One of the Nation’s Top Couples Counselors Believes Some Couples Should Accept Divorce

The Short Version: Dr. D Ivan Young helps couples come to terms with their good and bad relationship habits. For couples to gain insight from counseling, they need to tackle their own personal baggage, establish emotional intelligence, and accept the possibility of failure. Dr. D’s goal isn’t to save your relationship, but to save each individual in the relationship. 

There’s no such thing as a relationship miracle worker, but Dr. D may be the closest thing. 

He has far too many qualifications to name here, but we’ll try our best: He’s an International Coaching Federation Master Certified Coach and National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, as well as a certified professional diversity coach and a behavioral and relationship expert. 

We can keep going: He’s on Forbes’ Coaches Council. He’s a TedX public speaker. Turn on your favorite morning show, and there’s a chance you’ll see him doling out life advice and conflict resolution tips over coffee and croissants. 

Dr. D leads couples through conflict and helps them come to terms with their individual needs and boundaries. He works primarily with high net worth individuals, entrepreneurs, and public figures, but all you really need to succeed with Dr. D is the desire to improve yourself. 

“Ninety-five percent of people that complete my process, they stay on as a client,” Dr. D told us. If you became one of Dr. D’s clients, your first goal would be to achieve clarity within yourself. 

In the immortal words of RuPaul: “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you going to love somebody else?” Dr. D mirrored this sentiment. “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 worth their salt will tell you self-improvement isn’t possible without self-work. You have to understand how your life experiences influence your own actions and habits before you and your partner can address your relationship issues. 

“In my practice, the focus is on self-actualization,” Dr. D explained. And you can’t achieve self-actualization — AKA, the ability to believe in your own self-worth — if you don’t 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 experience as a certified professional diversity coach gives him a unique perspective when analyzing his clients’ behavior.

“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.  

Before Dr. D explores a couple’s relationship dynamics, he meets with each person individually. “They will typically reveal things to me that the person they’re married to or dating has no freaking clue about,” he told us. The point is for Dr. D to have a non-biased view of the relationship before he meets with the couple. 

“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.” 

At the end of the day, it’s all about perspective — and whether you and your partner can see yourselves as individuals and as a team 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. 

Dr. D named conflict management, personality type, cultural origins, and the way one grew up as factors that influence one’s behavior in a relationship. Of all of these factors, conflict management may be the most essential skill to learn. 

Dr. D Assesses Your Conflict Management Skills 

Dr. D suggested that the brain and the mind have two separate functions. How each function handles conflict says a lot about your ability to learn, grow, and change 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.”

In his practice, couples learn how to be mindful when they disagree. “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. Still, conflict isn’t a dirty word at Dr. D’s practice. 

If conflict doesn’t arise, how can you work on your response to it? 

“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.  

The depth of one’s emotional intelligence says a lot about one’s ability to understand their own actions — and their partner’s, for that matter. Empathy is necessary to form lasting bonds in a relationship. 

Frustration with your partner’s actions is one thing; an inability to understand the emotions behind their actions is another. 

Don’t go to Dr. D if you simply want to “win” an argument against your partner. “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 advised. 

He’s a board certified health and wellness coach with years of experience — not an umpire. 

If you and your partner genuinely recognize your individual faults and are willing to work on them, Dr. D could be your guide. “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 reiterated. 

Don’t shy away from conflict in Dr. D’s office. Without it, you and your partner may never be able to address the root causes of your problems. 

Worse yet, Dr. D may have trouble deciding whether your relationship is strong enough to save. 

Divorce Can Be a New Beginning

Anyone who considers working with Dr. D should keep something important in mind. 

“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. 

With Dr. D’s help, you can come to terms with your relationship’s lifespan. “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.” 

Breaking up doesn’t have to be tragic if it means you and your partner have learned about yourselves, your actions, and your own needs – and whether you’re each meeting those needs. 

Don’t worry — Dr. D isn’t Dr. Divorce. As he explained: “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 is known for his straightforward, no-nonsense approach to coaching, and this is true for couples counseling, too. 

“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. 

Dr. D’s counseling style isn’t about saving relationships, but saving the people in the relationship. And sometimes, this means couples need to part ways. At the end of the day, it’s far better to walk away single but self-possessed than in a relationship but completely lost.  

And according to Dr. D., his clients leave his care with newfound self-respect, regardless of 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.’”