Pre-marital counseling in Chicago?

March 10, 2009 12:26 PM

Any suggestions for a pre-marital counselor in Chicago? My fiance and I are doing a church wedding, and we are doing the Catholic pre-Cana requirements, but we actually think our church's requirements are too...minimal.

Our church only requires on "engaged enrichment day" and two meetings total with another couple. The church is in my hometown and so it's a fair amount of travel for us to do more with that church. It was suggested we look into Couple Communication, which is more what we're looking for. The problem is that they don't have any Chicago-proper counselors listed (and the nearest ones haven't responded to my requests for more information...).

We'd like to find a counselor/therapist who can talk to us about communication and preparing for being married. We don't want to do a group session, and we don't want to do a weekend retreat. We have no major issues (that we know of....), but just want to have a solid base to work from and think a third person to talk to might be a help.

Do you have specific suggestions of people or organizations we should look into?

posted by bibbit to Human Relations (3 answers total)

It's the only place I've been in Chicago, so I can't really make any comparisons, but I really like The Family Institute. My fiance and I were sort of in the same boat--no major capital-P problems, just wanted to make sure we were having the right conversations. Feel free to MeMail me if you'd like.
posted by Meg_Murry at 12:36 PM on March 10, 2009

Although our Cana counselors were pretty cheesy overall, they talked to us about the FOCCUS results. FOCCUS is a survey of attitudes about marriage that asks some good and some hilarious questions (Agree, Disagree, Undecided: My partner's homosexual tendencies frighten me....) Anyway, when they went over our results, we found out some things that we knew we scored low on, and we found out somethings that we were surprised to know. I actually feel like I got more out of that FOCCUS survey than the entire stupid Cana retreat.
posted by santojulieta at 10:01 PM on March 10, 2009

We lived in Boston and were Boston College alums, so we did our pre-cana there. (The parish priest who married us had agreed this was acceptable.) *shrug* Can you call the campus Ministry offices of a Catholic college in your area and do that?

I am fairly certain that the three-day weekend we did at B.C. was tougher than what we would have gone through at a small parish. You never know, though. :7)
posted by wenestvedt at 8:30 AM on March 11, 2009