The counseling of couples has long endured a number of transitional changes as marriages and other relationships have become increasingly fragile. Social demographics have contributed to the break-up of families and added to the broad-range of issues, which counselors must address. Recent decades have brought with them increasingly problematic scenarios and the foci of couple counseling have shifted--with only limited success.

Presented is an overview of current methodologies as well as a presentation of ideas for the more effective counseling of coupling from a biblical perspective. It is argued that couples must be reminded of their vows, their commitment to God and to each other-- and to the idea that "troubled waters" are often only a 'test of faith.' Predictably, marriages will be improved and strengthened when we return to a more divine perspective and methodology for relevant counseling.

For several years, "family values" have come to represent a volatile substance deposited at the crossroads between American politics and religion, with the Bible as the fuel waiting to be ignited. Marriages have been improved and destroyed over these perceived values and non-married couples have endured a similar roller coaster. "Biblical" family values, sometimes also known as "the American way of life," convey an aura of tranquility, respectability, and moral rectitude: everyone knows where he belongs and what God wants him to do, and everyone is therefore content, as go the lines of a familiar chorale, "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world." But we know that all is not right with the world, least of all in couples. And the problems that those involved in relationships face are certainly not the fault of God's alleged "absence." Rather, it is their own insistence upon looking for help everywhere except to God.

In assessing the conventional help available, it is evident that today's counselors work with a wide variety of couple and family systems. The systemic relationship combinations have be-immensely complex, with minimal experience from which the practitioner can draw. Stepfamilies, single-parent families, childless families, gay families, and so on represent a few of these evolving systems (Dinkmeyer & Carlson, 1984). The challenge for counselors is deciding how to work with couple and family systems that may need premarital counseling, marital therapy, divorce counseling, family therapy, or individual counseling.

Even a cursory glance at the available research suggests that problems confronting these diverse couple and family systems are perplexing. They reflect a society in which there is a 50% divorce rate, 1.1 million children involved in divorce annually, 40% of Caucasian children and 75% of African-American children experiencing divorce by age 16, 6 of 10 second marriages ending in divorce, one third of all children born in the past decade living in a stepfamily before the age of 18, 1 out of 6 women in the United States being abused every year by the man with whom she lives, repeated violence occurring in 1 in 14 marriages, and an average of 35 violent incidents occurring before being reported (Hurvitz, 1991).

Changes such as those cited above are some of the reasons for the increased attention given to marriage and family counseling and the demand for competent training in this field. The counseling/therapeutic response to these problems has created a paradigm shift in counseling and therapy by abandoning the traditional psychotherapeutic emphasis on individual history and utilizing interventions directed at the family system itself (Smith & Carlson, 1995). And while the idea that change was needed was certainly a correct one indeed, the path chosen was certainly incomplete. My own system of counseling couples would surely be one that returns them to the biblical ideas of relationships and the holiness of such a union.

Nevertheless, every professional group within the behavioral sciences has laid claim to working with couples and families. Even Sigmund Freud, though not working with the family directly, saw the importance of the family system in the classic "Little Hans" case (emphasis Dreikurs, 1946). Professionals using the titles of counselor, psychiatrist, psychologist, family therapist, clergy, and social worker have a history of working with couple and family systems experiencing distress and desire for change.

Helping professionals (counselors and psychotherapists) first worked with the individual, then couples, followed by treatment approaches for the entire family. Marriage counseling in the United States has been viewed as evolving from individual counseling and psychotherapy and from family studies and family life education (Huber & Carlson, 1994). Programs training professionals to work with couples and families have been housed in schools of education (counselor education), home economics departments (family studies and family life education), schools of social work (certificate and degree programs), psychology departments (family psychology), medicine, sociology, and freestanding institutes (family and child guidance centers and family counseling and therapy.

Religiously conscious counselors of couples tend to stress the importance of commitment and honor. While other practitioners are busy with games of empathy and role-playing psychological endeavors, religiously conscious counselors offer their clients a crude but compassionate look at the importance of their shared vows. They provide them with a biblical perspective on their relationship and remind them of the sanctity associated with respect and maintenance of their union. Moreover, most religiously conscious counselors provide couples with the tools they need to more greatly appreciate their mutual belief in and acceptance of their relationship with Jesus Christ. Under such recognition of shared love and of a relationship's divine importance, the couple will be more likely to work out their problems than if a non-religious counselor were to just offer them raw insight into each other's personality. Personally, I am convinced that religion proves to be a more powerful tool in counseling couples than blind empathy.

In my honest opinion, I feel that religious followers and biblical scholars can make a significantly positive contribution to this anguished situation from their own expertise alone. The late twentieth century A.D. has been a time of unprecedented divorce and uncoupling. The bonds of "holy matrimony" have been broken in uncountable number of times. In view of the massive upheavals and uncertainties about family life today, it is not surprising that some would prefer a return to what is perceived to be a traditional, and supposedly safer, ethic. But I still cannot help to ask if the so-called biblical family values that are promised as a remedy really all that biblical? For example, which is more biblical, "Wives be submissive to your husbands as to the Lord" (Eph 5:21) or "Whoever loves father or mother or son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me" (Matt 10:37)? I realize that many may be confused by just this sort of paradox when applying biblical thought to the counseling of couples. But what counselors must begin to do is to assign a certain unconscious order of hierarchy to their thinking: The prevailing themes of which to be aware are: (1) the ultimate devotion shall be to the Lord and no other man or woman and (2) that the vows of matrimony are unbreakable -- that horning the Lord is honoring such a commitment even under extreme tests of tenacity. Couples have to be made to realize that the toughest times are merely tests of their love's strength.

I am convinced that effective counseling must begin in the years prior to marriage. I even suggest that churches evaluate their premarital counseling efforts by calling couples a year after their marriage to ask two questions: "What do you remember about what was said to you as you prepared for marriage?" and "What would you have liked the pastor to say that wasn't said?" This realization comes under the principles of one ultimate goal: to keep the couple together. Whereas modern non-religious counseling often seeks to determine whether or not the couple should stay together only on all of the reasons why the couple should stay together -- even if such appears socially impossible. After all, shared struggle is the greatest creator of bonds. If God has willed a couple to be together, they must work in harmony to keep their relationship going no matter what it takes or no matter how bad things may seem.

Judging by what I have learned in this course and what I've experienced in every day life, it is clear that marital problems are caused both by a failure to communicate and also by a failure to maintain absolute faith in the Lord and his desire to keep the couple together. The latter fact alone -- when genuinely believed -- often offers enough strength to patch all wounds. It is when a couple loses sight of their original vows that they begin to drift apart or t is when the original vows do not seem to be enough to help them to overcome a specific hurdle. It is because of such instances, that I'd recommend pastors to contact couples that they have already married and find out what additional things they wish might have been said to strengthen their vows.

Although a religiously conscious counselor's goals and objectives for couples might differ in theme from those of non-religious counselors, their general methodology for assessment should not. They should obtain their information about the couple by using the common self-assessment technique and then apply such information in a manner relevant to the biblical perspective described above. They should also rely heavily on their own experiences in assessing couples but should be humble enough to realize that clinical observation represents only one form of assessment. Self-report instruments, which ask couples to report on their relationship through paper-and-pencil inventories, constitute another logical and biblically acceptable form of evaluation.

The couple that is counseled through this combination of contemporary psychological methodologies and traditional biblical theory should, in my opinion at least, have the best of both worlds. Their relationship is likely to be strengthened by a renewed interest in God's will and love coupled with techniques that enable the counselor to guide them more expediently through the "healing process." In essence, all disenchanted couples will ultimately learn from this genre of counseling that while it is indeed painfully difficult to lose sight of God's way, it is very easy to regain it... once we have FAITH.