The Process of Support by a Third-Party Expert in the Adjustment of Marital Relationships:

Focusing on the Practice of Marital Counseling in Japan

Abstract

    The involvement of professionals with families has primarily been discussed from the perspective of “support” or “control.” In Japan, counseling specializing in marital relationships has gained popularity in recent years as a form of professional engagement with families.
    This paper focuses on the practical process of such counseling, aiming to clarify how third-party professionals participate in adjusting marital relationships and exploring how this involvement can be interpreted sociologically. Semi-structured interviews with counselors from diverse professional backgrounds were conducted to understand the practice of counseling beyond the explicit knowledge of family therapy and family psychology. The data was analyzed using the modified grounded theory approach (M-GTA).
    As a result, 20 concepts and 4 categories were generated for the process of marital counseling in Japan. Building on these findings, it is argued that the practice of marital counseling in Japan, when examined through the lens of emotion management theory, can be understood as the de-individualization of ‘emotion work’ in two ways: “laborization of emotion work” and “pluralization of perspectives in emotion work.”