What Is Discernment Counseling? A NYC Psychologist Explains
You may have arrived at this page because someone — a therapist, an attorney, a friend — mentioned Discernment Counseling to you. Or you may have found it while searching for something else entirely, late at night, trying to figure out what to do about a marriage that feels like it’s falling apart.
Either way, I’m glad you’re here. Because if your marriage is in crisis — and especially if you and your partner disagree about what to do next — Discernment Counseling may be the most useful thing you’ve never heard of.
The short version
Discernment Counseling is a specialized, brief process — one to five sessions — for couples who are not on the same page about the future of their marriage. Typically, one partner is seriously considering divorce while the other wants to repair the relationship. In the clinical world, we call this a “mixed-agenda” couple, and it is one of the most common and most difficult situations in relationship work.
The goal of Discernment Counseling is not to fix the marriage. It is not couples therapy. The goal is to help both partners arrive at a clear, confident decision about what comes next — whether that means committing to a serious effort to repair the relationship, moving toward divorce, or choosing to stay in the marriage with the deeper understanding both partners have gained through the process.
I practice Discernment Counseling in my office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and through virtual sessions for clients in New York, California, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., and Florida.
Where it came from
Discernment Counseling was developed by Dr. William Doherty, a professor and marriage and family therapist at the University of Minnesota. His research revealed something that surprised a lot of people in the field: a large portion of couples seeking therapy are not both committed to working on the marriage. One partner — the “leaning-out” partner — is ambivalent about whether the relationship can or should be saved. The other — the “leaning-in” partner — wants to try.
This imbalance creates a fundamental problem for traditional couples therapy, which assumes both people are motivated to do the work. When that assumption doesn’t hold, therapy tends to stall quickly. The leaning-out partner feels pressured. The leaning-in partner feels desperate. The therapist feels stuck. And the couple drops out — often after just a handful of sessions — without having addressed the underlying question: do we both want to be here?
Doherty created Discernment Counseling to address that question directly, before anyone commits to the longer, harder work of couples therapy. His research on the first 100 cases found that roughly half of couples chose to enter reconciliation-oriented therapy after completing the process. It has since been adopted by trained practitioners across the country and internationally.
I was drawn to this work because I kept seeing the same pattern in my own practice — couples arriving in crisis with fundamentally different agendas — and recognizing that the standard approach wasn’t serving them well. Discernment Counseling gave me a structured, honest way to help these couples that respects where each person actually is, rather than pretending they’re both in the same place.
Who it’s for
Discernment Counseling is specifically designed for couples where at least one partner is uncertain about staying in the marriage and is considering divorce, while the other partner generally wants to preserve the relationship.
You might recognize yourself in one of these scenarios:
Your spouse has told you they want a divorce, but you believe the marriage can still work. You’re looking for a way to slow things down and give it a real chance — but your spouse isn’t interested in couples therapy.
You are the one thinking about leaving. You’ve been unhappy for a long time, and you’re not sure there’s enough left to salvage. But part of you wonders if you’ve really tried everything, and you don’t want to look back with regret.
You’ve already tried couples therapy and it didn’t work — perhaps because one of you wasn’t fully invested, or because the therapist didn’t know how to handle the fact that you had different goals walking in the door.
You’re both uncertain. Neither of you has made a decision, but the tension, the distance, and the unspoken fear that this might be ending have become unbearable.
In all of these situations, Discernment Counseling offers something that neither traditional therapy nor the legal process typically provides: a structured pause. A chance to examine what has happened, understand each person’s part in it, and make a decision from a place of clarity rather than crisis.
Who it’s not for
Discernment Counseling is not appropriate when one partner has made a final, irrevocable decision to divorce and is only seeking help getting the other partner to accept that reality. That is a different kind of conversation — an important one, but not what this process is designed to do.
It is also not appropriate in situations involving active domestic violence with coercive control, where one partner’s safety is at risk. In those circumstances, safety planning and individual support need to come first.
And it is not couples therapy. If both of you are already committed to working on the marriage and are ready to dig into the problems together, you don’t need Discernment Counseling — you need a good couples therapist, and I’m happy to help with that as well, or to refer you to someone excellent.
The three paths
Discernment Counseling is organized around three possible directions:
Path One is the decision to stay in the marriage without entering formal couples therapy — at least for now. This is not simply maintaining the status quo. During the Discernment Counseling process, both partners have gained new insight into what has gone wrong and into their own contributions to the problems. Those insights don’t disappear because you’ve chosen not to enter therapy. In many cases, they quietly shift the dynamic between you — a new awareness, a softened stance, a conversation that wouldn’t have happened before. Path One recognizes that not every couple is ready for the intensity of a six-month therapeutic commitment, and that sometimes the understanding gained through discernment is itself enough to begin changing the relationship from the inside.
Path Two is separation or divorce. If, after genuine reflection and exploration, one or both of you concludes that the marriage cannot be restored, you move forward with that decision — but with a deeper understanding of what happened and why. That understanding makes an enormous difference in how the divorce unfolds and in the quality of the relationship you’ll need to maintain afterward, especially if you have children.
Path Three is a six-month commitment to an all-out effort to restore the marriage through couples therapy, with divorce taken completely off the table during that period. This is not a tentative, “let’s see how it goes” arrangement. It is a bounded, serious commitment — both partners agreeing to bring their best effort, with a clear agenda for what each person needs to work on. For many couples, this is the first time the marriage has ever gotten a genuinely fair chance.
There is no right path. There is only the path that is right for you and your partner, based on an honest reckoning with what has happened and what each of you is willing to do about it.
How it differs from couples therapy
People sometimes ask me whether Discernment Counseling is just a short version of couples therapy. It isn’t. The differences are fundamental.
In couples therapy, both partners have agreed to work on the relationship. The therapist helps them communicate better, understand each other’s needs, and develop new patterns of interaction. The assumption is that both people are motivated to improve the marriage.
In Discernment Counseling, that assumption has not yet been established — and trying to act as if it has is exactly what causes traditional therapy to fail with mixed-agenda couples. Instead of working on the relationship, we work on the decision about the relationship. Instead of meeting primarily as a couple, I spend significant time with each partner individually. Instead of building skills, I help each person develop a deeper understanding of what went wrong, what their own contributions have been, and whether there is a realistic foundation for hope.
The individual conversations are where the most important work happens. The leaning-out partner can speak honestly about their ambivalence without worrying about devastating their spouse in real time. The leaning-in partner can begin to see the marriage from their partner’s perspective — often for the first time — without the defensive posture that couple conversations tend to trigger.
When we do come together, the sharing is carefully structured. I’m not asking you to argue or negotiate. I’m creating a moment where each person can offer something real — an insight, a recognition, a question they’re sitting with — and the other person can receive it.
What you can expect from me
I want to be direct about how I approach this work, because I think transparency matters — especially when you’re trusting someone with a decision this consequential.
I am not passive. I ask questions that are sometimes uncomfortable. I will gently challenge both of you — the partner who wants to leave and the partner who wants to stay — because genuine clarity requires more than just talking about your feelings. It requires examining your assumptions, your blind spots, and your role in the story.
I am not an advocate for divorce or for reconciliation. I am an advocate for an honest decision. Some marriages can and should be repaired. Some cannot, and ending them is the healthiest choice for everyone involved, including the children. I trust you to make that determination for your own life — my job is to make sure you’re making it with your eyes open.
I will not waste your time. The process is one to five sessions. After each session, you decide whether to continue. There is no ongoing commitment, no open-ended treatment plan, no ambiguity about what we’re doing or why.
The research
Discernment Counseling is grounded in research, not just clinical intuition. In the first published study of 100 consecutive cases, approximately 47 percent of couples chose Path Three — committing to reconciliation through couples therapy. About 41 percent chose Path Two — moving toward divorce. And roughly 12 percent chose Path One — staying in the marriage without formal therapy, but with the insights gained through the process.
Those numbers matter because they counter the assumption that once divorce is on the table, the marriage is over. For nearly half of the couples who entered this process, it wasn’t. And for those who did choose divorce, the process gave them a foundation of understanding that made the transition less destructive.
Broader research on divorce ambivalence — also conducted by Doherty and colleagues — has shown that roughly one in four people already in the divorce process still believe their marriage could be saved, and a third express interest in reconciliation services. Among people in their very first consultation with a divorce attorney, fully half are either ambivalent about proceeding or do not want the divorce at all.
These are not small numbers. They represent real people, in real pain, who might benefit from a process like this one — if they knew it existed.
Taking the next step
If what I’ve described resonates with where you are — if your marriage is at a crossroads and you and your partner are not in the same place about what to do — I welcome a confidential conversation about whether Discernment Counseling might help.
You don’t need to have made any decisions. You don’t need to have convinced your spouse to come. You just need to be willing to explore the question honestly. That’s all this process asks.
You can reach me at (212) 327-3624 or contact@drherwitz.com. I see clients in person on the Upper East Side and virtually throughout New York, California, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., and Florida.
Dr. Johanna Herwitz is a clinical psychologist in New York City specializing in Discernment Counseling, couples therapy using the Developmental Model, and individual therapy for accomplished adults. She holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the Derner Institute at Adelphi University, has been mentored for more than two decades by Phil Stutz, co-creator of The Tools, and served as President of The Women’s Mental Health Consortium from 2017 to 2022. She maintains a private, referral-based practice on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.