By Gretchen Keiser

Couples who are suffering with great pain in their marriages begin to have thoughts that are hopeless.

“This hurt will never stop,” they say. Or “It’s hurting more to stay married than to get a divorce.”

Statements like that sound true at the time and are accepted as truisms even by sympathetic friends who want to help the couple.

But there are couples in the archdiocese of Atlanta who have said those things and experienced that pain. They have stayed together and moved beyond their despair to renewed hope.

They are couples who have experienced a program called Retrouvaille. The program brings together couples who have had serious difficulties in their marriages with other couples who are now in that position, often separated, contemplating divorce or divorced, or living in a “cold war” situation although still together.

Some problems include infidelity, a severe specific crisis like unemployment or the death of a child, alcohol or drug abuse, abortion, the “empty nest” syndrome when children leave home, or hurtful children. There could be any number of other problems on the list, according to those who assist in the Retrouvaille program.

Unlike Marriage Encounter, which supports couples with basically healthy marriages, Retrouvaille is an outreach of the Church to those with severe difficulties. It is open to couples regardless of their religious background and interfaith couples and offers the peer support of those who “have been there” themselves.

Offered in the archdiocese every few months since 1985, Retrouvaille is a program in which couples hear talks given by others and meet privately as a couple. Privacy is greatly emphasized and protected throughout the program. Four follow-up sessions are held to support and sustain the communications and healing fostered during the first weekend.

Perhaps the prospect of healing seems completely unthinkable. So it seemed in 1985 to one couple whose 15-year marriage had had a number of crises, one after about five years of marriage and the other at about 15 years.

After “about a year of trying to work it out,” the couple says they moved into an aggressively open posture with each other, speaking bluntly and truthfully about their problems. They received counseling and even renewed their marriage vows, but there was no change in the hurtful situation. At the time they said that divorce would be less painful than their marriage and they agreed to attend Retrouvaille simply to placate a priest friend who was insistent they try everything before severing a 15-year marriage with four children.

Almost three years later they are still together and the program was clearly a turning point for them. About a year after attending the Retrouvaille program, they began to assist on the experience to help other couples and agreed to be interviewed in order to speak of Retrouvaille from an inside perspective.

A very attractive couple in their late 30s, they found during their Retrouvaille experience not a “miracle cure,” but a “miracle of hope,” the husband said. “We had a war going. Suddenly things had quieted down and we had hope.”

“It’s the most tangible evidence of God in my life, and I think in our life, to have been able to have gotten that miracle of hope. It’s the miracle of hope versus the miracle of total cure.”

While it is difficult to capsulize the program, the emphasis is upon renewing communication between people who most likely are no longer listening to one another; upon forgiveness and healing as a basis for beginning to rebuild devastated trust.

In this couple’s experience, the most striking and effective aspect of Retrouvaille is hearing other couples describe their difficulties and how they have succeeded in staying together and dealing with serious problems.

They are aware that even discussing hope or healing is like putting salt in a mound for couples in great marital pain. But they also know the validity of their own experience which gave them a place from which to start.

“Both of you have a part in the marriage break-up,” said the wife in this couple. She said that the program’s most extraordinary aspect was “the softening of all the bitterness, the anger, the mistrust.”

“A lot (of couples) will say this hurt will never stop,” she said. “We say – it does. We don’t know where it went, but it’s gone. We haven’t forgotten, but we don’t hurt.”

Those who have taken part in Retrouvaille range from newly-married people to couples with 40-year marriages. Approximately one third to one half are separated. Like this couple, many may still be living together and embarrassed to admit that they are having serious difficulties.

Their own pride and their involvement in Marriage Encounter made it difficult to admit to friends there were problems, the husband said, “None of our friends knew – nobody, our family, nobody.”

An ongoing healthy result of Retrouvaille, he said, has been a confidence in their rebuilt marriage relationship that has permitted not blunt, truthful facts, but a relaxation with themselves. He recently made a major career decision that involved downward mobility and a loss in pay and at the moment temporary unemployment. But hopefully a happier and more family-supportive employment is in the future. The risk involved in finances and change of status would not have been possible earlier in the marriage because such externals were overly important, he said. Now “we’re able to be honest. We’re able to be ourselves individually and as a couple.”

“We completely destroyed the trust between us. We rebuilt it. We lost it and had to regain it ourselves and now we know its ours,” he said.

They have talked as a couple at parishes and regional deanery meetings to spread awareness of the program. Retrouvaille is partly explainable, they say, but also graced, in their experience, by divine healing.

The weekend “is nothing fancy”, he said, “couples sharing their experiences, couples learning how to begin to communicate again, and the healing grace of God.” Since many couples have already had counseling without success there is an element to the experience that supersedes facts and logic, they say.

“Almost every couple that comes is close to or at the point of divorce,” the wife said. “For any of them to make it is a miracle.”