When Rich and Tina came to my office, their marriage was in shards. Like most desperate couples that come to me for pastoral counsel, their story was a quagmire of failed expectations, self-doubt, old wounds, immaturity, and misunderstanding. As we spoke, it was clear that Tina was willing to do anything to save the relationship. Rich on the other hand was accustomed to flight. The abandonment he suffered as a child had now become his primary tool for coping.
After an hour together, it became clear that if this couple did not have some space and time to reflect, their vows and newly born daughter would soon also be abandoned. I suggested a redemptive separation for the sake of redeeming their marriage.
Chris and Margaret were another couple on the cliff of divorce. The serial adulterous affairs Chris had made common place in his work life had recently broken the boundaries of their personal friend group and come to light within the church. Our pastoral team suggested a directed redemptive separation.
Unlike the situation with Rich and Tina, Margaret had adequate biblical grounds for divorce. Few would have faulted Margaret for ending the marriage. But instead, after the space of a redemptive separation, Margaret opted for hope.
The qualifications given for divorce in the Bible can be grace sometimes in a truly horrific marriage. But I believe in the grace to stay, the grace to forgive.
Relational Chemotherapy
Redemptive separation is a pretty simple concept. A couple, on the edge of divorce, opt for a constructive and directed separation in lieu of ending the marriage outright.
Redemptive separation is always a last resort. It’s like relational chemotherapy—meant to bring health back to a marriage by giving adequate space to destroy that which ails it. But also not medicine to be prescribed lightly.
I would be lying if I said that I was comfortable with the concept of encouraging couples to separate for any purpose other than physical or emotional abuse. I was raised in an evangelical church that believed that if you had God’s Word and Jesus, you could overcome any obstacle. I still believe that. I also believe that the church is losing the battle for the family and this generation of believing couples needs new tools to reconstruct strong Christian marriages from the rubble of our failure.
In the war to save marriages, space is grace.
In 2008 The Barna Group released a report stating that the number of Christian marriages that end in divorce is equal to that of atheist and agnostics. Today’s church is ill equipped to offer hope or to lead when it comes to family issues.
Convincing couples or more importantly their friends and family that directed separation is neither anti-biblical nor the fast track to divorce is often the most difficult element of implementing it. We in the church have been trained to believe that anything resembling retreat is unbiblical. But any combat veteran will tell you that retreating is often the only other option besides dying with your boots on.
The same is true when a couple’s marriage becomes a battlefield. Sometimes the best tactical option is to retreat for the purpose of regrouping—together. This creates space for couples to reflect, heal, and grow. In the war to save marriages, space is grace.
While there is no direct biblical template for redemptive separation, it is steeped in the biblical principles of forgiveness, wise counsel, prayer, and repentance. What redemptive separation does is give couples adequate margin for these biblical necessities to grow.
In the years since beginning to implement this tool in the adult ministry I oversee, none of the over half dozen redemptive separations I have been a part of ended in divorce. But obviously there’s more to it than just pushing a couple to live apart for a little while and hoping for the best. It takes care and strategy. With that in mind, here are my 5 principles for doing it well.
1. Redemptive separation needs structure
For redemptive separation to have any chance of success it needs to be deliberately shepherded by an outside mediator who maintains structure in the separation. This can be a pastor or Christian counselor, but without a consistent, outside, and unbiased professional third party helping the couple keep their commitments, this form of marriage restoration has little chance of succeeding.
Dr. David Stoops, a leading marriage and family therapist, says this in an August, 2011 article for The Journal of Marriage and Family. “I’ve seen it in my practice, that a carefully planned separation brings to the couple the seriousness of the issues, and due to the planning, the hope contained in the separation. But it must be clearly planned.”
The best tool I have found to shepherd this process is The Center for Relationship Enrichment’s “Growth-Focused Redemptive Separation Contract” created by Dr. Gary Oliver and his team (see also “Promoting Change Through Growth-Focused Brief Therapy” handout). This contract provides a mental, emotional, and physical first step back in the right direction.
The contract allows the person shepherding the process to hold both parties accountable to the agreed upon stipulations. These can include, but are not limited to, praying for the relationship daily, regularly seeing a common marriage counselor, attending church, and spending quality time together at least twice per month. These boundaries provide a crucial roadmap for couples who might default to following their emotions instead of wisdom or become paralyzed due to the relational trauma they are experiencing.
The contract also provides spouses a compass by which to measure their progress. This is important. Emotions like despair, anger, and resentment cloud one’s ability to see relational positives and progress.
2. Separations are never indefinite
While the length differs from couple to couple, it’s never indefinite. Often they start with a period of 14 days to one month, with an initial maximum of 3 months. The goal is always to maintain the balance between the least amount of time apart and the necessary space needed for recuperation. For Chris and Margaret this ended up being close to three years and Rich and Tina were apart less than six months.
After the agreed upon initial separation, the couple and their counselor or pastor meet to decide next steps. Is the couple ready to reengage their cohabitation immediately, add a few days per week of being under the same roof again, or commit to another extended time of separation?
Set mandates for a relational sabbatical act as an intensive care unit for failing relationships. Each individual is cloistered in a stable environment where they can have complete rest and care while recovering. These times are crucial because struggling marriages have the ability to become so toxic that the amount of space and structure necessary to begin to heal is virtually impossible to create. Something as small as, “Why does he always leave his keys on the dining room table?” can spiral the relationship out of control again and minimize any relational progress that might have been created. Through separation, many of the small annoyances that become big deals are removed so the couple can focus on the key issues at hand.
3. Contain the counsel
Other than the couples own issues, the greatest obstacle to seeing a marriage restored are the well-intentioned friends and family surrounding the marriage. To borrow from Marshall Shelley’s classic book of the same title, these Well-Intentioned Dragons or “concerned” friends can cause more harm than good.
One particular “dragon” in their life almost single handedly destroyed Rich and Tina’s chances of renewal through the relentless sending of “text bombs.” These group texts to family and friends poured fuel on an already hot fire. Some of these were controlling Scripture references, some were unsolicited counsel, but more often than not they were careless emotional venting.
When working with couples, I encourage them to have no more than three trusted confidants with which they share. Like battling a wildfire, containment is key. When too many people are involved in helping couples process decisions, the counsel, which is often conflicting, causes spouses to become even more confused. Add to this the careless gossip that often surrounds struggling relationships as well as the majority of people who do not know how to separate their emotions from their advice and what you have is a toxic cocktail of confusion and discord.
Containment of counsel is also crucial in regard to the professional therapist a couple sees. It is of vital importance that both spouses see the same professional counselor. This not only allows for both sides of the conflict to be understood by one person, but also protects the marriage from conflicting counsel.
4. Keep couples praying for each other
This is a challenge. It is hard enough having them speak to each other, let alone join together in prayer. There are a couple obstacles to this. First, prayer is a form of intimacy—and intimacy is the last thing couples are looking for when dealing with deep resentments. Strange though it sounds, prayer has a way of igniting the fires of romance.
Another obstacle to praying together effectively as a couple is the prayers themselves. In the early stages of a redemptive separation, the partners tend to assume a defensive posture. This was true for Rich. A prayer by Tina as simple as, “Lord, allow my husband to walk in truth” was seen as implying that he was somehow not walking in truth. This would then spiral into an argument.
Praying individually through a book is one of many options couples can choose when praying in agreement for each other but not with one another. An agreed upon fast day, praying the Scriptures, or creating a top 20 prayer list for the restoration of the marriage are just a few keys to help couples discover the restorative effects of prayer.
5. Keeping a date night
The art of courtship is often left at the altar on a couples wedding day. Many flailing marriages have not only lost the ability to be platonically intimate, but also maintain a simple quality friendship.
Today both of the couples mentioned in this piece are living and thriving on the other side of redemptive separation, putting a small—but powerful—dent in Barna’s statistics.
Both Rich and Tina and Chris and Margaret needed to rebuild their dating lives from scratch, as their previous premarital dating relationship was built upon the foundations of infatuation and sexual chemistry, rather than the mandates of 1 Corinthians 13.
I encourage my couples to always focus on relationship over romance as they begin to rebuild the dating life. Romance is fickle and misunderstood in our culture, but a quality relationship has a way of creating intense romance.
Assuring the couple that romance is not the key to their dating usually puts the partner who feels most distant at ease, as in most instances sexual intimacy has already ceased. When retraining separated married couples to date effectively, I offer the same advice as I do to my singles. Have an afternoon coffee as opposed to a candlelit dinner, plan dates where conversation is king, and use wisdom in regard to sexual intimacy.
Grace—the common denominator
Today both of the couples mentioned in this piece are living and thriving on the other side of redemptive separation, putting a small—but powerful—dent in Barna’s statistics. Things are not perfect, but what marriages are? In the end, the common denominator in the preservation of the relationship was grace, an eternal ingredient every marriage needs to survive. It’s just that every now and again grace needs space to come to its fruition.
Adam Stadtmiller is associate pastor at North Coast Calvary Chapel in Carlsbad, California.
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