More Recognition

CAMFT
President’s Message
President: Patrick Healy, MA
July/August 2007

This letter is confined to three issues, each indispensable to association members and essential to advancing the profession.

Imagine going to the dentist to have a cavity filled? How would it be if you discovered, perhaps the hard way, that the dentist’s drill was dull? Aside from the resulting pain and possible damage, no amount of Novocain will keep you from wondering why the dentist wasn’t better prepared. The annual conference in Santa Clara inspired me to be better prepared as a clinician and to make certain that my own therapeutic skills aren’t dull...Dr. William Doherty’s program “To Leave or Stay: Couples on the Brink” was invaluable. Doherty’s presentation to a packed auditorium evolved from four background points.

  1. Forty-three percent of divorced people had been to a counselor.
  2. Forty percent of divorced people say they have regrets about their divorce.
  3. Most therapists seeing couples on the brink of separation and divorce have no training in marital/couples therapy.
  4. It is assumed nowadays that therapists contribute to unnecessary divorces by not knowing how to help couples in crisis and by assuming that they can be truly neutral in the decision making process.

Bill Doherty is from Minnesota. So, to make this safe to continue reading, let’s presume he’s not talking about anybody here in California. He discussed values about marital commitment and divorce and he emphasized that, where as individual needs and those of the couple often crisscross and sometimes collide, the decision to divorce is a moral dilemma as well as a clinical problem. Adding to this problem is the fact that therapists are not trained to help clients with moral dilemmas. Nonetheless, the therapist’s values are crucial in this process and can be plotted on a wide continuum, having shifted over the past 30 years along with the broader culture. Doherty indicated that most therapists who specialize in marriage and family admit they are “neutral” as to whether the couple remains married or they divorce.

This letter ends with the question Bill Doherty left me,

Tomorrow, “before you sit down to hear your clients’ stories, what values about marital commitment do you bring to the conversation?”

______________________________________________________

Distinguished Advisors of the Registry include:

Sue Johnson, Ph.D., Michele Weiner Davis, MS.W., Andrew Christensen, Ph.D., Jon Carlson, Ph.D., Lori Gordon, Ph.D., Gayla Margolin, Ph.D., Scott Stanley. Ph.D., and Howard Markman, Ph.D. We look forward to working with them, and with therapists on the Registry, to improve the access of couples to good therapy.