Tag Archives: Infidelity

Finding Help When Your Marriage Is in Trouble

This document was developed as a print resource by the Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life, and Youth of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) in 2011.

For Sue and Carlos, married for eight years, life is hectic as they try to balance his full-time job, her part-time job, and the needs of three children. Even when they manage a date night, conversation tends to revolve around the kids. Sue misses the connection she felt with Carlos as newlyweds. Carlos loves his family but wonders if there’s something more than the endless routine of carpools and shopping. Both worry that the spark has gone out of their marriage.

Nearly a year after Tom admitted his affair with a co-worker, Sally cannot forgive him. She considered divorce, but Sally takes their wedding vows seriously and doesn’t want to abandon nineteen years of marriage. Besides, Tom is a good father to their teenagers. Tom wants desperately to regain Sally’s trust but doesn’t know how to begin to repair the damage to their marriage.

On their wedding day, when a bride and groom promise to be true in good times and in bad, the hard times seem far away. The Church rejoices with the couple, even as it reminds them of what lies ahead. In the Nuptial Blessing the priest or deacon prays, “Lord, may they both praise you when they are happy and turn to you in their sorrows.”

The Church understands that problems are part of every marriage. The reality of human sinfulness can impair the ability to achieve a happy and holy marriage. Modern stresses on marriage can take their toll.

Nevertheless, God’s plan for marriage persists. He offers forgiveness and healing so that couples might learn to grow in self-giving love and thus become an image of the relationship between Christ and his Church.

How can this happen, however, when couples face the difficulties of married life? In their pastoral letter on marriage, Love and Life in the Divine Plan, the U.S. bishops offer an answer: “We bishops urge couples in crisis to turn to the Lord for help. We also encourage them to make use of the many resources, including programs and ministries offered by the Church, that can help to save marriages, even those in serious difficulty” (24).

This brochure identifies a variety of resources available to couples experiencing marital problems. Some couples, such as Sue and Carlos in the above example, can benefit from marriage education. Others, like Sally and Tom, often need more intensive help, such as counseling. All Catholic spouses can draw strength and healing from the Church’s spiritual resources.

The Parish as a Source of Help

Catholics experiencing problems in their marriage often turn to their parish for assistance. For many, a first step is to discuss their situation with their pastor, who can often offer support and guidance. Although most are not trained counselors, an experienced pastor knows what to listen for and what kind of help to offer. Couples like Sue and Carlos may simply need reassurance that their marriage is going through an unsettling but normal phase.

In some cases, a pastor may identify and challenge an addictive behavior. He may also determine that professional help is needed and recommend a qualified counselor.

The pastor represents a Church that is committed to saving marriages, if at all possible. He promises to offer spiritual and emotional support as the couple works through their difficulties. He asks the couple to make a similar commitment by trying in good faith to save the marriage. (An important note: In Love and Life in the Divine Plan, the U.S. Catholic bishops state that “no one in a marriage is obliged to maintain common living with an abusing spouse” [24]. See also When I Call for Help: A Pastoral Response to Domestic Violence Against Women.)

In some parishes, deacons and lay ministers are able to provide pastoral care to married couples. Other parishes have pastoral counselors—trained mental health professionals who integrate sound therapy and spirituality. If no help is available, it may be possible to find assistance at a neighboring parish. This is also an option for couples who are reluctant to discuss their marital problems with their own pastor.

Helpful Resources for All Couples

  • Skills-building programs. Research has shown that marriages are more likely to succeed when couples acquire certain skills such as communication, conflict resolution, financial planning, and time management. Some parishes and community adult education programs offer skills-building sessions. The diocesan Family Life Office may be familiar with programs offered in the area.
  • In-home resources. Many couples appreciate the flexibility of in-home resources such as books, DVDs, and web-based marriage enrichment programs. These are readily available online and in bookstores. The For Your Marriage website includes lists of recommended books and programs.
  • A Marriage Mentor couple can be helpful for any marriage, especially one in trouble. Some parishes have programs to match couples; otherwise, a pastor might suggest someone, or a couple might look for a more experienced couple whose interactions they admire.
  • Group-based encouragement and enrichment. Various enrichment programs are offered in group settings. Some, such as Marriage Encounter and the Marriage Encounter Weekend Program, bring couples together for a day or a weekend to focus on improving their marriage. Others, such as Christian Family Movement and Teams of Our Lady, offer a chance to meet regularly with other married couples for mutual support and spiritual growth.

For Your Marriage has more information about these and similar resources.

Resources for Couples with Serious Issues

  • Support groups. Addiction to drugs and alcohol, gambling, pornography, and similar behaviors, if left untreated, worsen over time and can destroy a marriage. Twelve Step programs such as A.A. and N.A. can be effective, alone or in combination with other therapy. The spouse of someone with an addiction can benefit from Al-Anon or Narconon. Many parishes have a list of such programs in their area.

See the article on Addictions for more information.

  • Retrouvaille and The Third Option. Retrouvaille is a weekend program with follow-up, designed for couples with serious problems, including those who are separated or divorced. Weekends are offered around the country. The Third Option combines skills-building workshops, sharing with mentor couples, and a support group. It can be used for marriage enrichment or crisis intervention. Spouses may come alone.

Counseling

Sometimes a problem becomes more than a couple can handle alone. Indications that a couple might need counseling include ongoing conflict that does not get resolved; poor communication patterns; disruptive life transitions; substance abuse; disagreement over a child’s needs; and mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. A positive outcome is more likely when help is sought sooner rather than later.

A major challenge is finding the right counselor. The therapist should be committed to saving the marriage, if at all possible, and should respect religious values as a resource for strengthening the marriage. The therapist should have specific training in marriage counseling, with a practice that includes a significant amount of couple work.

The best referrals come from people whose wisdom and integrity can be trusted. This might include a friend, family member, physician, or mental health professional. It could be a pastor or parish staff member. Another referral source is the diocesan Catholic Charities Office or Family Life Office.

See the article on counseling for more information.

Spiritual Resources

Jesus promises to be with those who are dealing with difficulties: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest” (Mt 11:28).

Couples can experience Jesus’ presence through the Catholic Church’s rich treasury of spiritual resources.

  • In the Eucharist, Catholic married couples encounter the one who is the source of their marriage. Jesus’ self-giving love sustains their own union. Sometimes, however, couples slip in their Sunday Mass attendance, or they do not attend Mass together. A first step might be to make a date for Mass and start to reclaim the spiritual foundation for the marriage.
  • Through the Sacrament of Reconciliation, Jesus offers mercy and healing and the opportunity to make a fresh start after inevitable stumbles.
  • Personal prayer, Bible reading, and devotions such as the Rosary or eucharistic adoration can help couples discern God’s will for their marriage.
  • Some parishes and dioceses offer a day of reflection or weekend retreat for married couples.

Conclusion

The Catholic Church wants couples to have a holy and happy marriage. Addressing problems as they arise helps spouses develop the skills and behaviors that lead to a happy marriage; it also leads them to a holy marriage, as they grow in virtues such as patience, perseverance, and forgiveness. Couples who have worked through serious difficulties often emerge stronger and more committed. Hand in hand, they lead each other to heaven as they witness to God’s own faithfulness and abundant love.

About the document
The document Finding Help When Your Marriage Is in Trouble was developed as a resource by the Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life, and Youth of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). It was reviewed by the committee chairman, Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades, and has been authorized for publication by the undersigned.

Msgr. David J. Malloy, STD
General Secretary, USCCB

Scripture texts used in this work are taken from the New American Bible, copyright © 1991, 1986, and 1970 by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, DC 20017 and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All rights reserved.

First printing, May 2011

ISBN 978-1-60137-199-7

Copyright © 2011, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Washington, DC. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright holder.

This resource is also available in a printed brochure format (Publication No. 7-199). To order copies contact USCCB Publishing or call 800-235-8722.

Pornography

In 2015 the bishops of the United States approved “Create in Me a Clean Heart,” a formal pastoral statement addressing the issue of pornography and all those affected. Learn more about the statement or read it for yourself. Pamphlets in the series are also available here.

Henry seemed to have it all–a loving marriage, four young children, and a solid middle-management position with a local financial corporation. He and his family lived in a good suburban neighborhood and were active in their local parish, where Henry was involved in the music ministry. At 35, he was poised for a promotion to a more lucrative upper-management post.

He always worked long hours, both at the office and at home, but in recent months he had shown signs of wearing down. To his wife and children, he seemed distant, irritable and gloomy, and he was spending longer and longer hours at the computer. He often missed out on family outings, saying he needed to work. Even his co-workers noticed a change for the worse in his mood, efficiency and productivity. He simply wasn’t himself anymore.

Everything came crashing down late one evening when Henry’s 11-year-old daughter, Hannah, walked in on him as he watched an Internet video of men and women engaging in sexual acts. Horrified, Hannah ran and told her mother, and this now-disillusioned family suddenly had some very serious issues to face.

Tragically, Henry’s situation is not unique. While pornography has been around for centuries, the problem of addiction to pornography has increased dramatically in recent years largely due to its vast presence on the Internet.

Dr. Patrick Carnes, who in 1983 first advanced the idea that a person could become addicted to sex, calls the addiction to Internet pornography “the crack cocaine of sexual addiction.” Like crack, it doesn’t take long for an Internet porn user to become hooked, often a matter of just a few weeks. And like crack, habitual viewing of online porn creates an intense cycle of addiction that is extremely difficult to break without expert assistance.

These are some of the devastating effects of Internet pornography upon marriage, the family and the individual:

  • It destroys the trust and intimacy within the husband-wife relationship and often leads to the end of the marriage itself.
  • It creates obstacles to real communication and personal interaction with one’s spouse and with others.
  • It stimulates within the porn addict a distorted view of sexuality that can lead to the desire for riskier, perverse and even criminal sexual behaviors.
  • It draws focus away from one’s family life and relationship with God and sets a destructive example for one’s children.

Epidemic proportions

Porn addiction is an epidemic that has been grown in the Internet age. Some estimates put porn use among churchgoing men at 50 percent, a figure that differs little from use among the adult male population at large.

For Robert Peters, president of Morality in Media, the Internet is the primary factor in the increase in porn use.

“Particularly with the Internet, we usually talk about the three A’s: accessibility, affordability, and anonymity. Sometimes I add a fourth A, addiction,” says Peters. “Pornography is addictive in any medium, but when you’ve got this smorgasbord at your fingertips, and you’re clever enough to keep anyone from finding out about it, it’s an awful lot easier for people to get into pornography.”

Those factors also make it much easier for children and teenagers to access pornography, according to Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons, director of the Institute for Marital Healing near Philadelphia.

“Unfortunately, kids in elementary and high schools can develop a really bad problem with porn at a very early age,” Fitzgibbons says. “They go to school and talk about porn sites with their friends. If it were not for the Internet, these kids would not be into this fantasy world.”

Statistics bear this out: According to studies, 90 percent of children ages 8 through 16 have viewed pornography online, and children 12 through 17 are the largest single group of users of Internet porn.

How a porn addiction develops

An Internet porn habit may begin out of curiosity, by clicking on a racy advertisement or e-mail or happening upon a site by accident. A man may continue to explore online porn because he feels it fills a real or perceived need, explains Mark Houck, co-founder and president of The King’s Men, a Catholic apostolate based in the Philadelphia area.

“Perhaps he is stressed at work, or perhaps he is bored with his life and looking for some excitement,” says Houck. “Whatever the case is, it begins with his false perception that the women and images he will see on the Internet will satisfy his needs. The truth of the matter is that they will never satisfy his needs, and he will be left in a worse situation than he was before. . . . He is using pornography as a substitute for real human relationships, and he is suffering.”

Factors that may lead to the development of a porn-viewing habit include stress, marital conflict, profound self-centeredness, or the “pleasure principle,” a Freudian term for the drive to avoid pain and seek immediate gratification.

Sometimes there is a contributing cause in what Fitzgibbons calls “marital loneliness.”

“The couple has drifted apart in the home,” Fitzgibbons says. “They love each other, but they’re not present to each other, particularly in the evening. They’re in different rooms, even different floors of the house. That’s the worst mistake.”

Other emotional and character conflicts that can lead to addiction include poor body image, an excessive sense of responsibility, a lack of balance in life, mistrust of others, social isolation, lack of acceptance by peers, and repressed anger. Often these traits are rooted in negative formative experiences of childhood. Having had a parent who viewed or was addicted to pornography is another major factor that increases vulnerability to porn addiction.

Whatever the root causes, a man’s attraction to pornographic images can bring about a mental “high” that provides a brief escape from whatever stress or unhappiness he is experiencing in his daily life.

Gradually, the porn addiction escalates as he builds a tolerance to each level of his online experiences. He may seek out more explicit or perverse pornographic. He may be drawn to adult chat rooms where Internet users can meet online.

For some porn-addicted men, the obsession can get to the point that online images and encounters no longer satisfy their desires. They seek to act out their pornographic fantasies, for example, by having an affair, seeking casual sexual encounters, picking up prostitutes, patronizing “gentlemen’s clubs,” committing acts of voyeurism or even sexual abuse of another person.

Seeking help

Eventually, however, the anonymity ends when the secret gets out. As the addiction grows, his cognitive abilities are impaired and he takes more risks. His increasingly risky behavior and his efforts to conceal his problem raise questions among family and co-workers. His wife or child walks in on him in the act of viewing porn, or discovers his secret by chance when he leaves open a web page, a photo or incriminating e-mail onscreen, or fails to erase his browser history revealing the porn addresses he has visited.

The increase in Internet pornography addiction has brought with it an increase in the number of men and couples seeking help to overcome the problem, although it is not usually the man’s idea to seek help, says Fitzgibbons.

“Sometimes it’s the men, but more often the wives become aware that their husbands have this problem,” he says. Most wives consider their husbands’ porn use as a betrayal every bit as deep and damaging as if they had committed adultery.

“The negative impact on marriages is quite significant,” says Fitzgibbons. “I’ve had many women say that this is no different to them than having an affair. A number tell their spouses, ‘Unless you address this and work on this, this marriage will not survive, because I experience it as total betrayal.’ They’ll say, ‘When you are doing that, you’re not thinking of me. You’re involved in adultery of the heart.’ And there’s no response to that one.”

Arduous road to recovery

Most therapists today agree that obsessive viewing of Internet porn qualifies as a behavioral addiction. When a man views the images, the accompanying gratification tends to neurochemically “hard-wire” his brain and burn the images permanently in his memory in what some doctors call an erototoxin effect.

As Houck of The King’s Men explains in layman’s terms, “Overcoming a porn addiction is harder than overcoming a heroin addiction. When rehabbing from a drug addiction, there is a period of detoxification from the drug. With porn, you can detox, but the images never leave your body. Scary, isn’t it?”

Because porn addiction compulsion has so many of the same causes and effects as adultery, the treatment and counseling are pretty much the same, says Dr. Fitzgibbons.

“In adultery, the wife will say, ‘I want all the details.’ So you have to be totally uncovered, transparent, and honest about all the mistakes you’ve made, when, where and why,” he says. “And then there has to be a deep sense of sorrow, a repentance. So it is exactly the same as treating adultery in that there has to be a real commitment to identify the problems and address them.”

Rebuilding marital trust is a major undertaking in itself. The man must patiently discuss all that went on as deeply and as often as she requests. He must provide her with more attention and become more focused on their marital friendship. With time, if he can be chaste and accountable, his wife’s trust in him may grow again.

Part of the recovery process as well as a preventive measure is for husband and wife to practice good interpersonal communication and to spend quality time together – in other words, to build and maintain a strong marital friendship.

“Marital friendship is based on talking, communicating, being present to the other–not just watching television, but taking time to discuss matters or to do things together, even pray together,” Fitzgibbons says.

While treatment clinics and support groups can be helpful, Fitzgibbons emphasizes the need for a strong spiritual component if a man is to address and overcome his addiction effectively.

“Where there is a spiritual component to the recovery, we have seen great success,” he says. “The Lord doesn’t want this darkness to interfere with the great sacrament of marriage.”

Prayer, frequent reception of the sacraments, Bible study and support groups can be very helpful in the recovery process.

For Your Marriage Resources:

Research on effects of pornography:

  • The National Center on Sexual Exploitation runs a website called Porn Harms: Research, which includes an up-to-date list of major studies and scientific information about the effects of pornography.
  • The Family Research Council released a study in December 2009 on pornography’s effects on marriages, children, individuals and communities. See the Executive Summary and full report.

Catholic Church teaching about chastity and pornography:

For Further Reading (links to book reviews on For Your Marriage):

Infidelity

Healing a marriage when there has been infidelity takes teamwork. As a marriage therapist for the past thirty years, I’ve met with countless clients who thought that this would be the end of their marriage.

“Ben” and “Kathy” came in to see me after Kathy found out that Ben had been involved with another woman. It was even more difficult since Kathy knew the woman. She learned that they had been meeting when Kathy thought Ben was working. Through their willingness to fight for their marriage they were able to discover, despite this very low point, new possibilities and reason for hope. They were willing to deal with the damage of shattered trust. Then they entered into constructive remediation around issues that were not the cause of the infidelity, but that led to their marriage being vulnerable to the temptation of infidelity.

Both spouses must commit to getting the marriage back, or possibly getting to where it never was. This calls for courage. The infidelity may flag a boundary issue, difficulty with a new stage of family life (such as children or aging), or possibly indicate more chronic factors within the marriage or within one of the spouses. Marital infidelity is often both a problem as well as a symptom for whatever else may be missing or not working within the marriage. This makes it a difficult presenting problem since both need to be adequately addressed.

Many couples do work through this trauma and are able not only to reestablish their marriage as it once was, but bring it to a newer and healthier place. With sincere efforts from each partner, a commitment to look deeper into oneself and the relationship, plus the assistance of a trained professional, healing often is remarkable.

There are some infidelities, however, that are not of a sexual nature. While these may appear to be less severe than sexual infidelity, they can also cause harm to a marriage, especially if left unchecked.

For example, one partner may have a relationship that mimics an affair in that a third party or entity takes an inordinate amount of one’s time, energy and emotional investment to the detriment of the primary marital relationship. This “third party” may be the custom of sharing daily coffee, or a similar get-together, with a co-worker without the marriage partner’s knowledge.

Another “third party” can be seemingly innocent leisure pursuits or good works. There is a big difference between a hobby that allows a spouse to bring more to the marriage versus extracurricular activities that drain or pull the person away from the marriage. This can include such things as one’s golf game, over-involvement with the children, career, or a volunteer commitment in the civic, political, or church arena. Whenever one spouse is heavily engaged with some third party, then this third party can really be seen as a “mistress.”

Similarly, texting or messaging can be either sexual or non-sexual and has the potential to be a dangerous form of unfaithfulness within the marriage. This particular problem can also become an addiction and needs to be addressed, often through the use of an intervention.

For Further Reading:

About the author
Don Paglia, MS, CAGS is the Co-Director of the Family Life Office in the Diocese of Hartford.