on my own work. What I take from the method is its principle.

• The decision comes first. Repair waits until there is something to repair.
• The one leaning out is spoken to properly. I treat a partner who wants to leave as somebody with reasons, never as the problem in the room.
• No hidden hope. A therapist quietly wanting one outcome is no use here, and that hope is rarely as well hidden as the therapist believes.

What I hold to is that the decision gets made rather than defaulted into. A relationship that ends by attrition leaves both of you with no account of what happened, and that absence shows up years later in the next relationship.

How do you decide when one wants to leave and one wants to stay?

You work on the decision itself and leave the repair alone until it is made.

• Say which of you is doing what. Name out loud which of you keeps offering solutions and which keeps offering conclusions.
• Stop the audition. If you are leaning in, keep only the changes you would still want if your partner were staying anyway.
• Answer for your own part. If you are leaning out, say what part of this is yours, with no promise attached.
• Name your path today. Each of you says which of the 3 paths you are on today, in one sentence, as today’s answer rather than a final one.
• Put a date on it. If you choose couples therapy, agree how long it runs and keep divorce off the table until that date. A set period is a suggestion for keeping the work honest, not a clinical rule.

The load here does not sit evenly. The one leaning out holds the decision, and asking the other to wait with no date attached is asking a great deal of them, which is why a stated period does more for them than any promise. If the outcome is separation, the work still counted, because deciding it properly changes how the 2 of you speak to each other for years afterwards. I have written separately about what to settle before a trial separation starts.

These steps are not enough, and are sometimes the wrong move, where the decision is not genuinely open: where one of you has already gone in every way but the address, where another relationship is running and undisclosed, or where there is intimidation in the house and one of you is not free to speak in front of the other. The first piece of work there is individual rather than joint. What stays uncertain is not which path to take but whether a joint room is a safe place to think at all, and that needs exploring before the 2 of you book in together.

Questions people ask

How do I raise therapy when my partner is the one leaning out?

Ask for a short, bounded piece of work about the decision rather than for couples therapy. Some partners who have refused repair say yes to this, because its stated purpose includes the possibility of ending it.

Is there any point coming to therapy if I have already decided to leave?

Yes, and the work is then about how you leave rather than whether you do. Saying it properly once, to somebody who is not trying to talk you out of it, changes what the following years look like for both of you.

What happens in a first session when we want different things?

I ask each of you separately what you want from the hour, before either of you has to answer in front of the other. Nothing is decided in a first session, and nobody is asked to commit to a course of work in it.

Should we see one therapist together, or have separate therapists?

For a decision about the relationship, one therapist holding both of you keeps the whole thing in one room. Where one of you also carries something older and heavier, individual work alongside the couple work serves that better than splitting the couple work in 2.

What if my partner will not come to therapy at all?

Then the work is done with you on your own, and it is still worth doing. It will not give you the conversation between the 2 of you, and it does get you clear about your own half of it.

When one of you is leaning out and the other wants to stay, I give you each a fair hearing in couples therapy on your own or divorce therapy.

Sources

1. University of Minnesota, Minnesota Couples on the Brink Project, Discernment Counseling
2. Doherty, W. J., Willoughby, B. J. and Peterson, B., Interest in Marital Reconciliation Among Divorcing Parents, Family Court Review, 2011

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.