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What happens when past wounds collide in marriage? Steve and Lisa Call, co-authors with Dan Allender of The Deep-Rooted Marriage, founders of Reconnect Institute, and married for over 35 years, reveal how childhood stories unconsciously shape our most intimate relationships. Through vulnerable personal examples, Steve shares how his response of "I'm fine" masks deeper feelings of abandonment stemming from an emotionally unavailable mother. Lisa explains how these patterns remained invisible until they began exploring their stories together, creating a profound transformation in their marriage after decades together.

Ready to transform your relationship by understanding the stories you both bring to marriage? This conversation will help you recognize patterns, build emotional safety, and cultivate the curiosity needed for genuine connection.

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What happens when one partner has a career that demands everything? Whether it's an 80-hour workweek, constant travel, or shift work that throws off your entire family rhythm, demanding careers create unique challenges for relationships.

Brad and Kate tackle this reality head-on, acknowledging the struggles couples face when balancing intense professional demands with maintaining connection. Through their personal experiences and professional coaching work, they offer a refreshing perspective: your marriage doesn't need to look like anyone else's. The standard models simply don't apply when your circumstances aren't standard.

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Brad and Kate explore how married couples can drift into feeling like roommates or business partners when they neglect emotional connection and intimacy. They discuss how busyness, misinterpreting intentions, and focusing solely on logistics create distance in relationships. Then offer some practical tools, including their own book of questions, as a path back toward intimacy.

You can find the Questions for Couples book on Amazon or at aldrichministries.com/resources.

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Brad and Kate explore how couples can maintain connection during inevitable busy seasons when marriage can't be the top priority. They share personal examples from their May celebrations of their children's graduations and how they've learned to navigate similar challenging periods.

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Brad and Kate Aldrich explore how seemingly healthy self-care activities might actually be "imitation self-care" that creates distance rather than true rejuvenation in marriage relationships.

• Imitation self-care activities mimic real self-care but leave us feeling worse afterward
• Binge-watching shows and mindless scrolling often become ways to avoid connection
• The content we're drawn to often reveals something about our emotional needs
• Workaholism serves as false self-care when it provides validation missing at home
• Marriage strain often peaks when couples have infants around 6-7 months old
• Other common substitutes include shopping, excessive cleaning, and using spirituality to avoid problems
• Healthy curiosity about our coping mechanisms helps us understand our deeper needs

When the temptation to engage in these activities arises, invite it onto the porch and ask why it's here right now. Rather than trying to ignore or indulge it, use it as information about what you truly need.

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What happens when the very strategies we develop to care for ourselves actually pull us away from our partners? In this eye-opening exploration of "imitation self-care," we dive into the complex ways our coping mechanisms can disguise themselves as healthy practices while undermining our relationships. Imitation self-care is challenging to identify because it often contains elements of genuine care. Exercise, comfort foods, and even music can be legitimately nourishing or secretly destructive depending on the emotional motivation behind them.

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We examine the complexities of troubled marriages, challenging the idea that couples should "stick it out no matter what" while offering guidance on when to fight for your relationship and when boundaries might be necessary.

• Understanding the difference between pursuing happiness versus finding fulfillment and contentment in marriage
• Why staying together "just for the kids" often creates more trauma than healing
• How to approach your spouse about relationship struggles without blame or shame
• Setting healthy boundaries when your partner refuses to work on the relationship
• Recognizing when safety concerns might necessitate separation
• Moving beyond the "did I marry the wrong person?" question to deeper relationship insights
• Finding the courage to work through brokenness together for stronger connection

We'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic or any of our episodes. Contact us with your questions or topic suggestions at help@stillbecomingone.com or text us through the number in our show notes.

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Special guest Adam Young joins us to discuss his new book, Make Sense of Your Story.

What if the relationship patterns you can't seem to break are rooted in stories you've never fully understood? Adam Young, therapist and host of The Place We Find Ourselves podcast, joins us to explore how our earliest experiences continue to shape our most intimate relationships—and what we can do about it.

Whether you're struggling in your marriage, trying to parent differently than you were parented, or simply curious about why you relate to others the way you do, this conversation offers a compassionate roadmap for making sense of your story. As Adam reminds us, "Your stories need to be written and they need to be told." Are you ready to discover what's truly at the core of yours?

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