 Hello and welcome to another episode. I'm Rivka Slatkin. I'm Shloma Slatkin and welcome to the Marriage Restoration Project Channel. Today you are going to learn why weekly marriage counseling does not work for the most part. And what you can do instead, how to get the outcome you desire for your marriage without doing weekly therapy. So let's jump right in Shlomo. You've helped thousands of couples online, in person, through your marriage intensive retreats. Why do you think marriage counseling once a week, like the typical way of doing it, doesn't really work? Well, in order for a relationship to thrive and for counseling to really work, both people have to be committed. And the problem is, a lot of times, if the relationship is such a bad place, it's hard to be committed. What am I being committed to? How can I actually see that things would be better? So if you have a couple come for a week, for a therapy session, it could be your only chance to really get them in the door, especially if you have an unwilling spouse. So let's say you have a 50 minute session or even an hour and a half session. So yes, it could be enough, but most of the time it's not. You really need someone who is already committed in advance to come semi-regularly just to even give it a chance to see if the relationship could work. So you're already kind of at a disadvantage by doing that. Whereas if you're doing something more intense where it's a retreat, like we do, we do two days, you have someone committing to working two days. So by the time we've done two days, you have a pretty good chance of clarity about whether you want to be in this relationship, if it could be better, and what you want. I could see why maybe the spouse that's a little bit more non-committal wouldn't really want to schlep things out and go weekly, especially if not all the sessions are great, and they don't really see enough of a change after each session. Is that what you're describing? Yes, you don't see enough of a change sometimes. Sometimes you could have a bad week, and then you're at risk for the less committed spouse not to come back, and then you're done. So that's why it's kind of risky, especially if you're in a crisis situation. I think we're also going to follow up with a video on how to get your reluctant spouse to come with you to counseling. And this would be probably the first tip we would have for you to get your reluctant spouse to come along, is go for the one-off, really deep transformational experience that's more intensive than a 50-minute session one time once a week. It's going to be a lot harder. If you're in crisis, there's a lot to work through. And what I found is that, interestingly, even one time normally I do these two days in a row, and occasionally I'll space it out. For one couple, I made an exception. I would do three hours one day, three hours maybe another day that week, and then maybe the following week really broke it up too much. And what happened is we would make progress, even in three hours, we made progress, and then something happens during the week, and they come back, and now there's the next crisis. Almost like triage. Right, so the guy was willing to move back in, and then by the next time, no, I don't want to move back in. So we're kind of wasting time triaging the latest crisis without actually going deeper or accomplishing anything. So all the more so in a weekly session, 50 minutes. I mean, you can't even get a word in edgewise. You're talking about you have two people that need to talk. And then something else happens during the week. You can't even continue the work that you left off. This is really why we changed our practice years ago. We stopped doing weekly marriage counseling, because number one, Shlomo kept having to do the triage. Number two, we really wanted to provide couples with a total marriage turnaround. And we could only do that in an intensive experience, two days that are consecutive, where couples are coming in and working on things at a very deep level. And by the time they leave, they have the clarity. They know, is there light at the end of the tunnel? Is there not? If there is, I'm ready to commit. And once they're ready to commit, we have follow-up sessions, the regular, you know, the weekly therapy sessions, but the resistance is gone. They're already on board. They're already ready to do the work. And it's much, much more productive. And that's why we really, we get a lot of calls. Like, could you just see us for maybe one time? Can we try it out? And we really don't offer that unless a couple has been through the intensive private group retreat experience, private or group retreat experience. Right, because you really understand it. Otherwise, you don't really get a feel whether it's going to be helpful. And then if this was your only chance, then it's gone. Yeah. So please like, comment and share this video so that way more couples find out about why weekly marriage counseling really just isn't enough to fix your marriage at a deep transformational level. We also would love to give you our 60-second plan to a happy and healthy marriage. It's what we did 20 years ago to save our own marriage. And we promise it's easy. It's something you can use right now to shift the energy in your home. So thank you so much for watching. And again, please like, comment and share this video so you can be notified of the next time we drop a video. Take good care. Bye-bye.