Since 1946 Marriage Care has been tending to the needs of couples, both those preparing for marriage and those who have reached a tricky point in their relationship and are struggling with the hardship relationship poverty brings to family life.
All our work is carried out by dedicated volunteers such as Teresa Weeks who has been counselling three couples a week, fifty weeks of the year, for over twenty-five years. As a deeply committed Catholic who has undertaken the thirty-day Ignatian spiritual exercises, Teresa’s spirituality and counsellor training has helped her to discern what couples may need to hear, and to grow in the knowledge and love of God.
Teresa became a counsellor when she’d been married for about 25 years. As so often happens as people enter middle age and children grow up, she and her husband had got stuck as a couple. But they knew it was really important that they try to make their marriage work and not just let it go. They went for counselling and found the counselling so helpful that Teresa decided to volunteer.
There was a rigorous selection process, involving counsellors and psychologists, so Teresa was pleased when she was accepted. She had worried that the problems she experienced in her own marriage might make her unsuitable. She was pleased to find that the opposite was true as her own relationship journey helped her to understand better what others might be going through.
Volunteering for Marriage Care has become part of her life. She has supervision once a month and access to regular training to ensure professional standards are maintained in keeping with Marriage Care’s commitment to the ethical framework; a requirement of its membership of the British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists. For her, the volunteering is a marvellous part of her life and has fulfilled that desire to understand better how relationships work, how each of us develops as a human being made in God’s image and likeness and also to understand herself better.
The benefit to society of maintaining healthy, loving, and enduring relationships is huge because it reduces people’s stress and anxiety and it promotes peace and flourishing, especially for children. Nearly 50% of all 16-year-olds are not with both parents, which has a profound effect on them, so it’s not surprising that in 2022, 15-year-olds in the UK reported having the lowest life satisfaction in Europe compared with others in their age group. Children need a secure base and a good model of what a healthy relationship is.
Many couples on the verge of divorce say they would take a way back if they could find it, but they feel they’ve reached the end of the road. With help it is often possible to find a new way and get back to a loving relationship. Given a safe space where they can explore their issues and de-escalate the tension, they can start to listen and undo the negative patterns that they’ve got into.
Marriage Care’s counselling service is open to any individual or couple who needs support with relationships issues – Catholic or not, married or not. And the norm for couples attending our Marriage Preparation courses, which are designed for those marrying in the Catholic Church, is for one person to be Catholic, or from a Catholic background and the other not and as a result the courses offer an evangelisation process that builds bridges to faith through welcome and acceptance. Teresa believes that God is in all things and especially in the creation of loving relationships, therefore if we are working and supporting people in developing their relationships to be more loving that is of God.
As our work is undertaken by volunteers, we provide the lowest cost relationship counselling service, and we never turn anyone away if they can’t afford to pay.
Marriage Care needs more funds to recruit, train and support volunteer counsellors and supervisors so that couples get the help they need to find a way forward from their difficulties. As for Teresa, she says she will volunteer as long as she possibly can.
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