Marriage Enrichment Retreats Part 1

Marriage Enrichment Retreats.

by David Mace and Vera Mace.

About the Maces

David and Vera Mace have spent almost forty years making a vital relationship of their own marriage, and, because of their inherent sense of purpose, consequently have enriched the lives and marriages of innumerable persons in some sixty countries around the world.

David Mace's first degree was in science from the University of London.

Earlier family influence led him on to Cambridge University, a degree in theology, and work in a mission church in the slums of London. Vera, already in youth work, joined him after their marriage in the work of the mission church. From that point on theirs was a partnership which focused on counselling persons in trouble. Later, a PhD. in sociology for David and a Masters degree with a thesis on Christian marriage for Vera, moved them into full time marriage guidance work. (Two children, a war causing forced separation for a time, and a pacifist stand by David which also made life more difficult, only strengthened them in their life's purpose.) Before leaving Britain permanently in 1949, they had set up more than one hundred marriage guidance centers and achieved their goal of recognition for the Marriage Guidance Council.

It would be impossible to enumerate specifically here all the activities of teaching, published writing, training seminars and travels the Maces have shared. Theirs has been a life of richly varied experiences and shared responsibilities.

From 1960-67 the Maces served as joint Executive Directors of the American a.s.sociation of Marriage Counsellors. At present they are members of Summit Friends Meeting in New Jersey, currently living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where David Mace is Professor of Family Sociology at the Behavioral Sciences Center, Bowman Gray School of Medicine. David Mace delivered the 1968 Rufus Jones Lecture, _Marriage As Vocation_. This pamphlet and the project it presents is an outgrowth of that experience.

"How important is it that Quakers should have good marriages, and what should Friends General Conference be doing about it?" This question was asked at a gathering of ten married couples, all of them Friends, representing both the U.S. and Canada.

What brought these couples together was the common bond that all had been leading marriage enrichment retreats at which six to eight couples, all with stable marriages, spent an intensive weekend sharing marital growth around the theme "communications-in-depth about relationship-in-depth."

The project of which they had been a part dates back to the 1968 Rufus Jones Lecture, _Marriage as Vocation_.[A] The impact of the Lecture and the weekend following resulted in the Religious Education Committee of Friends General Conference sponsoring a project to train couples selected by Yearly Meetings to lead marriage enrichment programs in their own regions. The first group was trained in 1969, the second in 1971, and, as the majority of them met again the consensus grew that this project had been sufficiently tested to provide the basis for a more extensive movement within our fellowship.

A number of concerns emerged that can best be expressed as questions:

Do Friends reaffirm their traditional belief in marriage and the family as the foundation unit of the Meeting?

Do Friends believe that their mission to spread love and peace in the world begins with the practice of love and peace in their own primary relationships?

Are our Meetings doing their utmost to make use of modern knowledge and experience in the preparation for marriage of those for whom they accept responsibility?

Are our Meetings satisfied with what they are doing for the care and support of the marriages of their members, and that divorces that occur could not have been prevented by any means that lay in their power?

Would Friends in positions of leadership be willing to demonstrate their support for this project by partic.i.p.ating in retreats at which they can examine with others the potentialities for growth of their own marriages?

Those who met at Pendle Hill were not in a position to answer any of these questions in a definitive way. It is clear that answers would vary from one Friend to another and from one Meeting to another. They felt, however, that it would be appropriate and timely for these questions to be more widely considered. Moreover, their own experiences of marital growth, resulting from their sharing with other married couples, had been so rich and rewarding that they felt they had "good news" to pa.s.s on, and were constrained to do so.[B]

THE PLAN

Yearly Meetings throughout the United States were invited to select with care a married couple for a weekend of training at Pendle Hill, the Quaker study center near Philadelphia.

During the six months following the training each couple would have the opportunity to conduct a marriage enrichment retreat arranged by their Yearly Meeting. Then all the couples would rea.s.semble at Pendle Hill to share their experiences. The project would be evaluated, and further action would depend on whatever judgment was reached.

We two were asked to lead the two training weekends. Our decision was to begin with an actual retreat for the group of couples since this experience would, in our judgment, provide the best training we could give them.

PREMISES FROM EARLIER EXPERIENCES

In 1962 Joe and Edith Platt, a Quaker couple who helped run a retreat center called Kirkridge, invited us to conduct a weekend for married couples. We were at that time joint Executive Directors of the American a.s.sociation of Marriage Counselors, so this was a challenge we could hardly evade. Although we had been involved in many lectures and conferences about marriage, and plenty of marriage counseling, a retreat for married couples was a new venture. However, we accepted the invitation, conducted the retreat to the best of our ability, and learned a great deal in the process. There is no need at this point to go into detail about the procedures we followed for we improved on them considerably later as we gained further experience.

The first Kirkridge retreat was successful enough to encourage the Platts to ask us to come again and again. We then began to receive other requests as it became known that we were available for this kind of leadership, most of them being under religious auspices. The retreats generally began on Friday evening and ended with Sunday lunch. One, for Methodist ministers and their wives, lasted five days, and proved to be the inauguration of a nation-wide program now being run by the United Methodist Church under the t.i.tle "marriage communication labs."

These experiences brought us into close touch with many "normal" married couples. Our practice was to insist that the retreats were _not_ for couples with problems, but for those who considered they had satisfactory marriages and wanted to explore their potential for further growth. As counselors, we had previously dealt only with marriages in trouble. Now we found that many of these "normal" couples were settling for relationships that were far short of their inherent potential. Some exhibited the same self-defeating interaction patterns which we were accustomed to finding in couples with "problems"--but either they had accepted these poor patterns as inevitable, or the conflicts they caused had not yet reached crisis proportions.

Matching our observation of these couples with some of the research findings on marital interaction, we arrived at four important conclusions:

1. Only a small proportion of marriages came anywhere near to realizing their full potential. Lederer and Jackson[C] suggest that the proportion of "stable-satisfactory" marriages in our culture does not exceed 5-10 percent.

2. Most married couples desire, and hope for, the achievement we have called "relationship-in-depth." Early in their married life, however, they find their growth together blocked by interpersonal conflicts which they either cannot understand or are not prepared to make the effort to resolve. They settle for a series of compromises, resulting in a superficial relationship.

3. As time pa.s.ses, the couple either accepts this unsatisfactory situation, or it becomes progressively intolerable. They are usually so "locked into" their self-defeating interaction pattern that they are quite unable to change it by their own unaided efforts. Some seek marriage counseling, but often too late for it to be effective.

4. This tragedy of undeveloped potential could be avoided in many instances if married couples had a clearer concept of the task of marriage and did not have to struggle in almost total isolation from other couples going through the same experiences. The potential of married couples for giving each other mutual help and support is very great; but it is unable to function because of an unrecognized taboo in our culture.

This taboo, hitherto unrecognized as such, prevents married couples from sharing their intramarital experiences with other couples. In many settings married couples form friendships with each other, enjoy social contacts, even work together on projects; but there is always a tacit understanding that they do not reveal to each other, further than is unavoidable, what is going on in their husband-wife relationships.

Complex mechanisms for evasion and mutual defense exist. Some of these are familiar, strong hostility in one partner when the other appears to be revealing too much; making jokes to relieve tension when some inner secret of the marriage accidently breaks to the surface; silence or withdrawal when "outsiders" appear to be probing too deeply. These defense systems work so well that it is not unusual when a couple begins divorce proceedings for others in their circle of acquaintance to express astonishment in such terms as "We are amazed! We had no idea that they were having trouble!"

We could speculate about the reasons for this taboo: a protection against public humiliation, since we all want others to feel that we can manage competently such a basic undertaking as marriage; a safeguard against exploitation, since a discontented marriage partner offers fair game to a predatory third person; a link with our s.e.xual taboos, since difficulties in marital adjustment often have a s.e.xual component, and any suggestion of s.e.xual incompetence is deeply wounding to our pride.

It could reflect the traditional tendency to regard the family as a closed "in-group"--an att.i.tude not without advantages for its strength and stability.

What we are concerned about, however, is that this taboo is being maintained with a strictness that goes far beyond its usefulness in our changing society. It is depriving married couples of help and support from each other, at a time when marriage has become much more difficult and demanding than it was in the past. Indeed, we believe that with the emergence of the nuclear family as the norm in our Western culture, the individual marriage has been deprived of the supports derived from the extended family of the past precisely at a time when our rising expectations of highly rewarding interpersonal relationships are subjecting it to demands it is often unable to meet. In the larger family groupings of the Orient, despite their hierarchical structure, a great deal of help and support can become available to the individual couple in times of trouble from those with whom they share a common corporate life.

It may well be that the new "life styles" being experimented with today--mate-swapping, multilateral marriages, and group marriages, for example--represent attempts to enable the individual marriage to break out of its isolation and to gain better communication, interaction and needed support from other marital units.

A striking ill.u.s.tration of this trend toward deep sharing between married couples has come to our notice from an unexpected quarter. Two married couples from a conservative Christian background decided to meet and talk together, with complete detailed frankness, about their s.e.xual experiences. A series of such meetings was held, the conversations taped, and subsequently published in book form.[D] The couples, after careful consideration, decided not to hide behind a cloak of anonymity, but to use their real names and disclose their ident.i.ty.

Confronted with this new trend, we take the view that the taboo against the sharing of husband-wife experiences between one married couple and other married couples can with impunity be relaxed in appropriate situations with benefit to all concerned. Between such couples the development of great warmth, empathy, mutual understanding and support, can contribute significantly to the enrichment and growth of the individual marriages involved. This is essentially what happens in marriage enrichment retreats.

COMPARISON WITH THERAPY AND ENCOUNTER GROUPS

"How do our marriage enrichment groups differ from group marital therapy on the one hand, and from encounter groups on the other?" These questions are raised by many people. What are the answers?

Group therapy for married couples is now widely available, and its effectiveness has been established. Our marriage enrichment groups differ from therapy groups in three important respects.

First, marital therapy is undertaken with couples who have serious problems, often because the individuals concerned suffer from personality disorders. When marriages are not stable a good deal of pathology may emerge in the course of group interaction. Severe conflict between husband and wife may have to be permitted to surface and be handled openly by the therapist.

The second important difference is that therapy groups generally continue meeting, on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, over a long period of time--as long as a year in some cases. Moreover, individual couples may also undergo counseling (individually, conjointly, or both) in a.s.sociation with the group therapy either before being admitted to the group or concurrently with the group experience.

The third difference is in the leadership pattern. Therapy groups are led by professionally qualified persons--psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, social workers, marriage counselors. They play a fairly directive role. The leaders are often male and female co-therapists, but are seldom husband and wife. The role model aspect of the enrichment group, as well as the partic.i.p.atory aspect, are therefore much less p.r.o.nounced and the group is less free to find and follow its own direction.

An enrichment group consists of several married couples not in need of therapy meeting on an intensive basis but for a limited time period. In our opinion such groups need not be led by professional therapists; although, other things being equal, that is of course a decided advantage. We have come to the conclusion, however, that effective leadership can be given by lay couples if they are carefully selected and trained.

The encounter group, a general descriptive term, is intended to include many variants. We have partic.i.p.ated in such groups, studied their procedures, and adapted some of these to our marriage enrichment retreats. Couples who have been involved in encounter groups adjust quickly and easily to the methods we use in marriage enrichment, are generally very cooperative, and an a.s.set to our groups.

There are two significant respects in which our marriage enrichment retreats differ from encounter groups. First, encounter groups are composed of individuals, while our groups are confined to, and led by, married couples. This distinction calls for different approaches. There is a greater complexity in the leadership, and a greater complexity in the group itself. The encounter group is confined to interactions between separate individuals and usually these individuals have not known each other before joining the group and probably will not continue a.s.sociation afterwards. By contrast, we have at least three kinds of interaction: between individuals within the group, between couples (including the leading couple) within the group, and between husband and wife within the marital unit.