I think our marriage is on the mend.

[flowmom]

I'm still learning the details of your sitch but I just wanted to comment on a few things:

caring for small children:
It is so tough! It is so hard to be at our best when we are sleep-deprived and have no time for self-care. People can tell us to take care of ourselves, blah, blah, blah, but the reality is that those people don't turn up at our door with a cooked meal when our children are wigging out at 5 PM and they aren't there in the middle of the night when the child has woken up for the fifth time. I'm sorry that your little one is so sick. That is very stressful on your whole family. I don't know if it would help you, but after some brutal winters when my kids were getting fevers and sick all the time, I started supplementing them with 1 tsp of this kind of cod liver oil in the winters. Their health dramatically improved and now they just get the odd short-lived cold.

MC:
I totally believe that MC can be worse than nothing at all with the wrong C.

1. I would never go to a MC who didn't have children. The reality of life with children is totally theoretical to non-parents...they do not really understand on a gut level what it does to individuals and marriages. I was lucky that we had a C with young children like us.

2. We also got stuck in the C focusing on one person's problems (H in my case). That was really bad because it put H on the defensive, and it left me feeling hopeless, like there was nothing I could do (when in fact I realize that there was tons I could have done and DBing would have helped me and our M a lot at that stage). A more skilful C would have created a safe place for H to own his stuff more and more.

3. Our MC wasn't solution-oriented enough. Her solution for us was to make major lifestyle changes to reduce our stress. Good advice, but not practical when we were in a marriage crisis and couldn't do the joint decision-making that that would have required. She also went back to the past a lot. That's good in IC, but in MC I don't think that that helped H take responsibility for making the changes that he needed to make to help himself and our M.

4. If I could do it all over again, I would have picked an alpha-male type C. H has respect issues with women, partly because of his mother issues. I think that he had trouble taking advice from our female MC. He needed a guy to take a dominant role and be a father figure to H, which he so desperately needs (and isn't getting from his real father).

5. I like the idea of doing a marriage weekend type thing. When things seem hopeless, devoting a big chunk of time and actually making concrete progress and getting some hope would be a huge benefit.

It's great that you have to chance to work on things with your H. I would encourage you to find something that is a better fit for your sitch. I've heard that the Gottman approach to MC is more based on strategies and works better for men.