William J. Doherty, Ph.D., has dedicated his work to marriage and family flourishing. A professor of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Doherty has worked with couples since 1977. He’s been the Director of both Minnesota’s Couples on the Brink Project and the Citizen Professional Center since 2010. He has been a Fellow of the National Council of Family Relations since 2004 and was granted the Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Family Therapy Academy in 2017 as well as an Outstanding Community Service Award from the University of Minnesota in 2005. He’s a licensed marriage and family therapist, a licensed psychologist and a fellow and clinical member of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. He’s a member of the editorial board of many prestigious publications in the marriage and family field.

Fifteen years ago, Dr. Doherty’s work with couples had already been well established. A newly appointed head judge of the Hennepin County (Minneapolis) Family Court, Bruce Peterson, noticed a dearth of resources for divorcing couples who might be considering reconciling. He had attended some of Dr. Doherty’s talks and reached out to him for help.

Judge Peterson felt so strongly that a balanced perspective should be offered he personally met with each couple, Dr. Doherty recounted. Judge Peterson wondered if some subset of those who enter the court might have a marriage that could be salvaged. Dr. Doherty and his research team surveyed several thousand through the family court system in Minneapolis and found there to be “a meaningful number of couples in which one or both were interested in possibly reconciling if services were available,” Dr. Doherty said. “In 12% of the cases, both expressed interest; if it was just one, 40%.”

Dr. Doherty continued to research and published another study in 2016 also documenting what he terms “divorce ambivalence” rather than interest in reconciliation.

A Typology of Attitudes Toward Proceeding with Divorce Among Parents in the Divorce Process was published by Dr. William Doherty, Dr. Steven Harris and Dr. Katharine Wickel Didericksen, in the Journal of Divorce & Remarriage follows up previous findings.

The abstract reads:

“This article introduces a typology of attitudes toward proceeding with a divorce among parents of minor children. The backdrop is recent research showing that some parents are

ambivalent about the divorce and are open to reconciliation services. Surveying a sample of 624 parents who had filed for divorce, the study found that about two thirds of participants were certain they wanted the divorce, about one quarter indicated ambivalence, and about 8% did not want the divorce.

These attitudes were strongly linked to interest in reconciliation services. The article discusses implications for lawyers and mediators in assessing.”

Dr. Doherty and Judge Peterson realized there were a number of ways family law attorneys could present a balanced approach to their potential clients. Dr. Doherty began working with a group of divorce lawyers to develop tools to assist them to mention the idea of reconciliation organically and with skill. “We realized lawyers and mediators were uneasy. It hadn’t been a tradition to ask clients if they were open to alternatives to divorce,” Dr. Doherty said. “They might ask, ‘Have you tried marriage counseling?’ We accepted the fact that bringing up the question was clumsy and felt hard.”

The group borrowed a practice common in the medical profession – use of a screening tool. A patient might select a box about a condition on an intake questionnaire. Then, the doctor can quickly refer to that information when they see the patient. Likewise, if a lawyer included screening questions for divorce ambivalence, the attorney would possess information that opened the door to conversation.

“It is a comfortable way in, so you don’t have to introduce something out of left field,” Dr. Doherty said. The form can also address if the potential client has sought help and whether it was something they’d consider again.

Dr. Doherty created this assessment tool of four brief research-based questions for lawyers to include on their intake form to screen for divorce ambivalence. The group developed training on how to use the ambivalence questions for a conversation lasting about just seven minutes. “The lawyers were surfacing more divorce ambivalence because they were willing to ask about it,” he found. Many of the group members have incorporated the questions and protocol as best practice.

Questionnaire:

The introduction: people have different attitudes …which of the following is closest to where you are now.

1 – I’m done – there’s no way I want to stay married.

2 – I have mixed feelings.

3 - I would consider reconciling if my spouse made major changes.

4 - I don’t want divorce and would do anything to save the marriage.

Dr. Doherty’s research found 30-40% check something other than the first box, which then becomes a vehicle for the attorney to ask – can you tell me a little bit more about your answers?

Next question: Have you gotten any help? If so: Tell me about that. “The answers to this question would reveal to what extent a couple might have considered therapy,” he said.

“If there’s any indication at that point that the person in front of them is developing divorce ambivalence, the form also includes a short paragraph to describe discernment counseling – characterized as “a protocol to take time out to reflect whether the marriage is savable.” A referral to discernment counseling might be a wise next step if divorce ambivalence is uncovered.

In his career, Dr. Doherty “has seen his share of unnecessary divorces, as well as those that were necessary to prevent further harm. He is committed to the idea of adults doing their best for their children, which sometimes means employing every available resource to restore a troubled marriage to health,” he wrote in the forward to the Second Chances: A Proposal to Reduce Unnecessary Divorces he submitted along with Leah Ward Sears, to the U.S. State Legislatures in 2011.

As Dr. Doherty met with collaborative lawyers to train them to help potential clients discern if they really wanted to go ahead with divorce, they uncovered failures of couples’ therapy.

“It’s hard to send somebody back to therapy when it’s failed before or when one spouse doesn’t want to go,” he said, but traditional marriage counseling had previously been the “only tool in their arsenal.”

Dr. Doherty created a protocol to help people make a decision to divorce or consider reconciliation with more clarity – what he called discernment counseling. This counseling is more effective than traditional marriage counseling when one of the spouses was leaning out already and the other wants to save the marriage--what he termed a “mixed agenda” couple.

Dr. Doherty’s vision was for more therapists to be able to utilize this discernment counseling protocol. He created a 25-hour online, self-paced discernment counseling training for mental health professionals. Since then, more than 1000 have learned how to use this protocol. The practice has spread. In fact, the country of Singapore is adopting discernment counseling in all its divorce courts and anybody who goes to the divorce site in Singapore gets screened using the assessment tool, Dr. Doherty reported.

Discernment Counseling

As Dr. Doherty was developing discernment counseling, he realized there’s hardly ever a situation where both spouses are on the same page about a potential divorce. He came up with the idea of short-term discernment counseling to provide clarity and confidence for the direction of the marriage, based on a deeper understanding of what’s happened to the marriage and each person’s contributions to the problems. He and colleague Dr. Steven Harris published a book for therapists, Helping Couples on the Brink of Divorce: Discernment Counseling for Troubled Relationships, for the American Psychological Association in 2017.

Discernment counseling “helps both understand what happened to the marriage and their contribution,” he said. “It can restore hope that something good could come from getting help.” It presents three paths as options: 1) go on as they are, 2) separation/divorce, 3) six-month effort in marriage therapy to see if they could get the marriage to a place where it could be healthy. He describes discernment counseling as “a very specific, structured way to help the leaning-in party of the couple present themselves in a way that maximizes the chance the other will embark on serious couples’ therapy, and to help the leaning out spouse see their own contributions to the problems and if reconciliation might be an option.”

As he began to develop the discernment counseling protocol Dr. Doherty identified the need to help pastors and those in the faith community who have a heart to help couples but are not equipped to have these conversations. He partnered with others, including Drs. George Kenworthy and Russ Berg at 2Restored in the Twin Cities, who have expanded the discernment counseling application to the faith community.

“We train pastors to have a clear, calm, Christlike conversation to help couples decide, before they make an irrevocable decision, if they are absolutely sure divorce is their best and only option,” Dr. Berg explained. He helps couples have a conversation in a calm, non-condemning way. “Often they’ve never had that conversation,” Dr. Berg said. “They’ve yelled, they’ve talked at each other. But now they can speak in their own words what their marriage has been like for them. It opens little windows where they would be willing to get help that they’ve never had before. It has changed the course of the way I work with couples.” Dr. Berg has trained more than 500 individuals through the faith-based training course at 2Restored. “It’s an invaluable tool to have in the toolbox,” Dr. Berg said.

Marital First Responders:
Another of Dr. Doherty’s projects: how regular people can support each other’s marriages.

He’s created a training for those in the community identified as trusted confidants to better be able to help their friends and relatives when marriages are struggling. Termed Marital First Responders, the training is based on Australia’s Mental Health First Aid training template that equips ordinary people with the ability to be helpful to somebody having a mental health crisis.

Marital First Responders is a breakthrough way to help marriages by tapping into the power of their support networks—the people who care about them.

“Most people who are having marital problems go first to a friend, sibling, or co-worker - a peer,” Dr. Doherty said. From his website: 73% of USA adults report being a natural confidant to a friend, family or coworker around marital issues. Only 29% of divorced individuals sought counseling and only 16% ever confided in a clergy person. Of these millions of natural confidants, 40% feel stress in these conversations with friends and family.

“Sometimes the peers are helpful, and sometimes they are not,” Dr. Doherty said. “We developed curriculum for those who are natural confidants to teach them how to be a good responder… how to share experiences, intervene in crisis, challenge if they are having an affair,” he said. “It teaches how to avoid unforced errors like immediately barging in and taking a side. Instead, listen, ask clarifying questions, slow down, offer perspectives, affirm people’s ability to keep at it with their problems, and normalize problems that people think are abnormal.”

From the website: “The idea behind Marital First Responders is to equip you with more confidence and effectiveness in dealing with the married people in your life when they tell you about their problems or complaints.

“Like it or not, we all have the power to help or hurt our friends and the marriages they are struggling in. We can teach you how to be more intentional in conversations, how to be more useful to the person you’re talking with, how to keep your own sanity and boundaries so you don’t get exhausted or annoyed at a never-ending barrage of marital complaints, how to get out of the middle when both partners are telling you their one-side story, and how to steer someone to professional help when they are stuck or in crisis.”

As part of his role at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Family Social Science, Dr. Doherty initiated a study of American adults to get baseline data upon which to build the Marital First Responders training. “We have first-of-a-kind national research on confidants for American marriages and long term committed relationships,” he said.

Since that research study, two Ph.D. research dissertations have demonstrated effectiveness in LGBT populations (Zrenchik & Doherty, 2019) as well as African American populations (Yeager & Doherty, 2021). The study involved a survey completed by an Internet panel of 1,000 U.S. adults ages 25-70, conducted by YouGov.com, an academically respected Internet survey company. The sample was representative of the U.S. population on age, gender, race, and education.

In two published studies, Dr. Doherty has shown that people can learn and practice Marital First Responder skills to become a better resource to their friends and family members. The information about the program is available free to anyone who wants to learn at Maritalfirstresponders.org, under the umbrella of non-profit The Doherty Family Foundation for Social and Civic Well-Being.

On the website, Dr. Doherty explains the training to one who would facilitate, lead a group in role-plays and demonstrations and coach as Dr. Doherty provides the video of himself presenting the research-oriented material, content and exercises. Language for potential trainers: “You are passionate about marriage and may be one of the three specific groups we write about (therapists, marriage educators/coaches, or faith community members), in which case we have ways for you to plug in with us.” “This plug and play workshop is designed to enlighten, engage, and spread a greater understanding of what marriages are really like AND what is a healthy versus unhealthy response to the ebb and flow of a normal marriage.”

Trainers are provided all the training materials, handouts, and any updated material. They are able to add their own "resources" page to customize material for their local audience. They’ll receive a membership platform for all the videos to show to workshop attendees, get the facilitator guide, the handout material, trainer material, advice on how to present the material, troubleshooting, how to structure the workshop, role plays and group processing time.

The cost is free, but trainers must go through Dr. Doherty to set up a license and get his approval.

Ethical Lives of Clients

Over the course of his career as a psychologist and therapist, Dr. Doherty noticed a blind spot among professionals counseling couples considering divorce, and especially those working individually with one party. He recognized a subtle or not so subtle undermining of the marriage in favor of individual autonomy and best individual outcomes. “Too many individual therapists take the side of their clients, pathologize the spouse, and suggest the marriage is fatally flawed,” he said. “They become a midwife for divorce.”

He recently published research about this concerning phenomenon. What happens when people go to individual psychotherapy for marital problems? In a national survey of 100 clients of individual therapy, he discovered, “There’s a lot of undermining going on out there. We’re working to shed light on what’s going on in the field. You can’t be sure if you send somebody to a therapist, even someone from the faith perspective, that they are going to be marriage friendly. The cultural ideal is happiness; we’re overly impressed with the current state of someone’s unhappiness. Before we refer a client, we have to know the therapist and talk with them to get a sense if they are going to be pro-marriage,” he added.

To that end, he and his licensed couples’ therapist daughter, Elizabeth, created a clearinghouse listing those therapists who are marriage-friendly, a site now curated by Kathleen Wenger. “Too many therapists are neutral about whether people stay together,” Dr. Doherty said. “I later learned that even when therapists are pro-commitment, they are not necessarily skilled in how to do this in practice.” To address the deficit, he created training at the Doherty Relationship Institute to teach therapists to be both skilled and pro-commitment in marriage.

He had written about the concept initially in the 1995 book Soul Searching, which he has expanded and re-written as T he Ethical Lives of Clients: Beyond Self-interest in Psychotherapy, published by the American Psychological Association in 2022. He hopes to connect with the counselor/coach/therapist audience and encourage them to be more proactive in addressing the ethical dilemmas and challenges clients bring to therapy (including marital commitment), a practice traditionally ignored.

“We live in an individualistic culture,” he said. “Marriage is about relationship, commitment and covenant.” He’s seen therapists embrace very individualistic value orientations where ethical commitments are not given weight. “In a consumer-driven lifestyle – if your marriage is not working for you, you can just trade it in like you would a new car,” he said.

The book discusses how counselors and therapists can (and should) help clients with their ethical dilemmas. Divorce is a quintessential ethical dilemma, Dr. Doherty said, not just a relationship or psychological dilemma. Other ethical areas include keeping or not keeping family secrets, complex loyalty dynamics of stepfamilies, lying vs truthfulness, decisions about health and family, putting children in the middle after divorce, and having an affair.

Historically, a therapist either stayed completely neutral, missing the opportunity to address a client holistically, or clumsily inserted their own morality into the conversation. There was no appropriate middle ground, he said. His goal is to train counselors and coaches how to skillfully have conversations with clients to help them examine the moral and ethical ramifications of their decisions and behavior and offer perspectives.

“In our culture, we put a high value on the promise of marriage,” he said. Even a secular therapist can agree with the morality of making and keeping a promise. “You made a marital promise, and somebody builds a life around this promise. That’s why relatives fly in for a wedding. People expect to be married to that person for life. Now you are thinking of going back on your promise. This ethical/moral issue should involve deep reflection.

“My view is that while there can be justifiable reasons to let go of a marital commitment, it’s a weighty ethical decision because it affects the welfare of at least one other person who made life decisions based on an expectation of continued commitment, and usually there are additional stakeholders such as children and extended family members. Therefore, I am willing to challenge clients when I believe they are not including concern for other stakeholders in their decision making,” he wrote in the book.

Marriage also involves a promise of sexual fidelity. Polls show one thing 90% of people agree on is that they should not be cheating on a spouse. It’s one of the few areas of permissiveness that has declined, he said. People bring this dilemma up in therapy. They have concerns with what is right.

Dr. Doherty explains that historically, counselors have not been equipped well to jump over the chasm to help a client think not just about their own self-interests, but also how their decisions/behavior affect others. He points out in doing so, therapists are actually providing better counsel to their clients and offers a framework to follow.

He hopes to normalize that good therapy involves helping people with the ethical dilemmas that are part of human life. This includes helping people see if there’s a possibility of working on the marriage and retaining commitment in a way that could also be good for all involved.

Therapy Blind Spot

In The Ethical Lives of Clients, he reveals the experiences of several people in martial distress with whom he is acquainted. Their counselors undermined their commitment to the marriage. Dr. Doherty noted it is a “challenge for many therapists of how to think about and address clients’ life commitments in situations when those committed relationships are the sources of pain and distress. … The rub comes when the marriage seems to be harming their client or keeping them from achieving their therapeutic goals. … We challenge clients to privilege their immediate self-interest over relational commitments. This looks like neutrality, but it’s a heavily value-laden stance.”

He gathered data from a survey of those who brought relationship issues to individual therapy and found “counselors suggested that my spouse/partner had a personality or mental health diagnosis without having done an individual assessment,” and ‘Without ever having met my spouse/partner, my counselor suggested that my spouse/partner was unlikely to change.’ Findings do suggest that these therapist actions are not rare. They are a troubling indicator of the absence of a sense of responsibility for the consequences of our statements for our clients’ relationships and their intimate partners. I’ll state my position bluntly: We have an ethical responsibility to care about the welfare of people whose lives intersect with the lives of our clients,” he wrote in the book.

“Really the next level of best practice is holistic therapy. If we eliminate the ethical domain from human life, it is truncated therapy,” Dr. Doherty said. “It is possible to respect the autonomy of clients while engaging them in therapeutic conversation about how they can balance their personal needs with their sense of responsibility to and for others – to not just ask ‘what do you need to do for you?’ and downplay the role of responsibilities and obligations to others and community.”

“There is nothing esoteric about the ethical challenges discussed in this (Ethical Lives of Clients) book: family commitments, fidelity versus affairs, truth telling versus lying, self-interest versus harming others… A fundamental premise is that because clients don’t separate the psychological and ethical aspects of their lives – ‘what am I feeling’ is not separated from ‘what should I do?’ – we owe it to them to become more skilled at ethical consultation,” he wrote.

Practical Application

Dr. Doherty opens by presenting a broad history of different psychological perspectives. In Chapter two he explores how to develop the skills used in ethical consultation. He uses an acronym LEAP-C (Listen, Explore, Affirm, Perspective – Challenge) to help professionals easily incorporate skills in a counseling session.

Listen for clients’ ethical language and moral emotions

Explore moral intuitions, emotions, beliefs and meanings

Affirm the client’s ethical sensibilities and sense of agency

Offer perspective (Golden Rule question)

Challenge – when clients have blind spots about how their behavior is affecting someone else

The book includes case studies of how LEAP-C was used with clients to help them see/resolve ethical problems in the following areas.

Keeping or Ending Commitments

Having Affairs

Lying and Deceiving

Harming Others

In the chapter of having affairs – one of the “hard problems” addressed in counseling that often leads to marital distress, Dr. Doherty walked through an example client consultation. He asked, “How do you think a divorce would affect your children?” “This question represents a core part of ethical consultation: asking about how the client’s actions might affect the welfare of someone else.” He declares he has never had pushback there, because… “Nearly all clients have been asking themselves this question.” “How would this affect someone else?” is the quintessential ethical question, he added.

“We have an ethical responsibility to care about the welfare of people whose lives intersect with the lives of our clients.”

— William Doherty

He points out that a therapist should not accept that a client has no agency about an affair. They have made a choice among other possible choices. No one “falls into an affair, and no spouse ‘makes their partner have an affair.’…. An ethically informed psychotherapy accepts the reality that once you’re committed to being faithful to another person, your sex life and romantic life are not just your own,” he wrote.

Dr. Doherty uncovered a potential source of bias: therapists seem to experience their own struggles with commitment: “It’s noteworthy that a large, definitive study of divorce rates among occupations, using U.S. Census data, found that the category of ‘therapists’ showed a divorce rate 40% higher than the national average (McCoy & Aamodt, 2010). Other similar occupational categories showed the same patterns. Counselors, 38% higher, psychologists 18% and social workers, 42%.”

He encourages therapists to extend their work to address ethical problems in the public realm, whether it be working to overcome political divides or addressing racial tension.

“There is a permeable membrane between what we do in our offices and what happens in the personal and public lives of our clients. If we focus only on the immediate self-interest of those who hire us, we fail them, and the larger world. When we expand our vision to see our clients as relational selves with responsibilities and commitments beyond their self-interest, we contribute to their wholeness, and we help make the world a more human and just place for all of us,” he wrote. An aspirational goal for mental health professionals, based on the wisdom of more than four decades of a career dedicated to marriage and family flourishing.