Discernment Counseling Questions

Discernment Counseling Questions

Discernment counseling is short-term work for people who don't know whether to stay or go. It isn't couples therapy. Couples therapy assumes you're both trying to fix it. This assumes you don't know yet, and it takes that seriously instead of rushing you past it.

Most articles about it will hand you a list of questions to work through. This one has that list too, further down, and the questions are good ones. But there's something that has to happen first, or the questions won't work.

You can't answer these questions while you're on trial

Here's what actually happens when someone sits down to figure out whether their relationship is over.

They don't evaluate the relationship. They evaluate themselves.

Am I the asshole if I leave her.
What if no one else ever wants me.
Why can't I just make myself love him again.
I'm so selfish.
What if my kids don't want anything to do with me after.

And from the other chair, the person who doesn't want to be left is asking the same kind of question in the opposite direction. Am I pathetic for still wanting this. Why can't I let go. How much more of this am I supposed to take before it makes me a fool.

Both of them are asking whether what they want is allowed.

That's the trial. And while you're on the stand defending yourself, you cannot answer a single honest question about your marriage, because every answer is evidence. You'll shade it. You'll build the case that makes you the good one. You'll skip the memory that undermines your argument, and you'll dwell on the one that helps it. That's not dishonesty. That's what anyone does when they're being judged, including by themselves.

So before the questions, this:

Your needs matter. Your commitment matters too, and those two things are allowed to be in conflict without one of them making you a bad person.

The right thing for you doesn't have to be the right thing for them. Both can be true at once. That's not a loophole, that's just what it's like to be two people.

If you don't want to do the work, nothing they do can save it. And if they don't want to do the work, nothing you do will ever be enough. That cuts both ways and it's the hardest sentence in this piece.

There's no version of this that doesn't hurt someone, including the version where nothing changes. A slow decay isn't a painless option. It's just a quiet one. That's true whether you leave or whether you stay.

We're not going to tell you which way this goes. We don't know. That's the whole reason the work exists.

What we actually do

Most of the discernment work we do is with one person, not a couple, though it helps to have both partners are involved.

You do not need your partner's permission to figure out what you want. You don't need them in the room, on the phone, or on board. Plenty of people start this work alone, because they're the one who's carrying the question, and because the question is theirs to answer whether or not anyone else participates.

If both of you want to come, we'll work with both of you. If it's just you, that's not a lesser version of this. That's most of it.

The questions

Use these however you want. Alone, together, in your head at eleven at night. They work best when you answer them as yourself and not as your own defense attorney.

What brought you to this point?

Most people answer this with the last fight. The last fight is almost never the answer. It's the thing that finally got loud enough to hear.

The more useful question underneath it is when the drift started, and what you did about it at the time. A lot of people find they noticed years ago and decided not to know.

What have you already tried?

Be honest about whether you tried, or whether you performed trying.

There's a difference between doing the work and doing enough of the work to prove to yourself that you did the work. People on both sides do this. The one who wants out sometimes goes to three sessions so they can say they went. The one who wants to stay sometimes does everything except the one thing that was actually asked of them.

What are the strengths, and what are the weaknesses?

If you can't name a single strength, that's information. If you can't name a single weakness, that's also information, and it usually means you're not being straight with yourself about your part in it.

If your partner were willing to change, what would you be willing to change?

This one is the tell. It separates the people who want the relationship from the people who want the relationship to be different without them having to be.

Sit with the answer even if you don't like it.

What do you need from them that you're not getting?

Say the actual thing, not the sanitized version. Not "more support." The real one. The one you've never said out loud because it sounds needy, or petty, or because you're afraid of what it means that you still need it.

What are you afraid of?

Not about the marriage. About after.

Being alone. Not being wanted. Your kids looking at you differently. Realizing you were wrong. Realizing you were right and you waited seven years anyway.

Whatever's in that answer is doing more to steer this decision than anything else on this list, and most people never look at it directly.

What would you need in order to decide?

Sometimes the honest answer is "nothing, I already know, and I'm waiting for someone to tell me it's okay."

That's worth knowing. It's also worth saying to someone who won't flinch.

Where this ends up

Three places, usually.

• You stay as you are. This is rare, and it's usually not a decision so much as a decision not to decide.

• You commit to a real, defined effort, with an actual timeline, and you both stop keeping score. This is the one people skip because it requires the leaning-out partner to genuinely try, and the leaning-in partner to genuinely stop begging.

• You separate, with clarity instead of a slow collapse over another two years.

We don't have a preference. We have seen every one of these be the right answer.

What this looks like at Breathe

Sometimes we only need a handful of sessions to clarify where you are. Sometimes we wrestle for a very long time to untangle all the knots. The goal isn't to fix your marriage and it isn't to end it, it's to get you to a decision you can actually stand behind, made by you and not by exhaustion.

You'll talk to the person who will be your therapist, not an intake coordinator. If you come alone, you come alone. If you want to spend the first session telling us why you're skeptical about therapy, that's a fine use of the time.