Chapter 1

Produced by Mark C. Orton, Tamise Totterdell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Marriage Enrichment Retreats

Story of a Quaker Project

By

David and Vera Mace

Friends General Conference 1520 Race Street Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19102

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 Association 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 participating 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 pass 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 reassemble 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 Association 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 title "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 passes, 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 sexual taboos, since difficulties in marital adjustment often have a sexual component, and any suggestion of sexual incompetence is deeply wounding to our pride. It could reflect the traditional tendency to regard the family as a closed "in-group"--an attitude 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 illustration 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 sexual 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 identity.

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 association 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 participatory aspect, are therefore much less pronounced 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 participated 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 asset 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 association 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.

This multidimensional aspect of the enrichment group not only makes it more complex, but also increases its potential. This is particularly true after the experience is over. From our knowledge of encounter groups we are aware of the problems encountered by the individual who, after experiencing a new and invigorating openness and warmth in interaction with others returns home to an atmosphere in which a similar quality of relationship cannot be sustained unless there are already friends and associates at home who have had the benefit of earlier encounter experiences. In the case of our marriage enrichment retreats, the experience is not gained by an isolated individual, but by a preexisting social unit, so that new levels of openness and warmth which the couple have experienced in the group can continue to be maintained after their return home. This would suggest that the "casualty rates" for couples would not be nearly so high as for individuals. We know of no precise study that has investigated this, but our general impressions would seem to confirm it.

The second significant difference between encounter and marriage enrichment groups raises a somewhat controversial question. Encounter groups are more ready to evoke negative interaction between participants, while we place major emphasis upon positive interaction.

If our judgment of encounter groups is in this respect inaccurate we are open to correction. We have, however, gained the impression from many sources that an important technique used in these groups is to provide opportunities for the participants to secure cathartic release of their pent-up hostilities, including hostilities engendered by, or projected upon the group leader or one or more of its members. We recognize that many people in our culture are pregnant with suppressed hostility or rage, and that the provision of properly controlled opportunities for its release may constitute a commendable service; and since the group members are generally strangers who will not be personally and socially involved later, no entangling complications are likely to follow.

For our married couples, the situation is different. We do not mean that they do not have hostile feelings toward each other. They often do, and this comes out clearly and unmistakably. We do not mean, either, that healthy discharge of these feelings might not be good for them--in our therapeutic work with individual couples in conjoint interviews, we make full use of such controlled opportunity for cathartic release with ensuing interpretation. It is our considered opinion, however, that in the particular context of our enrichment retreats, unrestrained discharge of hostile feelings should in general not be encouraged.

Our reasons? One, the shortness of the available time might not permit the proper resolution of such episodes. Two, a couple who have openly discharged rage against each other may well react later with deep feelings of humiliation that are not easily assuaged. Three, coping with this kind of explosive emotional discharge could be alarming for lay leaders not accustomed, as the therapist is, to the expression of deep feelings which normally are not displayed in public. Four, other members of the group could be similarly disturbed and diverted from full participation in the main purpose of the retreat. This complaint has actually been made, and we think justly, by participating couples in a group where a violent and prolonged emotional episode took place.

We have been criticized for taking this position, but have not been persuaded to change our considered opinion. That opinion is reinforced by another conclusion, namely, that when genuine positive interaction is promoted, negative emotion, even when it is strong and intense, tends to dissolve and wither away. Couples have told us how their fierce hate melted in the atmosphere of warm and loving support engendered in the group, and with the stirring of compassion within them, they began to see each other in a new light. We are inclined to the view, after hearing such testimonies, that in deploying our therapeutic armament we have given short shrift to the power of love not only to cast out fear, but also to turn away wrath.

LAY LEADERSHIP

Our decision to train lay couples for leadership was not hastily made. In fact in the early years during which we were leading retreats we knew of no other couples who were doing so. After seven years we felt that we knew what we were doing. Although we expected criticism from some of our professional colleagues this has not developed to any significant degree, and we are now entirely satisfied that we were justified in taking such a calculated risk. We know of no case where our lay couples have encountered crisis situations which they were unable to handle with wisdom and skill.

STRUCTURING THE RETREAT

These retreats require a minimum of organization and structure, but that minimum must be firmly insisted upon. We strongly favor the residential weekend retreat, although we have met with groups of couples for separate evening sessions spaced out over four to six weeks. This approach was found to be less effective, but decidedly better than nothing for couples who cannot get away from their homes.

We would regard five or six couples as the optimum number, but seldom have we enjoyed this luxury. Usually we have had to accept our upper limit of nine couples, in addition to ourselves, making a total group of twenty. Often more couples apply than we can take, and the organizers plead with us to accept the maximum number because family crises can compel couples to drop out at the last moment. Two couples short at a retreat planned for five couples would leave only three. Therefore our normal procedure has been to ask for six to eight couples.

Although the selection of the couples has been left to the organizers we insist that husband and wife both undertake to come together, which means that if one has to drop out, both do so; we insist that they come only on condition that they both continuously participate in the entire retreat, from beginning to end.

No requirements regarding age, race, vocation, education, or socio-economic status are made. There are advantages in having a homogeneous group of couples, but there are also advantages in a heterogenous group. Our groups have included one engaged couple and one honeymooning couple who came straight from their wedding as well as couples old enough to be retired. They have included highly qualified professionals and blue-collar workers, PhD.s. and high school drop-outs.

Couples coming to our retreats should have what they consider to be reasonably good and stable marriages since our purpose is not to provide group therapy, but to foster marital growth. The reason for this requirement is that we do not believe that group marital therapy can be attempted on a short-term basis, and it is not the purpose in these retreats. Many couples come to these retreats with a good deal of apprehension, and some have told us that they would not have come at all had they not been assured that it was definitely not for "problem couples." Despite all our efforts, couples with severe marital problems do get in occasionally under the wire and we found no way of avoiding this.