The fastest way to a better marriage is to change what you CAN control, not what you can’t. If you have ever tried to change another human, you’ll probably find changing them is harder than you think. You see, people only change when they decide to, so helping them change means learning how to trigger them positively, not negatively. So the smart people are starting to see that to create a better marriage, they have to be better. They see that to make a better marriage, they must change themselves first to achieve a positive trigger in their partner. There has been a dramatic shift with my cli ..read more

Are you waking up firmly connected with a sinking feeling that your marriage is in real danger? If so, I’m sure you are aware that you’re not alone.  Each year, countless individuals find themselves lying awake, staring at the ceiling in the dead of night, wrestling with the realisation that while on paper, their life together should be great, their marriage is unravelling, and they feel powerless to stop it.  Before you let panic set in or resign yourself to defeat, remember crises, even in marriages, are not just challenges—they’re opportunities.  I say this because most of th ..read more

The majority of couples in crisis are trying to solve the wrong problem in their marriage, and it’s leading them into an unnecessary divorce. In today’s post, you will find three common examples. I have found that clients are time-poor and need to know quickly if they have been trying to fix the wrong problem or if they are genuinely incompatible. So, I moved the practice into a diagnose and prescribe model for their dynamic enabling accuracy and speed. Without a correct diagnosis, how do you know what action to take to be strategically efficient for the client? For two decades, I’ve listened ..read more

When a person’s ego is engaged, relationship problems are never far away. A dominant ego can kill a couple’s connection in several ways and won’t make either person happy. I’ve listed a few below to help those who suffer understand the truth of this unhelpful energy. So, maybe you have an ego that’s out of control, or you are living with one. Either way, the post below will uncover how this affects any marriage. Lack of Compromise People with large egos tend to struggle with seeing any perspective other than their own. This makes conflicts and joint decision-making almost impossible. People wi ..read more

What do you do when a couple has normalised their distorted dynamic and sits blaming each other for their problems? What do you do when each person has a distorted relationship with themselves and normalises those behaviours? You see, how do we know what a normal and healthy relationship is like if we’ve never seen or experienced it? This is where the problems start. To be fair most people have grown up in varying degrees of dysfunction, and this has become understandably their normal. So, they filter their perception of life and relationships moment-to-moment through these unhelpful pasts. Th ..read more

So what do you do when the trust is broken so badly that their relationship ends with them selling their family home and moving into separate homes? Most people would consider this the end, but this gentleman decided something different. He wrote to me to see if I could help. I wanted to encourage his desire to fight for his family. I’ll always honour anyone who has the courage to step up. But I didn’t want to give him false hope. So I told him the chances of success were very low, but I was happy to help him as long as he agreed to do this my way. I wanted him to learn how to become a better ..read more

So, one group of people I consistently deal with is professionally successful men who are unaware of how their natural way of being, which created their business success, is negatively affecting their marriage. They are married but primarily live in their all-consuming businesses. They are laser-focused on where they are going and the life all their efforts will bring. When I question these men about what all this effort is for, a significant number of men tell me he is doing this for his wife and the family’s future. So, he has great intentions, but these men keep missing a critical fact: The ..read more

The challenge we all face is that, on some level, we all have some unhelpful emotional patterns that we learned growing up. It’s nothing to be ashamed of because, growing up, we all learn to create different coping strategies for the challenges life throws at us and to be fair, there are a lot of challenges. The problem is many of our emotional patterns are not helpful today because they were created in our childhood for our childhood situations. Some of us had to cope with extremely tough situations, and some of us learnt how to respond to life’s problems by mirroring how our parents coped. S ..read more

Why did my partner have an affair? Why does my partner want to leave me? Why has our love died? Sometimes, the reason someone would break their promise in a relationship can seem impossible to understand why. This post provides a few examples of the cost of a shallow connection. Weak emotional foundations can create shocking behaviours, ranging from happy people having affairs to 70-year-olds looking for a divorce. So many people come to me seeking answers to lift them out of their despair. One of the most confusing problems is when a person seems to be happy yet decides to break the trust. I ..read more

Can a couple really recover from an affair? The answer is “…it depends!” Affairs and the fallout from affairs make up a significant part of my work with couples in crisis. Dealing with couples in marital crisis needs a very different approach to traditional couple’s work because motivation reinvestment combined with fear and limiting beliefs can significantly hamper progress. The reason so many couples fail to recover from their affair is they see the affair as the primary problem. If they see the affair as the problem, they will try to do anything to protect themselves from the affair and the ..read more