When a Catholic couple gets married and then experiences marital problems, their expectations and paradigm around faith and marriage are shattered. I thought when I got married that if two people really loved God and each other that love would flow naturally and easily. I knew that my wife loved God and was devoted to him as I was and so I was certain that resolving marital issues would be easy. But it was so hard it shattered my paradigms, and this is the situation that many Catholic couples find themselves in. How can two people who love God so much fight so much and hurt each other so much?
As a moral issue, it drills deep into the Catholic couple’s relational and spiritual life. The inability to find peace rocks the foundations of their faith and their convictions. If they get stuck long enough, they will start putting up walls with each other and with God because they are trying in their own power to protect themselves.
As they separate and pull apart, they see the issues in their marriage so logically from their own perspective, it’s hard to imagine how their partner isn’t crazy, abusive, narcissistic. And of course, their spouse can conceptualize them the same way. In these scenarios, they come into marriage counseling hoping that a Catholic marriage therapist will set their spouse in order for the things they are doing wrong.
But I want to give you a different vision of Catholic marriage counseling; a process that is not focused on making you doctrinally and morally correct in your marriage but rather relationally integrated.
Marriage, after all, is a relationship. As wonderful as it is, it is but a shadowy reminder of the communion between the three persons of the Trinity. Our need for a relationship is a reflection of the image of God within us. A marriage takes two people; it is an interpersonal process and it is in the interpersonal process that Catholic marriage most often disintegrates.
At the root of the problem is that Catholic couples lack emotional intelligence. If a spouse doesn’t know what to do with their own negative emotions, especially “anger,” they also have no idea what to do when their spouse is angry with them. It feels destabilizing, threatening. In this dynamic, couples start arguing with each other’s emotions as if the emotions were reality itself. But emotions are an expression of a person’s experience, not a description of reality and therefore, not the basis for decision making. Even Jesus had feelings, but he never made decisions out of his feelings, he always stepped into the virtues or the principles to respond. And the first step to marriage repair, is that Catholic couples have to learn emotional intelligence, the proper and right place of emotions in their own lives and their marriage.
This lays the foundation for what I call relational intelligence, learning how to develop healthy and direct communication skills in the relationship. Without emotional intelligence, relational intelligence is impossible. And healthy conflict resolution is impossible without both emotional intelligence and relational intelligence.
In our program, The Marriage Rescue Institute, we take couples through a 12-week process that helps them learn the emotional intelligence, relational intelligence, and conflict resolution skills to put their marriage back together. It is the pillar, the foundation.
In our experience, we have seen couples that were separated, dealing with infidelity, even believing their spouse to be a narcissist put their relationship back together. And the reason is that the root problem was not what the couple was primarily focused on, but the underlying lack of emotional intelligence.
As a Marriage Therapist and a married man with four lovely children, I believe in marriage. I believe and know that even the most broken marriages can be put back together because God is in the business of healing and restoring broken relationships. If you are struggling in your marriage, I want you to know that life is not about where we start, it’s about where we finish and there is hope for your marriage still. All it takes is two willing hearts, and we can teach you the emotional intelligence, relational intelligence, and healthy conflict resolution skills to thrive in your marriage. The greatest miracles are not the physical healings, they are the transformation of the soul that happens as God transforms us and our relationships. You may think your situation is too far gone, but it’s not. We’ve put married couples dealing with infidelity back together, separated couples back together, and we’ve seen them thrive long beyond our work with them. We can face your problems with you. If you’re holding on by a thread, don’t let go! Believe in your marriage because it’s worth saving.
To connect with John Kane, visit his directory profile at
https://find.catholictherapists.com/john-mark-kane-mft
- Catholic Marriage Counseling: A New Perspective - September 18, 2025
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