Marc Johnston on Crisis Marriage Coaching and the ICU Approach

Marc Johnston built a coaching practice around the hardest cases: marriages already in crisis, where often only one partner still wants to save it. He calls it the ICU for marriage, and his method starts from that reality instead of the tidy assumption that both people are equally committed.

In this candid conversation, Richard Lowe draws on his own difficult first marriage to test Marc’s approach against a real situation, and Marc lays out the research and the communication principles his work rests on.

Marc Johnston is a marriage coach with High Thrive Coaching, where he specializes in relationships in crisis, what he calls the ICU for marriage.

He holds a psychology degree and built a method around working with a single committed spouse, daily group support, and structured training on handling affairs, reluctance, and rebuilding connection.

DISCUSS YOUR BOOK

Full transcript of the conversation follows.

Richard Lowe: Tell me about this ICU for marriage. What does that mean?

Marc Johnston: We’ve created a bit of a niche in the market. The vast majority of people we help are individuals trying to patch together their marriage when their spouse is already starting to head out the door. I talk with these individuals, help them identify what’s really driving their spouse away, and give them tips on how to rebuild connection. Even if their husband or wife is saying, “We’re getting a divorce.” This is why it’s the ICU. People are in a marriage crisis situation in most all cases that we deal with.

Richard: I could have used that 15 years ago. My wife passed away, but I was married for 12 and a half years. It was a pretty rocky road.

Marc: It’s not an easy period for a lot of people. People find it immensely helpful just to have a decent direction to go in a situation they’ve never encountered before.

Richard: It’s not like you receive training in school about how to manage your marriage. I actually got married on the third date. Literally. I asked her to marry me and we got married that night.

Marc: I’ve heard some fast courtships, but I think you might have the record. A very short courtship is generally not statistically favorable for a long-term relationship. But you lasted 12 years, which actually gets over that hump. It must have been at least in some ways a good match.

Richard: She got sick about two or three years in, and became very sick. I wasn’t about to walk out on somebody that sick.

Marc: So this wasn’t really about being a good match. There were circumstances outside the marriage that led to what happened.

Richard: We would have gone through divorce. But I’m not going to walk out on somebody whose IVs I have to change every day. If you’ve got any honor, any responsibility.

Marc: Within a few years you’d basically made the commitment for better or worse. Honestly, not everyone thinks that way. That’s commendable.

Richard: My advice to anybody would be: don’t get married on the third date.

What the ICU Approach Looks Like

Richard: If we’d come to you after a year and I said I want to divorce this woman, what would you’ve done?

Marc: Typically I look at what are the active pain points causing people to become apart. That’s always a great place to start. You need to eliminate those pain points. But that doesn’t necessarily create a good relationship. My neighbor, I don’t have any problems with them, but I don’t have a good relationship with them. Same with marriage. You can eliminate problems, but then you need to build up that connection. It’s really different depending on the couple. Some it’s about rebuilding trust because there’s been infidelity. Others have lost the love and we need to examine what happened. Other situations, people get into midlife crises or fall into depression and blame the marriage. The approach depends entirely on the problem.

Richard: It got so bad where she started half-jokingly talking about “you have to sleep here and I have knives” or “watch out for the poison.”

Marc: Even though that’s joking, it sounds like it became acceptable to have some amount of contempt between the two of you. One of the biggest names in relationship research is John Gottman, who got famous for predicting pretty accurately who would stay together and who would divorce. He had the Four Horsemen of divorce. One of the big ones is contempt: a persistent negative view of the other person.

Richard: She told me she’d had an affair and didn’t care what I thought about it.

Marc: Big can of worms there. My philosophy is that there’s always something that can be done to improve the relationship, even if we accept it might not get to reconciliation. For some people, if they can at least get along enough to co-parent well or remain in contact, sometimes we have to settle for those smaller goals.

Working with a Reluctant Spouse

Richard: If we’d come to you, she’d be coming under protest. That’s how we went into our first counseling sessions.

Marc: Right off the bat I’d see a problem with motivation. If I’m fighting someone on a goal, the likelihood they’ll follow through with any suggestions is next to nothing. I’d start with her complaints. If she’s saying, “Richard is this terrible husband who doesn’t understand me,” I’d ask, what do we actually want changed? Is that something you’re interested in? A lot of times a spouse says, “I just want to be done.” That’s not an actual goal. Divorce isn’t an end goal. No one wakes up in the morning and says, “I think it’d be a really good idea to divorce.” They want what divorce affords them. Maybe they want relief. Maybe they don’t want arguments anymore. Maybe they want freedom or respect for their choices. We look at those underlying goals and see if there’s motivation to work through that problem. Typically we can find something, even if the end goal isn’t reconciliation. When you solve some of these problems, it becomes easier to go further.

Richard: You’d have had a hard time because for her, everything was “fine.”

Marc: I would have called her out on that. This is my bread and butter. I get people who don’t want to talk to me, people who are uncomfortable or hostile. I think one of my talents is putting people at ease and making them feel understood. I’ve had people yelling and screaming at me, and they’re close friends with me 10 minutes later. If she was really resistant, I’d probably move toward meeting with her individually to take the pressure away from having to answer in front of you.

Richard: That would have been fine with me. I just wanted to stop getting attacked. The counselor we did go to was lost.

Marc: Here’s the thing. Most people go to their local counseling office and say they need marriage counseling. I went to school for psychology, and getting my clinical psychology degree, I wasn’t required to do anything in terms of couples counseling. I elected to take two classes that were offered, which is hardly enough. Most therapists’ client load isn’t couples counseling. They’re dealing with depression or anxiety, the very common mental health problems. The approach for saving marriages isn’t the same. It’s like going to your general practitioner versus the oncologist for cancer.

Communication Styles and Cultural Differences

Richard: She was Guatemalan with a somewhat different approach to life than mine. I was born in California. There were cultural differences.

Marc: Differences in values or culture, people can get over that. But there are certain values, and if those are different, you’re stacking the numbers against you. Even within the same culture you might have different values. My wife and I are both Caucasian with similar religious backgrounds but different values, and there are sometimes clashes between us even though I work with people on marriages every day.

Richard: As a Californian and as a man, I tend to be overt. If there’s a problem, I want to solve it, talk about it, get it done. She was covert. She’d drop hints, and I didn’t pick up on them at all. That infuriated her.

Marc: I see that among a lot of cultures. It’s this assumption that if you don’t know what’s going to make me happy, you must not love me. Really the factor is you’re expecting the other person to read your mind and then are upset when they don’t guess correctly. It’s much better to clearly state what you want.

Richard: Everything was always “fine.” The doom word. When she said she was fine, you were doomed. We also had a blended family situation. Her son from a previous relationship came in at 14, which was hostile from the start.

Marc: Blended families. Once again, nothing against them, but it’s another stressor. When you stack all these things, I can see why there might have been problems.

The Two Things That Kill a Relationship

Richard: I think with relationships, you don’t want to hurt the other person, so you start not talking about what’s going on. Then it builds up until the pressure cooker goes off.

Marc: The two things that will kill a relationship: if you have no ability to be open about problems, or if you have no avenue to be open about what’s wanted. If you don’t have those things, the pressure will build up and it’ll explode or just die.

Richard: Hypothetically, suppose one spouse privately told you about an affair or a gambling problem they were hiding. Would you recommend they tell their spouse?

Marc: First I’d wonder why they can’t share that. A big thing that fuels addictive behavior is secrecy. “I can’t share this, it’s too much for them, they’re going to leave me.” I do think it would eventually need to be discussed, but we’d need to work through why it can’t be shared in the first place. You want to be able to share it in a healthy manner.

Richard: So you’d build up affinity between the two before disclosure.

Marc: The whole reason this person can’t share is it would be a major problem in the relationship anyway. So this is on the same path of fixing the couple: being open enough to share problems. I talk about levels of intimacy. Level one is the cashier, you wish them a good day but don’t really care. Level two is business or facts with a coworker. Level three is opinions about things outside yourself. Level four is personal opinions, what do I like about you, what do I like about myself. Level five is sharing struggles and weaknesses and making that a connecting experience. That’s a very intimate relationship, and that’s what’s needed here.

Richard: If you can’t do that, you’re not at level five.

Marc: No. One of the things I appreciate about my marriage is my ability to share those things with my wife. I know I can go to her and say I’m really struggling here, and I can expect she’s going to be there to support me. It makes for a very open relationship where we can have struggles and know it’s not going to be a deal breaker.

How Their Method Is Different

Marc: Part of why we’re different: with regular couples counseling, you’d go maybe once a week or every other week. Because we’re dealing with crisis situations, it needs more attention. I’m typically talking to my client regularly. In addition, I run group calls. Either myself or one of my team members is there every day of the week for a couple hours to answer questions in case you’ve gotten into a fight. On top of that, we have trainings: what to do if your spouse is dealing with an affair, what to do if they don’t want to talk to you. I can say, “Here are the principles, go watch this. Next time we come back together, now that you know the principles, I want to apply them to your specific situation.” It’s good for holding clients accountable and making sure they’re learning the skills.

Richard: But it sounds like the foundation is that both want to solve it.

Marc: Actually, we come in with the assumption that only one person wants to fix the marriage. That’s why we’re the ICU. That’s the niche we’ve created. 95% of people starting with us, one spouse is wanting separation or divorce. We’re looking to put out that fire and then rebuild.

Two Types of Commitment

Marc: Two things keep people together, two types of commitment. One is everything like marriage vows, having children, time together, stigma against divorce, things outside the marriage. The much more powerful thing is: does it actually feel good to be around each other? Until you have that, it’s very unlikely a spouse would consider staying together.

Richard: You must get some phenomenal anger issues.

Marc: People get confused. They’ll say, “I’m trying to help my spouse, I’m trying to fix things, even support them, and they react in anger.” Anger when it doesn’t logically make sense. It takes a lot on my end to make sure I have those emotional walls up, being able to guard myself against the extreme emotion I’m seeing on a constant basis.

Richard: Do you ever encounter actual abuse situations?

Marc: If I encounter actual abuse, I don’t typically recommend reconciling. It’s more about how do we peacefully exit without further damage. How do we get them out of danger. For the most part, though, our advertising talks about saving the marriage, and if you’re a battered spouse, that’s probably not on the top of your priority list.

Codependency

Richard: You must also run into codependency a lot.

Marc: The client approaching will present much more desperate. Their spouse is pulling away and they’re so distraught at the idea their husband or wife could leave. Just the idea of “could you actually be happy without this person” is hard for them to fathom. A codependency where you couldn’t possibly be happy without them isn’t a healthy foundation. I talk with clients about how to be happy without your partner, even if we’re aiming to fix the relationship.

Richard: It’s important to spend time apart. That was one of her areas of contention. I needed space and she didn’t want to give it.

Marc: There needs to be room for individual interests, hobbies, to a certain extent friends, so that when you do come together there’s something to talk about. Something to share. Learn more about Marc Johnston at highthrivecoaching.com or join the Thriving Marriage Facebook group. Find Richard Lowe at TheWritingKing.com.

Quotable moments

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the “ICU for marriage”?

Marc Johnston’s niche: coaching marriages that are already in crisis, where in most cases one spouse is heading toward separation or divorce. The approach is built to put out that fire first and then rebuild connection.

Can coaching help if only one spouse wants to save the marriage?

Yes. His method assumes from the start that only one person may be committed. He works with that person to identify what’s driving the other away and to rebuild connection, even when the other spouse begins reluctant or resistant.

Why does he say divorce is never the real goal?

Because divorce is a proxy for something else, relief, freedom, an end to arguments, or respect. He works from those underlying goals, which is where motivation to change actually lives.

Is a regular therapist the same as a marriage coach?

Not necessarily. Marc points out that many clinical psychology programs require little to no couples training, and most therapists’ caseloads center on individual anxiety and depression instead of the distinct skill of saving marriages.