This is the tenth in a series of guest posts on the topic of mixed faith marriages (MFM) from a variety of mental health professionals, coaches, podcasters, counselors and regular readers offering advice from their own experiences. Keep your eyes on the blog over the next few weeks for more great content, and feel free to submit your own essay to this series by emailing [email protected]. (Thanks! -Abby Maxwell Hansen)

Guest Post: Megan Story Chavez is a licensed marriage and family therapist at https://progressivepathstherapy.com/ and a professor of Marriage and Family therapy at Utah Valley University https://www.uvu.edu/mft/. She enjoys working as a therapist with couples who have a significant difference in their relationships such as mixed-faith, interracial, or mixed-orientation partnerships, and emerging adult individuals. Megan’s research focuses on the biopsychosocial-spiritual framework, currently, the studies she is working on center on the interconnection between spiritual transitions and mental health. She loves teaching graduate students, especially supervising student therapists. Megan enjoys attending concerts with her partner and playing with her two kids. 

My Experiences
As a newly married 30-year-old Mormon woman, I didn’t expect to be sitting on a pew alone each Sunday. However, that is exactly where I found myself in Omaha, Nebraska each week. I had moved to Omaha to pursue a post-doctoral internship and my partner had followed once we were married in the Provo City Center Temple in July of 2018. The 949 miles to Orem Utah where I grew up felt much farther each week as my partner got ready for work and I got ready to attend church alone. He had quit his well-paying and stable job to move with me to Omaha so that I could pursue my career. After searching 3 months for a job, he wasn’t going to ask for Sundays off. So with that, each Sunday we separated, me going to the LDS chapel and him heading to work. This was the first taste I got of what it might be like to be in a mixed-faith relationship. The way people at church would look at me, the bishop calling me into his office to ask where my partner was and why he wasn’t attending, and feeling isolated and lonely when I attended church.

My next taste came professionally when we moved back to Utah County after my internship ended. I was working full time as a marriage and family therapist in Utah County. I began to see many clients who were struggling with their faith practices. As a trained couple’s therapist, my case load became full of couples who had one member of their relationship who had decided to leave or step away from the LDS faith. This became a crack in the relationship for both partners. I often would hear the questions they had about how to make things work, each question laced with loads of uncertainty. Couples wondered if they could make it work and maintain the joy that they had once felt in their relationships. I used the knowledge and training that I had to support each couple that came into my office.

However, I also found myself stuck because I had studied at two different MFT programs that taught me to use research as an aide to my work as a therapist. I would search for peer- reviewed sources to support what I was doing with the couples only to be met with articles that had some helpful information but didn’t focus on couples who were mixed or interfaith. They didn’t focus on couples that were or had been in a high demand religion. They didn’t focus on what helps them succeed, but rather highlighted the problems that occurred. This didn’t fit with my approach to treatment which typically focused on a solution focused and emotional attachment lens. I wanted to know what helped couples who were interfaith and in high demand religions like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints make it work.

When I started at an academic position in August 2020, I knew right away what I wanted to study. I was ready to jump into a meal of understanding what helps couples in interfaith relationships within Mormonism be resilient and make things work. I conducted a qualitative
interview study with 6 couples, 12 individuals to begin to better understand the questions I had about resiliency processes in interfaith couples. My research team and I looked for themes and what happened helped build resiliency in these couple, then we looked for the pattern of how that happened. I worked with a team of students who had various experiences within the LDS faith or outside of it. Our hope was to triangulate the data and really look at what the couples we interviewed found worked for them and get away from considering our experience. The goal of qualitative research is to let the data tell the story. We found important things that began to help me support my clients in their experience. I would like to share some of the themes we found.

Findings
The themes we as a research team heard from couples about what helped them make it work were respect for one another, ability to differentiate from each other, communicating openly, prioritizing their marriage, practicing loyalty to each other, holding boundaries, seeking
support, and finding common ground with each other. These represent just some of what we found but include the largest themes in what helped the couples we talked to make it work. These research findings then led me to focus on some of these things in my clinical work with
couples in mixed-faith marriages. I’ve found them to be super helpful in breaking down skills that we can practice in relationships with people who have differing spiritual beliefs than our own. For each of these I’ve started identifying what it means to me as a clinical provider,
consider examples of what it looks like in practice, and the things we can do, as humans in relationships, to develop these skills. One that I think makes a huge impact is respecting the beliefs and ideas of people who have varying beliefs.

Practicing the Findings
Respect can mean many things. When I consider respect, I think about a regard for another person and admiration for them. When I respect someone, I consider them and their opinions. Even if I don’t agree I can see their ideas as good and usually I seek to understand
their ideas before trying to critique them. Within a mixed-faith relationship, maybe this means when my partner or family member starts to describe a spiritual belief or idea they have, rather than quickly consider and critique it, I would try to understand what they mean. I would try to see why it has value for them. I would admire their consideration and thought on the idea and try to understand it.

But what if I think very differently than the idea, how do I manage that? One tool I use therapeutically to practice respect and increase open communication for others is Nonviolent Communication described by Marshall P. Rosenberg (2015). He described a four-phase process that I think can really help us as people practice respect for each other’s ideas. I have shifted it a bit as I’ve practiced for the last ten years as a therapist. This is my interpretation of it. Here are the four parts of the process.

1. Observation: I am going to highlight what I observe. What are the facts?
2. Feelings: I am going to highlight what you seem to be feeling about this topic. What do I think you may you feel?
3. Needs/Values: I am going to highlight the values or needs I am noticing you may have and ask about it. Why does this matter to you?
4. Requests, Question, or Validate: I am going to ask more about it, make a request, or validate their ideas and beliefs. (Remember validation does not mean I have to agree, but rather can see why it matters to them).

So maybe with someone who describe a spiritual belief it goes something like this as we listen.
1. You are talking about how much you respect and admire Joseph Smith.
2. I can tell you feel passionate and revere him.
3. It seems like this matters to you because you really value strong leadership and curiosity in people and see those qualities in Joseph Smith.
4. I can see why you would respect him as a leader in the church. I am curious who else you see that has these leadership qualities?
Or
I can see why you respect him as a leader, and there are some things that I have a hard time with about him, could we talk about this later when I’ve had some space to think more about it?

I’ve found as a therapist and human, using these skills has helped me show respect for people who believe differently than myself, while also communicating openly about it’s impacts on me. As someone who is a retired member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint,
I’ve used this 4-part communication process both to share my feelings and to understand and seek to respect the ideas of other people. I use it in my work with students, my family members and partner, my friends, and my kids. When hard things come up about faith with my family members or friends, I use this to talk about my personal experience. I will state the observation that something about the conversation is challenging for me. I feel left out or lonely because I value connecting with my family members and feel isolated when the conversation revolves around church. I sometimes take a break or ask my family if we can talk about something else that is more inclusive. I have found using these tools personally helpful for me in my process of navigating mixed faith friendships and family relationships.

*Rosenberg, M.B. (2015). Nonviolent communication: A language of life. PuddleDancer Press.

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This post is part of a series about navigating Mixed Faith Marriages. Find more from this series here.