Episodes

Welcome Back: Where We’ve Been and What’s Next for the Podcast In our 280th episode, we provide an update after a five-year hiatus! We discuss our personal experiences, including burnout, career changes, and coping with the pandemic. The episode covers the transition from our old OnlyYouForever brand to the new Therapevo Counselling brand, highlighting the expanded focus on diverse counseling topics and services. We also touch on rebranding the podcast to ‘Normalize therapy.’ and adding a new ...

We’re here to talk There’s a level of control that occurs in relatively few marriages that we would see as part of an abusive power and control dynamic. But then there’s a lower level of control that doesn’t come from an abusive spouse that can still be frustrating and lead to conflict in the marriage. We’ve talked about the abusive kind of control before, so if you want to learn more about that kind of control feel free to go back to our previous episodes of the podcast to learn more about wh...

This is a subject we’ve wanted to address for some time. We see some irony in the work we do with couples or individuals when it comes to abuse. Often, though not always, people who are in a relationship with a truly abusive person do not realize it. On the other hand, couples who are in high conflict often label the other person as abusive when they are not really an abusive person, although they may relate to abusive tactics from time to time. So, the ‘abuse’ word gets abused sometimes. And ot...

How do I know if I can trust my spouse again? This question represents one of the most profound dilemmas a betrayed spouse will struggle with as they journey towards healing after a significant betrayal. How do I know I’m not going to get hurt again? How do I know I’m not just being a fool to trust him or her? Trust is so easy to break and so hard to build: today we’d like to give you more insight into the dynamics at play in this important struggle. Before we talk about indicators of trustwort...

The five pillars of attachment are felt safety, attunement, soothing, expressed delight, and support for becoming one’s unique best self. They are the core attachment needs every child requires from a caregiver, and every adult continues to need from a spouse. The framework comes from the seminal attachment textbook Attachment Disturbances in Adults by Daniel P. Brown and David S. Elliott (W. W. Norton, 2016), and it sits underneath everything we do in marriage counseling when a couple is strugg...

Did you know that the research shows that marriage takes a hit when you have kids? One author reported in 2005 that an analysis of 90 different research studies showed the drop in marital satisfaction is a shocking 42% larger among the current generation than their predecessors. A more recent study from 2016 showed that 67% of couples reported a decline in relationship happiness for up to three years after the birth of their first child.[1] Those figures are reported in non-pandemic situations. ...

Reasonably often, we get inquiries from a wife whose husband is addicted to pornography and he won’t do anything about it. In this article we want to help you prepare for that first serious confrontation where you have a very deliberate conversation about this problem and how it is impacting you as his wife. Understanding Denial It’s almost inevitable that you are going to run into some level of denial in a conversation like this, so let’s begin by talking about denial. It would be easy to run...

Well, we live in unprecedented times as many of us are adjusting to a global crisis. We are recording this episode in the middle of the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic, with some of our listeners in cities in full lock-down and others nervously awaiting the community spread of this disease. Certainly, it has created considerable stress and new issues to negotiate. Today, we’d like to help you understand how these kinds of crises impact marriage, but more importantly, how your marriage can help you buf...

If you have decided to disclose an affair to your spouse, you are probably looking for a concrete answer to one question: what do I actually need to tell them? A thoughtful infidelity disclosure covers seven specific elements: the type and extent of the betrayal, who the other person was, where and when the contact happened, how often, whether there are health implications from any sexual contact, the current status of that relationship, and where your spouse might cross paths with the affair pa...

If you are trying to break a pornography addiction, one of the best things you can do is to find a group that you can join in addition to doing individual counselling. Fortunately, there are a number of great options out there to choose from depending on what is available in your area or whether or not you are looking for something that fits with your faith/beliefs or your goals for sobriety. Today, we are looking at 6 of the largest groups available so that you can make a choice about what migh...

If you have betrayed your spouse and disclosed that betrayal to them, one thing you will have become very aware of is the rage that betrayal can cause. In our experience in working with couples, many people who are working through their own infidelity and trying to recover their marriage find that they aren’t sure how to respond to this rage or what to do with it. Today we are going to look at why anger is a normal part of responding to betrayal, where it comes from, and how to best support you...

Compassion is probably something that you find harder to provide for yourself than for others. However, did you know that self-compassion can help your marriage? Yes, we often talk about what you could and should give to your spouse in marriage, but today we want to talk about the need for self-compassion and how beneficial that can be both for yourself and for your marriage. In Western culture, compassion is most commonly thought of as something that should be extended to others. In fact, most...

Disclosing an affair is a terrifying but crucial step toward healing a marriage. This episode provides guidance on how to navigate this difficult conversation with honesty and care. We'll cover the four key things to avoid when revealing infidelity, such as staggered disclosure and blame-shifting, which can cause further trauma. Learn how to take responsibility for your actions, understand the impact of betrayal on your partner, and discover how couples therapy can create a path toward rebuildin...

If you ever find yourself feeling overwhelmed during conflict, then this article is for you. We describe the psychological experience of flooding: when you white out or shut down or get hijacked by your own emotions. Usually, this happens during a fight with your spouse and it never helps resolve the issue you’re facing. In this article, we talk about what flooding is and how you can calm yourself down in order to navigate through conflict more successfully. What is Flooding? This is a problem...

We’re here to talk If you are married, it’s more than likely that you’ve had a discussion with your spouse at some point about a friendship between one of you and someone outside your marriage. So, what about those opposite-sex friendships? Are they healthy or are they dangerous? Should we avoid them at all costs or take them on a case by case basis? How much friendliness with the opposite sex is too much and could land you in trouble? What if the person you’re friends with is 50 years older th...

Four episodes back we addressed the topic of pain during sex for women and that show received a lot of downloads. Today we return to the topic but this time for men. Sexual issues like this can be difficult to figure out and often people just don’t even know who to ask, so they struggle alone. We hope this will be the start of getting help for anyone who is struggling with pain during sex so that you can return to enjoying physical intimacy with your wife. Pain During Sex for Men Often, the ca...

When your wife finds out you’ve been using porn, she isn’t overreacting and she isn’t making it up. Her nervous system is responding to a betrayal wound the same way it would respond to any other relational trauma. This article is for husbands who want to understand what their wife is actually going through, and why her healing depends on more than your apology. We work with this every week in our practice. The hurt you’re seeing in her is real, it has a name, and there is a structure to it that...

What do you do when you’re going to see family for the holidays or on a vacation and you know that not everybody is in that healthy place where they’re going to be able to show you, your spouse and kids respect and care? So many of our listeners — if they want to spend time with family — know ahead of time that it’s not likely to go well. How can we prepare and protect ourselves when this is the case? For many people, family visits are a time to look forward to where you enjoy spending time wit...

If you find yourself thinking, “my husband takes me for granted,” you are not being dramatic or ungrateful. You are naming something real. The noticing itself matters, and it is usually the first honest signal that something in the relationship needs attention. When a wife feels taken for granted, she is usually describing a slow accumulation: the effort she puts in has stopped being seen, the care she offers has become background noise, and the thank-yous have quietly disappeared. It is rarely...

If you experience pain during sex, you are certainly not alone. Pain during sex is called dyspareunia, and research shows that about 7% of women experience pain it.[1] Of those 7%, about one-quarter of them reported that the pain had been occurring frequently or every time they had intercourse over at least 6 months. Today, we’d like to look at some of the most common causes so that if you’re experiencing dyspareunia you maybe have a starting point to know how to explore and hopefully resolve th...

Back in episode 209, we did a show on the five things you need to know if you’ve been betrayed by your husband. Today we want to look at the experience of a husband who has been betrayed. Men and women both experience betrayal, but have different ways of responding to it. Betrayal trauma is the result of a shocking disclosure of a relational breach, whether that’s unfaithfulness or some other form of broken trust or loss of confidence in your marriage. These breaches can come from things like s...

Picture an ordinary Tuesday. Your wife is at the stove, and you walk past, resting your hand briefly between her shoulder blades. Three seconds. No words. That small piece of contact is doing more for your marriage than most couples realize. Physical touch is one of the first senses we develop, and it never stops being a primary channel of intimacy in adult love. It is also the channel that erodes most quickly when life gets busy, when children arrive, when stress builds, or when the relationsh...

Transitioning from full-time employment into retirement is naturally going to impact both your life and your marriage. Retirement comes with lots of changes, and there are ups and downs to the process. Whether you have parents going through this, you’re coming up to retirement, or you have recently retired, there’s lots to learn about how to handle the changes that come with moving into retirement since it’s a brand-new stage of life. Research shows that there are both positives and negatives t...

If you or your spouse is working through recovery from porn or sex addiction, you have probably noticed that the problem runs deeper than the behavior itself. There is a reason for that. Research consistently shows that attachment style plays a significant role in who develops compulsive sexual behavior and why. In a landmark 2008 study, Zapf, Greiner, and Carroll found that over 80% of men with sex addiction had insecure attachment styles. That is not a coincidence. It points to something found...