marriage

February 4, 2009

Good Parenting Starts With A Good Marriage

julie-and-matt-leavenworth-3We’ve been married for 20 years now, and we’re the first to admit it hasn’t always been easy. We started out our life together heavily involved in drugs and alcohol, and both of us had unsuccessful marriages (and the ensuing divorces) under our belts. We weren’t especially well equipped because of our pasts to be good spouses. We eloped to Reno and got married without telling anyone in our family until a month after, which didn’t go over well at all! We were starting a marriage with 2 strikes against us, and it showed because we almost split up before we were married for a year.

Fortunately, those days are far behind us, and we’ve both been clean and sober for nearly 20 years, and have managed to become a happily married couple – most of the time, that is. We still have our problems, but we work through them with the help of tools and techniques we’ve been taught by various counselors throughout the years. And we continue to go to counseling on an as-needed basis, whenever we feel we need a little “tune-up”. There’s nothing wrong with admitting that you need help figuring things out.

Counseling is not for everybody

While I totally recommend counseling for anyone that’s having marital problems, I also understand that’s just not the route that some people want to go, for a variety of reasons, such as:

  • They don’t want to expose their lives and/or problems to a stranger.
  • They can’t afford it.
  • They don’t have the time.

The Us Factor

Because of this fact, I was excited to learn that the creators of The Total Transformation had developed a marriage program called The Us Factor. I thought, “this might be the answer for couples that were struggling” so I got a copy of it and we started to go through it together.

What we found was some very good training by a counselor named Dr. Joseph Melnick, a licensed psychologist. I heard many of the things I’d learned from my counselors, and a few new ideas to boot! And I’m only through the first 3 DVD’s. If you’d like, you can read my Us Factor Review at our marriage website, How To Fix Your Marriage.

If you’re in the category of needing a little (or a lot) of help with your marriage, and you just don’t want to go to counseling, maybe The Us Factor is for you. Like Total Transformation, it doesn’t cost anything to try it out for a month, so it might be worth your while!

Filed under Books and Resources, Parenting Tips, Wise Counsel

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