Incidently considering 50% of couples that go for “marital counseling” by Mental Health proffesionals wind up divorced I would think that means a good portion of the proffesionals are incompetent.
Not necessarily so. Assuming the statistic is correct, it still doesn’t prove your point because you’re ignoring all the other variables.
The population of couples who go for marital therapy are not randomly selected. Couples in healthy relationships tend to not go to therapy. The ones who do go (generally speaking) are the ones that have problems in the marriage. So, the group that goes to therapists are a self-selected group with a bias toward marriages that already have issues.
Imagine, if you will, a doctor that deals with only high-risk patients that have a high (over 50%) mortality rate. If only 50% of his patients live, then the doctor is doing a *good* job — not a bad one. You can’t compare his patients’ mortality to the general population and say “oh, he must be killin’ ’em!”
The Wolf