A Leading Couples Counselor Says Divorce Is Sometimes the Right Answer

The Short Version: Dr. D Ivan Young helps couples accept both the healthy and the unhealthy habits in their relationships. To get real insight out of counseling, partners have to face their personal baggage, build emotional intelligence, and accept that things might not work out. Dr. D doesn’t set out to save your relationship; he sets out to save each person in it.

Relationship miracle workers don’t exist, but Dr. D may come as close as anyone.

Listing all his qualifications here would take far too long, but we’ll give it a shot: He’s a Master Certified Coach with the International Coaching Federation and a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach. He also holds certification as a professional diversity coach, and he’s an expert in behavior and relationships.

And there’s more: He sits on the Forbes’ Coaches Council and speaks publicly at TedX. Tune in to the morning shows you love, and you may spot him sharing life advice, plus pointers on conflict resolution, over croissants and coffee.

Dr. D’s clients are high-achieving couples ready to put in hard work to improve themselves.

Dr. D steers couples through conflict and helps each partner accept their own needs and boundaries. He mostly works with entrepreneurs, public figures, and high-net-worth individuals, but the only real requirement for success with Dr. D is a wish to better yourself.

“Ninety-five percent of people that complete my process, they stay on as a client,” Dr. D said. As one of his clients, the first thing you’d work toward is clarity within yourself.

As RuPaul famously said: “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you going to love somebody else?” Dr. D echoed the idea. “How the heck can you have a great relationship with anybody when you haven’t dealt with your baggage?”

Individual Self-improvement Is Necessary

Any couples counselor who knows their stuff will say that self-improvement requires self-work. You and your partner can only take on your relationship problems once you each see how your own habits and actions are shaped by what you’ve lived through.

“In my practice, the focus is on self-actualization,” Dr. D said. And self-actualization, meaning the capacity to trust in your own worth, stays out of reach until you deal with your baggage.

“Until you deal with the issues that each individual brings to the table individually, collectively, you cannot resolve anything. So in my practice, we take a very deep dive and we look at everything affecting that individual,” Dr. D told us. 

His background as a professionally certified diversity coach gives him a distinctive lens for analyzing how his clients behave.

“If you are a person of color or you’re a minority in your community, the odds are there are some psychosocial traumas that may or may not affect you, but more than likely affect how you show up, which affects your self view and your self esteem,” Dr. D said.  

Are you and your partner committed to growing as individuals? According to Dr. D, self-improvement is the key to a healthy relationship.

Dr. D meets with each partner individually before digging into the couple’s relationship dynamics. “They will typically reveal things to me that the person they’re married to or dating has no freaking clue about,” he said. The goal is for Dr. D to form an unbiased picture of the relationship ahead of seeing the couple together.

“At that point, I make a decision whether I will work with them, because I don’t take everybody,” he explained. “If you go see a marriage counselor, that would be the equivalent of going to watch a little league baseball team, right? If you come to my practice, this is the World Series. It’s the pros.” 

Ultimately, it all comes down to perspective, and whether the two of you can view yourselves as separate people and as a team, each with room to grow.

“When I have two people who want to become the best versions of themselves, individually, collectively, that works out well,” Dr. D said. 

According to Dr. D, personality type, cultural origins, upbringing, and conflict management all shape how a person behaves in a relationship. Of these, learning to manage conflict may well be the most important skill.

Dr. D Evaluates How You Handle Conflict

Dr. D proposed that the mind and the brain serve two separate functions. The way each one deals with conflict reveals a lot about your capacity to grow, learn, and reshape your relationship habits.

“The brain reacts to cues in the environment, and it has one goal: to keep things in balance,” Dr. D explained. “The mind is what you use when making mindful present decisions that help you to create an intentional outcome.”

Couples in his practice learn to stay mindful during disagreements. “What we do is help people learn to control those visceral responses and to become much more mindfully present in how they address conflict,” he said. Even so, Dr. D’s practice doesn’t treat conflict as a dirty word.

After all, how can you improve the way you respond to conflict if it never comes up?

Dr. D, whose work as a health and wellness coach has earned national recognition, knows how much empathy matters.

“I’m going to have you take some psych assessments, and we’re going to look at how you handle conflict. We’re going to get a clinical look at emotional intelligence,” Dr. D explained.  

How deep someone’s emotional intelligence runs says a lot about how well they understand their own behavior, and their partner’s too. Lasting bonds in a relationship depend on empathy.

Being frustrated by what your partner does is one thing; being unable to grasp the emotions driving it is another.

If all you want is to “win” an argument with your partner, Dr. D isn’t the right choice. “If the individuals are coming into this with the hope that (I’m) going to prove one person right and one person wrong, I’m not your guy,” he warned.

He isn’t an umpire. He’s a health and wellness coach, board certified, with years of experience behind him.

But if both of you truly see your own faults and are ready to work on them, you may have found your guide in Dr. D. “If you’re coming into this and your attitude is, ‘I want to be a better version of me. I really want to, whether this relationship works or not, be the best version of me possible.’ I’m probably a really good fit for you,” Dr. D emphasized.

In Dr. D’s office, don’t run from conflict. Avoid it, and the two of you may never reach what’s really driving your problems.

Even worse, Dr. D may struggle to judge whether the relationship has enough strength left to save.

Divorce Can Mark a Fresh Start

If you’re thinking about working with Dr. D, there’s one important thing to remember.

“I don’t work with people with the intent to break you up or to keep you together. I work with the intention for you to have clarity about yourself and to be self-actualized, and intentional in your behavior,” he explained. 

Dr. D can help you accept how long your relationship is meant to last. “Sometimes, that means that that relationship has to come to an end. And people are trying to force fit something that shouldn’t go past the duration that it was meant to.”

A breakup needn’t be a tragedy if it leaves both of you knowing more about who you are, how you act, and what you need, and whether each of you is meeting those needs.

Divorce isn’t a foregone conclusion, but it might be the healthiest path for you and your partner.

Relax: Dr. D isn’t Dr. Divorce. He put it this way: “Other times, people were about to break up, or were even in the throes of divorce. I work with them and they pump the brakes on the divorce and they realize, ‘I need to get my shit together, and I don’t want to lose you.’ That probably happens about 50% of the time.”

Dr. D’s coaching is known for being direct and no-nonsense, and his couples counseling is no exception.

“I’ll tell anybody, if you’re going to spend 50 to 100 grand on a ring, 25,000 on a dress, 50 to 250 on a wedding, you probably would have been better served creating a foundation that would make sure it’s durable,” he told us. 

His counseling doesn’t aim to save relationships but to save the people within them. Sometimes that means a couple has to go their separate ways. Ultimately, leaving single but self-possessed beats staying in a relationship while feeling completely lost.

And Dr. D says his clients walk away with a new sense of self-respect, whatever the outcome. “In any case, all of my clients, roughly 98%, are like, ‘Thank you. Because now I can at least be authentic and genuine and who I am.’”