Should I Get Trained?

The only training of Discernment Counseling is here, with Bill Doherty, the creator of this protocol. He has endlessly fascinating case examples embedded in lessons as he brings the full training to life. This course is extremely practical, with a goal that you start seeing couples after completing the 23+ hour online course. The total length is 23 hours, and almost 60 clinical demonstration hours if you watched all 6 of the couples we recorded. Attention span issues are aided by two key design decisions: the average lesson is only six minutes long, and most of the material is Bill Doherty talking directly to you on camera, or Bill and Elizabeth talking together, to you. We have been told ours is the online training some therapists can tolerate, and we've been told this is the best online therapy training out there. You get enormous support throughout the online experience. It is not a "here's a link, enjoy" type of course!

It's yours forever! You can take a year to get through it, or you could set aside a week and get through all of it. We also have live learn-a-long groups run by our Master Practitioners, which offer accountability and great conversations with colleagues.

The book is a really great way to learn enough to make referrals and to stay up to date in the field of couples therapy. If you read the book, it reinforces the ethical concern by the authors to claim that you offer this service when the book is not a training manual. We are very proud that the American Psychological Association saw real clinical innovation in Discernment Counseling and commissioned an introductory look at the principles and structure. The course has tremendous detail, nuances, specific details for every session, real couples shown in the online course, and clinical problem solving missing from the book, as well as the vital clinical tone and sample lines of communication you have to hear demonstrated through the many dozens of skills taught in the course. The full 23 hour online course makes you qualified to offer this service.

The one complaint we never get is "there was too much fluff." If anything, we get "I want more!" Senior couples therapists say this is a transformational approach to serving this type of couple. This material leaves nothing out, addressing crisis individuals, on different pages, with complex relational histories, present-day intense emotionalities. You'll become skilled at getting two distressed individuals to the heart of the question: can this marriage be analyzed, quickly, in a way that offers some hope for change, with both people seeing how they in some ways, contributed to the marital break down? This course helps you master divorce ambivalence, a newer research area for couples therapy land. You will know every second matters, and why DC is designed as it is, including addressing affairs, addictions, abuse, assessing and addressing past couples therapy attempts, individual therapists involvements, interaction patterns, conflict styles, and more.

I will join your sensibility that no, a highly distraught marriage is very unlikely to experience dramatic, lasting change in 5 sessions. But that is not the goal nor premise of discernment counseling. By definition, a leaning-out spouse, eligible for this service, has no interest in prolonged couples therapy and assessments. They are seriously considering divorce AND have no energy for couples therapy. Definitionally, the leaning-in spouse, by our criteria, is in utter crisis without months to "hang on". Thousands of couples have greatly benefited from the intensity and speed, with only  committing to one session at a time, for up to 5 sessions. We are more like emergency room work than primary care. The entire premise, set up, structure, and every moment from the screening to session 5 is hyper focused on the goals of Discernment Counseling, which are: clarity and confidence on a direction for the marriage, based on a deeper understanding of what lead to divorce being on the table and each persons personal contributions to the problems. This work moves fast because we aren't creating change, but going right to the heart of the heart: can these two people see their own contributions well enough to have new energy, new insights, and a new sense of hope that trying a six-month all-out effort at couples therapy is worth it? We help you learn how to get both people to look inward, not outward at their spouse, without prompting clinical shame or judgement, primarily through assessing interaction patterns, which leads to their personal contributions, all while validating and normalizing these are problems faced in every marriage.

No. We have new couples therapists and senior therapists doing this with 40 years of seeing couples, who often find this invigorates their passion for couples again!  We hold a public health perspective - not an expertise perspective. I'd rather a new therapist in rural Montana be able to help these couples, than the rural Montana couple divorcing because nobody near them was able to support the divorce ambivalence.

This is not divorce counseling, but your understanding of divorce can be helpful. Discernment Counseling is best thought of as an exit ramp from either plunging into another failed round of couples therapy, or diving into divorce, where divorce ambivalence is blocking the leaning-out spouse from feeling clarity and confidence on that as a direction for the marriage. There are many ways an individual therapist may see couples, but if you want a research informed protocol, strongly endorsed by the psychotherapy field, we would love to have you join us.

Not at all, though I'd caution against buying this in a courses-only year. The material is very hands on practical, and without having seen couples, I believe it's too abstract to land well in your head. As a matter of transparency, I was near graduating with my MFT degree when the very first live introductory workshop (not the full training.) I remember feeling a little overwhelmed, as I just hadn't seen enough couples for it to land. And I'm Bill Doherty's daughter!

If you don't see many couples because you really don't enjoy them, then no, do not subspecialize in the hardest couples! If you don't see many couples because you are coming out of an individual clinical professional life, and are highly motivated to see more couples, then it's a very different answer. Consider getting trained and joining one of our master practitioners' learn-alongs, where you can get more live interaction and support as you absorb the material. Then consider attending our Annual DC Symposiums in April, where we've had great success boosting the confidence of trainees who haven't yet seen their first Discernment Counseling couple, but have done the training.

We have trainers and therapists in every model out there who know this isn't a competing model. It's a protocol designed before you'd ever use a couples therapy model. As long as you follow the DC protocol and structure, there is a lot of freedom inside the individual conversations to go down the conversational paths as you wish. And if the couples choose couples therapy, then you pivot to how you do that work!

No. You are free to take the material to your board to request CE's. Some of our Master Practitioners do offer CE's for their ongoing support for trainees.

Yes. The key distinction between "save your marriage" therapy and discernment counseling is our divorce ambivalent spouse is ALSO experiencing ambivalence towards couples therapy! For a variety of reasons, it's a twin ambivalence: I don't know if I want this marriage, and I don't have the energy to see if it can be saved. If you would love to help that population, we definitely tilt towards seeing if marriages can be worked on in couples therapy.  If, however, you would feel distraught at the idea of witnessing a marriage end, then you may want to consider referring this type of couple to a Discernment Counselor. 

Very straightforward. There is no research that extensive supervision or showing clinical tapes to a committee makes a better clinician. It's not to suggest those are bad things for any organization to do. But we are purposefully cutting all that energy (and cost) out. All we ask is that you see 7 DC cases, respond to a reasonable short number of questions, and share the outcome data from those 7 cases. A very modest fee is involved.

OK, I'm going to be blunt, based on lots of conversations. If your particular model is one where being certified puts you in a new "club" with tons of referrals, and those referrals really help your bottom line, it may be worth delaying this training.  If you aren't going to necessarily see a good return on the expensive process, it may be worth this training and starting to see DC couples. They can pay well, and it differentiates you from those same certified people. Also, the math is useful for this service. In the end, one DC couple could easily be 32 clinical hours. Either way, you get couples your colleagues won't, because these couples are definitely not looking to do a round of couples therapy.

Yes! Read through our website so you can make confident referrals to a Discernment Counselor. And add a question to your intake: On a scale from 1-10, 1 being none, 10 being fully in, how committed to working on the marriage are you? And what number would you give your spouse? That is a very simple way to know who may be a better referral than suffer through a couple of sessions and give them a very bad experience with the wrong service. 

If you have to ask, you probably are correct that DC isn't the right fit. Off the top of my head, if you're in an individual client-only setting, this probably makes no sense. If you work with a transient population or people who don't couple up in a "life-long committed" way, this isn't the best service to be trained in. If you work in a deeply religious setting where divorce is not only not allowed but your clinical setting won't accept divorce ambivalence as a real thing, DC would not work because you would not be able to explain the service to potential couples. The final group that may stress you out is a cross-location couple, if your insurance or license stress means you need two people in the same place to serve them. But that isn't even a DC-specific strain. Reach out to us about your setting to see if we can help you discern.