Marriage Development

The simple truth is that PTSD can be extremely debilitating - not just for the person who has experienced trauma firsthand, but for their partners, as well. And while there are many books written for those suffering from PTSD, there are few written for the people who love them. In Loving Someone with PTSD, renowned trauma expert Aphrodite Matsakis presents concrete skills and strategies for the partners of those with PTSD.

What makes love last? Why does one couple stay together forever, while another falls apart? And most importantly, is there a scientific formula for love? Drs. John Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman are the world’s leading relationship scientists. For the past forty years, they have been studying love. They’ve gathered data on over three thousand couples, looking at everything from their body language to the way they converse to their stress hormone levels. Their goal: to identify the building blocks of love.

Licensed counselor and relationship expert, Debra Fileta, walks you through eight significant choices involved in taking marriage from hard to great. Throughout each chapter, Debra shares astonishing survey results from thousands of singles and married couples, revealing intimate details about things like love, sex, conflict, communication, and attraction. From her experience as a professional counselor and wife, Debra believes that a beautiful exchange occurs when spouses learn what it means to choose we before me.

Discovering that a partner has been unfaithful hits you like an earthquake. Long after the first jolt, emotional aftershocks can make it difficult to be there for your family, manage your daily life, and think clearly about your options. Whether you want to end the relationship or piece things back together, Getting Past the Affair guides you through the initial trauma so you can understand what happened and why before deciding how to move forward.

This extraordinary book presents scenarios of one family's therapy experience and explains what underlies each encounter. You will discover the general patterns that are common to all families - stress, polarization and escalation, scapegoating, triangulation, blaming, and the diffusion of identity - and you will gain a vivid understanding of the intriguing field of family therapy.

Over time, the business of life creeps in and even the most deeply committed couples can feel like they're living parallel lives rather than enjoying life together. Their once happily-ever-after can quickly turn into an endless grind of work, chores, errands, and carpool. And the pull of social media becomes more compelling than engaging with one's spouse. In this book, Dr. Greg and Erin Smalley offer practical ways to rekindle the passionate, intimate, heart-to-heart spark of connection between husbands and wives.

What if making one tweak to your day-to-day conversations could immediately improve every relationship in your life? In this three-hour, conversational listen, you'll discover the whats, whys, and hows of one of the most valuable (yet surprisingly little-known) communication skills - validation.

In the perennial favorite Boundaries, Anne Katherine introduced the concept and importance of personal limits. In Where to Draw the Line, she takes the next step with a practical guide to establishing and maintaining healthy boundaries in a wide range of situations. With every encounter, we either demonstrate that we'll protect what we value, or that we'll give ourselves away. Healthy boundaries preserve our integrity. Unlike defenses, which isolate us from our true selves and from those we love, boundaries filter out harm.

Today’s challenges can make a fulfilling marriage seem like an impossible dream. Yet God delights in doing the impossible if only we would ask! Stormie Omartian shares how God can strengthen your marriage as you pray for your husband concerning key areas in his life. You will be encouraged by Stormie’s own experiences, along with the Bible verses and sample prayers included in each chapter. Join the millions of women who have been blessed by this life-changing look at the power of a wife’s prayers.

In prospective, long-term research with over 700 couples, Gottman has discovered certain factors that distinguish happy, stable couples from both unstable, ultimately divorcing couples and stable but unhappy couples. These findings, which are explained here in understandable, nontechnical language, form the basis of his Sound Marital House theory of marriage, which guides the new therapy. This therapy has two goals: changing the marital friendship and teaching couples to regulate conflict.

Talk to Me like I'm Someone You Love is a brilliant interactive relationship tool that can help couples stop arguing and begin healing. This revised edition features two new sections - one on making love and another on deepening trust - containing more than 25 new "flash cards for real life", statements that hold the power to express what we wish we could say to the person we love but for which we can't find either the right words or the right tone in which to say them.

In For Married Women Only, pastor and author Tony Evans explores these three principles in a straight-forward yet encouraging manner. He unpacks the touchy topic of submission and lays out the rewards inherent in this biblical model. On seduction, Evans looks at the quality of attractiveness and how embodying it can be pleasing to your spouse and to God. And with surrender, readers will examine why a wife is the perfect helpmate for her husband and how to combat attitudes opposed to God's design.

You can't put it into words, but something is happening to you. Your stomach churns, your heart aches, and the tension in your marriage is making you feel weary and a little crazy. The constant criticism, disrespect, cruelty, deceit, and gross indifference are eroding your confidence and breaking your spirit. For any woman caught in an emotionally destructive marriage, Leslie Vernick offers a personalized path forward.

After infidelity, relationships can become strained as both partners lose trust and faith in each other. Author Tammy Nelson helps couples regain trust, romance, and intimacy after infidelity by redefining the monogamy contract. The new monogamy contract is an explicit relationship agreement created after the affair that allows each partner to safely share their desires, expectations, and limitations. After an affair, it's impossible to go back to the way the relationship was before, but this book offers the chance for a new beginning.

Women want to be in love, get married, and live happily ever after. Yet disrespect for men and disregard for the value, feelings, and needs of husbands has fast become the standard for male-female relations in America. Those two attitudes clash in unfortunate ways to create struggle and strife in what could be a beautiful relationship.

Single parents who are dating or want to begin a dating relationship wonder: How will dating affect my children and my parenting? They probably have figured out that "dating in a crowd" is complicated. Now they're looking for help. Ron Deal, who has counseled single parents and remarried couples for many years, helps single parents - as well as those who date them - navigate the potential pitfalls involved. He gives perspective on when a relationship may be harmful to the children as well as how it can be a blessing to all.

Can you have a strong personality and still be a godly wife? Yes! Do you ever get the idea that being a godly wife means you need to be a mousy doormat? Be as unnoticeable as a doorknob? Or have a personality transplant? Fierce Women: The Power of a Soft Warrior smashes that idea. No matter whether you're an extrovert or more introverted, Kimberly Wagner believes women are created to be a compelling force.

Based on the most detailed survey of long married people ever conducted, 30 Lessons for Loving shows the way to lifelong, fulfilling relationships. The author, an internationally renowned gerontologist at Cornell University, offers sage advice from the oldest and wisest Americans on everything from finding a partner, to deciding to commit, to growing old together.

Marriage is all about sharing: sharing space, sharing joys and sorrows, sharing hopes and dreams. Yet we often hold back a part of ourselves because we fear that being wholly transparent - about our past, our desires, our failures, our faults - will bring judgment, rejection, or even just unwanted friction to our relationship. We are afraid to be fully known. As a result, we never experience being fully loved. In this paradigm-shifting book, Ryan and Selena Frederick show you how to develop a see-through marriage, one that is marked by full transparency and confident vulnerability.

Since the very beginning, God's design for marriage is for husbands and wives to be ambassadors of holy love to a hurting world. Still, so many couples stop short at happy and wonder why they feel unsatisfied. Rather than "you and me against the world", God calls each couple to the rich and meaningful mission of "you and me for the world".