This is the ninth 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 Bio: Callan Olive practices therapy in Indiana and has a Bachelor’s in Psychology from Brigham Young University and a Master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy from Texas Tech University. She’s an adventurer, a feminist, a therapist, and a coach. She lives near Indianapolis and works with clients from all over the US. Callan is a single mom with 4 small children and when she’s not working, she loves going on adventures with them or listening to audiobooks. Social justice issues like women’s rights and LGBTQ rights are very important to her.
Check out Callan’s Tiktok channel and her website.
Sarah (name changed) sat across from me, shifting on the therapy couch. “I’m just so lonely,” she said through tears. “We used to be able to talk about everything. I used to be able to come home from a long day and kind of melt into him, into the relationship we have together. Now it’s just tension. Even in our best moments, there’s an unspoken divide between us. The distance just grows and grows no matter how hard we try to find our way through it. It all feels so impossible.”
I began seeing Sarah in my therapy practice during a difficult time in her faith transition. She was struggling to know how to move forward- leave the church and have it impact every relationship in her life or stay and continue suffering in the pain and disconnect she felt. Eventually, she concluded that there was no way to avoid the suffering and she had to choose what would help her be the healthiest version of herself, especially for her children. She decided to leave the church.
Meanwhile, her believing husband, Bryan, (name changed) was struggling immensely. He was thrown into what felt like a tornado of chaos, unsure who this woman, his wife of 12 years, was becoming. How could she change so much? How could she suddenly decide that the entire life they had worked toward didn’t matter anymore? While he loved his wife dearly, he felt betrayed and didn’t know how to trust her.
How could they move forward?
As a Marriage and Family Therapist and lifelong member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I have seen many couples in my therapy practice who were going through the same arduous process as Sarah and Bryan. When one partner undergoes a faith transition, both partners and the relationship itself are highly impacted. As I’ve met with these couples over the years, I have found myself wishing that the church did a better job of supporting mixed-faith marriages and helping its members build the tools they need before a faith transition hits. A church that teaches that “Marriage is the highest and holiest of all human relationships” [1] should provide tools and educate its members on healthy, successful marriages even when one partner is no longer believing or has never believed. It is not necessary that both partners believe in the same religion for a marriage to work, but it often feels necessary in the context of latter-day saint practice.
I believe there is one vital concept that the church could shift that would have a drastic impact on mixed-faith marriages.
Differentiation vs Fusion
Sarah’s decision to leave the church had to be a personal decision. She was in so much turmoil about the church and its teachings, she couldn’t handle continuing to go anymore. To her, it felt largely unrelated to her marriage and much more about her relationship with the church, even though she understood her marriage would be impacted.
Bryan, however, felt Sarah’s decision was directly related to their marriage. How could she throw away the possibility of an eternity with him? How could they “be one” and prioritize the covenants they made to each other and to God if she no longer believed in those covenants?
Sarah felt betrayed by the church. Bryan felt betrayed by Sarah.
Every conversation they had would lead to cycles of blame and misunderstanding because they couldn’t see each others’ perspectives. Both believed they needed the other to agree and understand their perspective before they could move forward together. The new differences in their beliefs scared them and made them behave from a reactionary, threatened space instead of a place of wholeness and security.
Sarah and Bryan, like every other couple in their situation, were struggling with fusion. Dr. Ellyn Bader, who created The Developmental Model of Couples Therapy, stated that “fusion happens when a person is fearful of encountering differences. These can be minor differences including how one spends their time or their hobbies, or major differences such as conflict style and desire for togetherness.” [2] Fusion is a problem because it restricts the movement available for either partner. Any disagreement or shift is seen as threatening to the relationship and the shared wholeness rather than a natural result of two whole, individual people.
The church’s teachings strongly encourage fusion in marriages. I wish the church’s rhetoric focused less on “becoming one” and “becoming whole” with your partner and much more on the “wholeness” and “oneness” that already exists inside each one of us. In the many instances that Jesus healed the sick, I don’t remember a single one that said “Thy faith hath made thee whole… but only if you are sealed to a believing spouse.” But that is often how we treat marriages in the church. There is a sense of deficit or defect in singleness and the only remedy is a faith-led marriage.
Due to the church’s focus on shared wholeness, when one partner has a faith transition, the believing spouse perceives the shift as a threat not only to the relationship but to their individual sense of wholeness. Likewise, the non-believing spouse feels that the only way to move forward in the relationship is to convince the believing spouse to agree with them. Neither partner has the tools they need to co-exist without believing together.
The opposite of fusion is differentiation. Dr. Bader describes differentiation as “an active process in which partners define themselves to each other.” She states that “differentiation requires the risk of being open to growth and being honest not only with your partner, but also with yourself.”
How different would a faith transition look if either partner could step back and say, “This is a lot for me and I realize it’s hard for you to support me in the ways I need right now, but I know I can take care of myself and find the things I need so that I can bring my best self to this relationship.” For a mixed-faith marriage to work, this sense of “individually together” needs to be achieved. Both partners need to learn to prioritize their own sense of wholeness, apart from their spouse or any other relationship. Once that is achieved, it will feel much less threatening to discuss the hard differences of belief and find togetherness.
The church should encourage differentiation and prioritize the individual relationship with God. They should change the rhetoric from “becoming one” within marriage to “becoming one” individually, becoming one with God, then bringing that wholeness to the marriage.
This foundation of differentiation instead of fusion would make all of the difference to people like Sarah and Bryan who eventually divorced due to the reactionary nature of their relationship and the magnitude of how threatening their differences felt. If the church really does believe marriage is the highest and holiest of all human relationships, it should teach differentiation and show members how to be healthier, whole humans with or without a believing partner.
Benson, Kyle. “Attachment and Differentiation in Relationships: An Interview with Ellyn Bader, Ph.D.” The Gottman Institute, https://www.gottman.com/blog/attachment-differentiation-relationships-interview-ellyn-bader-ph-d/. Accessed 14 January 2024.
“However Long and Hard the Road.” BYU Speeches, https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/jeffrey-r-and-patricia-t-holland/however-long-hard-road/. Accessed 14 January 2024.
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This post is part of a series about navigating Mixed Faith Marriages. Find more from this series here.
One Response
I think it would be interesting if the “Be One” focused on a “Creation” aspect instead of a “Unification” aspect.
Example: A pregnant woman and the baby inside the belly are “One” more precisely, “One Unit” because of the body’s creation of a host of accommodations such as the entire placenta, hormones, and auto-immune suppression tactics.
Likewise, it takes the creation of experiences, scripts, processes, and all kinds of other stuff to make a growing marriage that “creates” the family life (whether extended family, kid(s), pet(s), etc. are included or not – it’s still “family life”).