Are you dealing with a bad marriage with a husband who will not take counseling? If you are, then it may very well feel as if you are trying to save the marriage by yourself. While it is true that couples counseling is often seen as the last line of defense when a marriage is on the rocks, please rest assured that your marriage can be saved whether you go to counseling or not!

Traditional marriage counseling is utilized by plenty of couples as a way to strengthen a marriage that is already great. For most however, it isn’t something they even consider until the marriage is in trouble. You might be surprised to learn that marriage counseling as it is normally practiced has a success rate of only about 20% in saving troubled marriages. Often times marriage counseling can actually weaken the marriage even further!

There are a lot of reasons for this type of failure of traditional counseling, but in most cases it is because this type of counseling works from a faulty model. It treats the couple as individuals rather than treating the marriage itself. The vast majority of marriage counselors are trained primarily in individual therapy and actually have very little idea how to strengthen and save a troubled marriage. What typically happens is that the individuals learn personal coping skills and better communication, but this doesn’t do a lot to help the marriage relationship or solve the complications they experience.

For this reason, do not worry a lot about whether your husband is ready to attend marriage counseling. With only a 20% success rate, you have other options available to you. Here are some very important steps you will need to take:

1. Regardless of how you may be feeling right now, it’s important that you get out of your emotional state (hurt, jealousy, fear, anger etc) and put yourself in a calmer, more resourceful state.

2. Make a firm resolve that you will give 100% of yourself to saving your marriage, regardless of what your husband’s effort is right now. After all, if you don’t take the lead, then who is going to?

3. There are extremely specific things you must do and say and extremely specific ways you must behave that will change the outcome of your relationship, even if your husband isn’t changing anything at all. Remember, with every action, there is a reaction! You just need to take the right action.

Your marriage can still be rescued regardless of whether you and your mate go to counseling or not. Time however, is not on your side! The longer you wait to take action, the worse the situation will become and the less chance you have of saving your marriage.

Once you start looking around for ways to save a marriage, pretty much you have admitted that your marriage is in serious trouble, but you really don’t want to walk away from it. That in itself is something for which you should be proud of because you’re doing something worthwhile and something that shows you to be a strong and positive thinker.

This is due to the fact that people normally sit back and just accept that divorce is the only thing to do when a marriage hits a rough road, but you have been brave and have stepped up ready to find ways to save your marriage.

Now the first thing that you should do is tell your spouse that you are fully committed to saving your marriage because you still love them and you still want to make a life with them. If your partner thinks that there is nothing to rescue and they wish the marriage was done, don’t worry. For now they can’t see a way forward within the marriage and that’s OK.

Your next move is to start your research and find a proven plan or guide that will help you come up with a step by step approach that will give you what you’re looking for: Ways to save a marriage. If your spouse was on board with saving the marriage, then you would be sitting down with each other and discussing things and trying to learn where things went wrong and what you can do to make things better, but your spouse isn’t. So it’s all up to you for you.

As soon as you have hold of the best plan or guide that you can find, your job is to research and understand the one that will be able to help you the best in your situation. Of course all marital problems are different, but the fundamental cause of marriage in crisis is a lack of communication.

So find the guide that will help you understand and give you the skill and understanding of how you go about saving a marriage and you will soon find that your spouse has responded to you positively.

The most impressive part is that when they notice your new skills and your commitment to them and the relationship, they can’t help but be drawn back to you. It is human nature to desire to be with a person who loves and cares for them and that is how your marriage can be rescued.