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Mark A. Saunders Sr., PhD, LMFT, LPC, met his future wife in the 1980s when they were both students at Purdue University in Indiana. They were fast friends — inseparable for three years — before deciding to date. After that, they quickly became engaged, drawn together by their shared Christian faith and service to others.

As the young couple talked about their future, they dreamt of providing marriage counseling together. Saunders laughs now at their presumptuousness: “Looking back, what did we know about marriage counseling?” But counseling couples was always “on my heart,” he says.

After the two married in 1990, they participated in — but didn’t counsel or lead — their church’s marriage enrichment classes. Seven or so years later, they began to lead a small group of church couples talking about their marriages. But their intended ministry soon took a detour.

Saunders is now the president of Wellspring of Hope LLC in the Lynchburg and Richmond, Virginia, area and an assistant professor serving as an adjunct professor at Liberty University and Regent University. He is a member of the ACA Governing Council, representing the International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors.

After more than three decades together, Saunders and his wife, Linda P. Saunders, PhD (her PhD is in intercultural studies), recently returned to their longtime dream of offering marriage counseling. In 2019, the couple bought a former lodge on 97 acres in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, where they created their Wellspring of Hope Restorative Marriage Estate.

However, their dreams were delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. Now, five years later, they are opening their doors again, offering evidence-based marriage therapy that lasts two to four days, with up to seven hours of counseling a day. While the lodge can host three couples at a time, Saunders prefers counseling one-on-one. He finds that the intensive format of 25-30 hours of counseling over three or four days is extremely beneficial for couples in crisis.

Mission Service in Venezuela

The marriage estate was a long time coming. Back in the early 2000s, the Saunderses’ dream was postponed as their Christian faith pulled them in a different direction.

In 2004, the couple and their three elementary-age children moved to Valencia, Venezuela, to become missionaries. They registered as a social foundation and spent the next 15 years working with underserved families and “street children” in one of the most dangerous countries for kids. According to Save the Children, 24 out of every 1,000 children are murdered in Venezuela each year.

Many Venezuelan families were dealing with extreme poverty and living in dilapidated shacks known as “shanty towns.” “The parents would work every day, but the minimum wage was so low that at one point the monthly salary was about $3,” Saunders explains.

The Saunderses bought a farm to raise fruit and animals so they could feed families. They prepared meals and delivered the food, along with clothing, to people’s homes throughout the week. They also worked to connect families with social and medical services. They partnered with a dentist and began offering regular dental clinics across the country.

Unlike those who fly into countries for short-term mission trips — for example, bringing physicians to treat immediate needs for a week or two — the Saunders family wanted to help establish permanent programs. “In our heart, we wanted to build a social network that worked and functioned permanently.”

And they achieved that to some extent. But after 10 years in their adopted country, the Saunderses recognized the growing instability and increasing authoritarianism of the country, while inflation and unemployment soared. Visa restrictions began to tighten, and the family understood it would soon be difficult to stay in Venezuela. The family began to transition back to the U.S., and four years later, in 2018, they moved to Virginia, where their sons were now attending Liberty University.

A Focus on Marriage Counseling

Earlier in Venezuela, after 16 years of a happy and fairly stress-free marriage — “La La Land,” Saunders calls it — daily life began to take its toll. The isolation from family back in the U.S., frustration with the Venezuelan authorities while trying to help families, and their stress over financial struggles all built up.

The couple decided to take part in short-term intensive marriage counseling during a visit to the States. But they didn’t find many options — and none they could afford. There would be no intensive marriage retreat. Instead, they worked on their marriage together. But they never forgot about that counseling gap.

When they returned to the States permanently, Saunders first established his Wellspring of Hope practice. Then the couple created their marriage estate, hoping to offer what they couldn’t find for themselves.

When people talk about marriage struggles, the word “communication” often comes up, Saunders says. But while communication challenges might be what brought a couple to marriage counseling, it goes deeper than that.

“I tell all my couple clients that we have to have openness, honesty and authenticity,” he says. If a person is not completely honest and vulnerable in counseling, “We’re not working on the truth, and we can’t get down to where we really need to be.”

Saunders finds couples often think they went into their marriage with full transparency and honesty but may be hiding something from their spouse “deep down in the recesses of their heart.” In addition, couples often bring the good and the bad lessons from their family of origin. “They may not have shared what all went on in their home, what is really affecting them; that has created who they are.”

He also includes sex therapy as part of marriage counseling. As a Christian, he looks back at the creation story of when Adam and Eve were naked and not ashamed. His PhD dissertation examined the question: Why does nakedness now bring shame to people in our society, with a key being the difference between nudity and nakedness?

Data show that about 30% of couples who seek counseling have some form of sexual distress, according to Saunders. This makes it imperative, he says, for therapists who counsel couples to be comfort- able talking about sex and sexuality.

However, this area is lacking in counselor education, he says. “An LPC who graduated from a clinical mental health program is not required to take a human sexuality course, leaving them woefully ill-equipped. So they will graduate from an accredited program without having taken a human sexuality course, and they’re going to see couples, and 30% of the couples have sexual distress.”

Clients may not have sought out a counselor to talk about sexual distress, but the topic often comes up through the counseling process. Clients will sense if a counselor is uncomfortable talking about sex, causing clients to not broach the topic, Saunders says.

“Sex and sexuality are a huge part of our life, and it’s a wonderful part of our life. When I delve into it with my clients, I promote open communication, which is necessary, but I’ll ease into it, normalize the conversation, make it comfortable.”

Saunders also says the Christian church needs to improve its conversations about sex. A lot of shame about sex comes from Christian upbringing, he says. “I enjoy working with Christian couples to work through this because they do have large elements of shame because of what they have been brought up in,” he says. “We’ve got to do better. We’ve got to do better in the church regarding sex and sexuality because we’ve messed up.”

Integration of Faith and Counseling

Saunders has been able to create a counseling career that combines his Christianity with cross-cultural work and service to others. He enjoys merging his experience and academic training to integrate spirituality and faith — no matter what the religion — into counseling sessions. He employs a conflict resolution and restoration couples counseling model integrated with evidence-based hope-focused therapy.

Instead of focusing on religious differences, he reminds people that the three major world religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — share the idea that humanity was made in God’s image. “There are thoughts and beliefs that are different, but we can work together, learn from each other, learn culturally from each other.”

He extends this idea to the counseling field and his work with ACA and the International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors: “We’re all just humans, and there’s usually a common denominator — peace on earth, goodwill towards men. … In ACA, I want to be able to promote a unity within mental health that we don’t have to do one thing at the cost of not doing something else.”