By Oluwafunke Allen
Once a month, I stand in front of a room at Daystar’s Marriage and Family Life ministry with roughly twenty-one couples in it — forty-two people, give or take, whose combined marriage experience spans ten to forty years each. Pastor Sola and Pastor Simi Mabogunje first mentored Kunle and me into that unit fifteen years ago, and it has been fertile ground ever since, for the couples who pass through it and, honestly, for my own marriage and my own healing too. Every single time, without fail, I watch the same moment happen in that room: somewhere in the first thirty minutes, a wife hears another wife describe a problem she thought was uniquely, shamefully hers, and her whole posture changes. That moment is the entire reason I keep running these sessions, even though one-on-one counselling is, in most ways, simpler to do.
Why I started running these sessions at all
I didn’t start group work because it was easier — it isn’t. Managing the dynamics of forty-two people in one room, several couples deep in active conflict, is genuinely harder than managing two. I started because I kept noticing something in my private practice: couples would come in convinced their specific struggle was evidence of a uniquely broken marriage. A husband ashamed that he and his wife hadn’t been intimate in four months. A wife certain no other Christian couple argued about money the way they did. They weren’t uniquely broken. They were just isolated in their shame, and isolation always makes a normal problem feel like a catastrophic one.
The moment shame loses its grip
There is a specific sound a room makes when someone names something everyone else has been quietly carrying alone — a kind of exhale, sometimes a nervous laugh, occasionally actual tears. I’ve watched a husband admit, in front of forty strangers, that he resents how much of the household decision-making falls to his wife because he doesn’t trust his own judgment after a past failure — and watched three other men in that room sit up straighter, recognising themselves. He wasn’t fixed in that moment. But something loosened. Shame survives in secrecy. It cannot survive being spoken into a room full of people nodding along, because nodding is evidence that you are not the anomaly you believed yourself to be.
Peer wisdom that individual counselling can’t manufacture
Here’s the part that surprises people: in a group setting, some of the most useful insight in the room doesn’t come from me. It comes from a couple married twenty-two years telling a couple married four that the fightingabout-nothing phase they’re in is textbook and survivable, or from a wife offering the exact wording she uses to de-escalate a fight before it spirals — language she earned through her own trial and error, not from a textbook. I can teach a couple a communication framework. I cannot hand them the lived, tested, specific wisdom of someone who has actually walked their exact road five years ahead of them. A room of forty-two people carries a combined few centuries of marriage between them. No single counsellor, however experienced, holds that much accumulated field data. Proverbs 11:14 puts it plainly: “Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.” I used to read that as being about seeking one wise advisor. I’ve come to believe it’s just as much about the safety that exists specifically in a multitude — many voices, many angles, many lived experiences converging on the same struggle. That’s structurally something a private session, however good, cannot replicate. Hebrews 10:24-25 adds the piece about why we’re told not to neglect “the assembling of ourselves together” — because we’re meant to provoke one another toward love and good works, and that provoking happens in rooms, not in isolation.
What group counselling isn’t for
I need to be honest about the limits. Group sessions are not the right setting for acute crisis — active abuse, an affair discovered last week, a marriage in genuine emergency. Those need the privacy and pacing of individual work first. Group is for the couples navigating the long, common, unglamorous middle of marriage: the drift, the money tension, the intimacy that’s cooled, the in-law friction. It’s powerful precisely because it’s ordinary — that’s where most marriages actually live.
The line I want you to keep
Your marriage’s specific pain is rarely as unique as your shame insists it is — and the fastest way to discover that is to sit in a room with forty other people carrying something close to the same weight. The book grew directly out of what that Daystar room has taught me over the years — there’s a chapter that’s essentially the greatest hits of what forty-two strangers, collectively, keep getting right.
