Before You Choose a Focus on the Family Counselor, Ask These 4 Questions

Before You Choose a Focus on the Family Counselor, Ask These 4 Questions

Can This Counselor Distinguish Marital Conflict From Abuse?

Focus on the Family’s Christian Counselors Network (CCN) offers to connect Christians with licensed mental-health professionals. But being licensed, Christian, and listed in Focus’s referral network does not tell you something critically important:

Is this counselor safety-first—or marriage-first?

If your marriage involves abuse, coercive control, chronic deception, addiction, or repeated infidelity, that distinction can matter enormously. Will the counselor identify the spouse who is causing the harm and hold that person responsible? Or will the counselor blame both spouses by turning the victim’s fear, anger, withdrawal, distrust, or attempts to protect herself into her “part” of a mutual marriage problem?That is where a marriage-saving model can slide into victim-blaming.

A good counselor should be able to distinguish between two spouses contributing to ordinary marital conflict and one spouse reacting to another spouse’s serious wrongdoing. Safety, truth, and accountability should come before preserving the marriage at all costs.

A counselor can be highly credentialed and still be a terrible counselor for your particular marriage.

That’s because credentials tell you something about a counselor’s education and licensure. They do not necessarily tell you how that counselor understands the problem sitting in front of them.

And in a destructive marriage, the counselor’s view of the problem can make an enormous difference.

Do they blame your reactions—or do they hold the person committing the marriage-destroying behavior responsible for what they are doing?

What does Focus actually require of its Christian Counselors Network?

Focus on the Family’s Christian Counselors Network (CCN) is a nationwide referral network. Focus requires applicants to hold appropriate professional credentials, personally provide care to referred clients, share Focus’s faith and values, and integrate their Christian faith with their professional training.

Focus’s application also asks clinicians about their theological beliefs and professional approaches to subjects such as marriage, divorce, remarriage, sexuality, and other issues.

But here is an important distinction:

I can find no public requirement that every counselor in the Christian Counselors Network practice FOTF’s official Focus Marital Therapy (FMT), use the Reactive Cycle (below), or follow the Hope Restored treatment model.

That’s important, because I believe Focus’s official model can be unsafe when one spouse is the primary source of serious harm. (See my explanation below.)

So I would not assume that a counselor is unsafe simply because you found that person through Focus on the Family.

But I wouldn’t assume the opposite, either.

Focus is actively spreading its own official marriage-therapy model to counselors

This is where I start getting concerned.

Focus now offers a formal Certified Focus Marital Therapist (CFMT) credential for licensed and provisionally licensed mental-health professionals. The program is built around the same Focus Marital Therapy model developed through Hope Restored and includes about 32.5 hours of formal training plus 8 hours of FMT supervision, competency testing, case examples, and video demonstrations of core FMT concepts.

At the 2026 American Association of Christian Counselors conference, the key architect of Focus Marital Therapy, Robert Paul, told a room of several dozen counselors that people commonly come into counseling wanting to talk about the other spouse and “what they did.” His comment was striking:

“Guys, that conversation
is a complete and total waste of time.”

Read that again.

Instead Paul tells therapists to redirect the conversation away from what the other spouse did and onto the reactive cycle.

Robert Paul also said he does not explain this to clients right away. He first wants to “establish some trust and some foundation with a client” before introducing what he calls this “exposure.” That matters.

It also raises a serious question about informed consent: If most U.S. states and Canadian provinces require licensed clinicians to obtain informed consent before therapy begins—including explaining the nature, goals, procedures, and foreseeable risks of treatment—does waiting until trust is established before telling clients that discussion of “what the spouse did” will be redirected toward their own wounds and reactions comply with that requirement?

That is the bait-and-switch I have been writing about: couples may come seeking help for abuse, infidelity, addiction, deception, or other serious wrongdoing, only to have the focus shifted toward their own reactions and told it’s “a complete and total waste of time.”

Focus also says FMT has been “vetted by research” but doesn’t show us scientifically validated evidence. It calls its strategies “tried and true”but many past participants of Hope Restored have told me that the FMT tools don’t work where there’s abuse.

So there are really two different questions:

Is every Focus referral-network counselor required to use FMT?

Apparently not.

Is Focus actively training and certifying therapists in the same model used at Hope Restored?

Yes.

And that makes it extremely important to ask what model your prospective counselor actually uses.

Why I’m concerned about the Focus Marital Therapy model (aka the Smalley-Paul model)

The problem becomes much easier to see when you go back to Gary Smalley and Robert Paul’s early relationship teaching—the material that eventually fed into the marriage-intensive model.

Focus on the Family’s own history traces the foundation of their Focus Marital Therapy model (FMT) to Gary Smalley’s relationship teaching and Robert Paul’s intensive-marriage work. In 1999, Greg Smalley asked Paul about developing intensive treatment for married couples while “weaving in some of Gary’s teaching and principles.”

Then, in 2004, Gary Smalley, Greg Smalley, Michael Smalley, and Robert Paul published The DNA of Relationships.

And look at what that book actually taught.

In The DNA of Relationships, the authors state the underlying assumptions remarkably plainly: “The external problem is rarely the problem.” “The core problem is our fear.” And healthier relationships begin by understanding that “the other person isn’t the problem.”

In fact, the book says that in “nearly every conflict,” something has touched each person’s core fear, producing what they called the “Fear Dance”—an early version of the reciprocal fear-and-reaction model that Hope Restored later called the Fear Cycle and now calls the Reactive Cycle.

That may be useful when two basically safe, honest spouses are caught in a mutual pattern.

But sometimes the external problem really is the problem.

The affair is the problem.
The violence is the problem.
The addiction is the problem.
The deception is the problem.
The coercive control is the problem.
The sexual abuse is the problem.
The chronic lying is the problem.

And sometimes the other person’s conduct really is the central problem.

A marriage model that begins by telling someone that the external problem is probably not the real problem can send a counselor looking in exactly the wrong direction.

Instead of asking:

What did your spouse actually do?

the counselor may start asking:

What fear did this trigger in you?
How did you react?
What is your part in the cycle?
What can you change?

That ordering matters enormously.

This Reactive Cycle illustration shows how the theory works in practice today

Another exercise in the 2004 book makes the problem even clearer.

The worksheet begins by asking readers to identify a recent “conflict, argument, or negative situation” that “pushed your buttons.” Then it moves immediately to the reader’s feelings and finally asks what the conflict made the person feel about themselves.

The next step is to identify the person’s fear.

Notice the missing question: “What actually happened?”

Is someone lying or hiding a secret life?
Threatening, intimidating, or terrorizing the other spouse?
Cheating or carrying on an affair?
Sexually coercing or violating someone?
Controlling the money or withholding access to it?
Running up secret debts, gambling, or hiding spending?
Monitoring, isolating, stalking, or controlling where the spouse could go or whom they could see?
Preventing a spouse from leaving a room, house, or car?
Belittling, humiliating, degrading, or chronically criticizing them?
Using religion, Scripture, or spiritual authority to control them?
Driving drunk or behaving recklessly with the children?
Hitting, shoving, blocking, restraining, or physically frightening someone?
Refusing to work, parent, provide care, or carry basic family responsibilities?
Withdrawing affection, communication, sex, or partnership for long periods as punishment or indifference?
Exploiting the spouse financially, sexually, spiritually, or as an unpaid caretaker?
Continuing an addiction or compulsive behavior despite serious harm to the family?

Those facts determine what kind of problem you have before anyone starts drawing a relationship cycle.

Conflict can be uncomfortable.

But conflict can also be information.

Sometimes your fear is not an irrational wound begging to be healed.

Sometimes you are afraid because something frightening is actually happening.

A handful of licensed Christian therapists have told me they decided to remove themselves from the Christian Counselors Connect Network due to these concerns.

So ask your Christian counselor these four questions

If you are looking for a Christian marriage counselor—especially one you found through Focus on the Family—ask these before you commit to ongoing therapy:

1. “Is there ever a situation where divorce is the right option?”

Listen carefully to the answer.

You want a counselor who recognizes that some marriages involve a pattern of abuse, coercive control, chronic deception, sexual immorality, dangerous addiction, infidelity, or serious neglect, other serious wrongdoing—and that preserving the marriage is not always the safest or wisest goal.

2. “Do you use Focus Marital Therapy, the Reactive Cycle/Fear Cycle, or other Focus on the Family marriage materials?”

If the answer is yes, I would be very cautious—especially if you’re in a marriage that’s not just a little disappointing, it’s actually destructive, as Leslie Vernick says.

3. “If one spouse is doing serious harm, do you still treat the marriage as a problem both spouses are creating?”

A good counselor should be able to distinguish ordinary marital conflict from a situation where one spouse is primarily causing the harm.

4. “Will you first help me figure out what is actually happening before asking me to examine my reactions or ‘my part’?”

A counselor should not assume that your fear, anger, distrust, or withdrawal is the problem before understanding what your spouse is doing.

Sometimes fear comes from old wounds.

And sometimes you are afraid because something frightening is happening right now.

A Christian label is not enough

Focus describes its referral network as a source of qualified Christian counselors and screens clinicians for professional credentials and theological alignment.

Those are useful pieces of information.

They are not enough.

For someone experiencing ordinary marital conflict, a counselor who emphasizes mutual responsibility, emotional regulation, forgiveness, and reconnection may be enormously helpful.

For someone living with an abusive, coercive, deceptive, addicted, or chronically unfaithful spouse, the exact same assumptions can be disastrous.

Before allowing a counselor to help you identify your “part” in a destructive marriage, find out whether that counselor is willing to ask the question that should come first:

“What actually happened?”

Because sometimes there really are two frightened people caught in a destructive cycle.

And sometimes the external problem is the problem.