More News

When Toni Coleman reads Francie Billotti-Wood's blog, she discerns a distance between Billotti-Wood and her husband, Christopher Alan Wood.

"She's kind of going off on her [own] track," the McLean, Va., relationship coach and licensed psychotherapist said Tuesday when referring to the March 16 entry in which Billotti-Wood writes about her son, Chandler, 5: "He doesn't do change well but neither does Chris."

Although that sentence "sounds flippant," Coleman said, it signified to her that Billotti-Wood was content to live her own life while Christopher Wood dealt with the full weight of his work-related stress by himself — a mistake that allowed resentment to foment into rage in Wood.

"There's this distance," Coleman said. "That's a classic example of what happens when a couple stops communicating."

The father of Francie Billotti-Wood, 33, on Saturday discovered his daughter and his daughter's entire family — husband Christopher A. Wood, 34, and children Chandler, 5, Gavin, 4, and Fiona, 2 — all slain at the hands of Christopher Wood.

Billotti-Wood's blog — "What Am I Supposed To Do Now – the life of a working girl who crashed into motherhood and never realized it" — tells the story in recent posts of a couple who uprooted from Florida to Billotti-Wood's hometown of Middletown.

While Billotti-Wood spent time with her children and her parents and joined the Middletown Moms at Home club, Christopher Wood apparently dealt with extra stress in his job as a salesman amid new circumstances.

It could have ended differently, Coleman said. "Had they gone into counseling together instead of him being identified as the problem … I think the outcomes would have been different," Coleman said.

A bad economy is making for situations where couples who would get divorced in better times are continuing to live together out of economic necessity, Coleman said. Also, people who would normally pay for private couples' therapy may be more hesitant to do so now.

Still, there are options, especially in the form of trained laypeople connected to churches.

Marriage Savers of Frederick County, a faith-based nonprofit in Walkersville that seeks to slash divorce and cohabitation rates, has a program that empowers churches to save failing marriages through the use of mentor couples.

The Rev. Robert J. Donk said that such couples can serve as "pre-psychotherapy people," meaning they can help normal couples get through hard times, but would refer individuals to professionals if they discern mental or emotional problems.

The trick to saving marriages is to get help before it's too late. A marriage begins to deteriorate when "one person wants the other person to change," Donk said, and gets worse when neither partner changes.

At some point in a failing marriage, the love is lost. Saving that marriage becomes extremely difficult because, often, one partner has already moved on with his or her life.

Married couples seek counseling because "they want closeness," said Janice E. Daffern, a couples therapist at Fredericktowne Pastoral Counseling Center in Frederick and an associate pastor at Evangelical Reformed United Church of Christ. There are three "crisis" periods in a marriage, she added: after 2-3 years, between 7-10 years and after 20 or 25 years.

Daffern declined to comment on the events in Middletown. "It's so beyond what most people deal with," she said.

E-mail Jeremy Hauck at jhauck@gazette.net.