Marriage Therapy Radio

Zach sits down with Don and Carrie Cole, the Gottman Institute's clinical director and research director, and asks the question the show always comes back to: forget the credentials, what actually makes your own marriage work? Both Coles came into this relationship out of first marriages that failed. Don spent years stuffing his feelings to avoid upsetting his first wife, and it cost him the marriage. Carrie survived a relationship that was psychologically and physically abusive, what she still calls "manhandling" rather than assign it the harsher name it deserves. Thirty years later, with an anniversary trip already booked, they're still negotiating a blended family, a chronic disagreement about punctuality, and an unmade bed, while trying to actually practice what they've spent their careers teaching.
The conversation moves fast between the personal and the professional, because for the Coles those two things are the same material. Don walks through the three words he tells every couple in therapy, "that makes sense," and what it costs him to mean them when his wife brings him a plan he didn't ask for. Carrie explains the physiological version of the same idea, how her heart rate visibly drops when Don validates her, and how the worst sign in a relationship isn't two partners fighting, it's one partner's pain landing on a partner who feels nothing at all. They trace their own origin story back to a staff meeting in the mid-90s, before they were a couple, when Don asked Carrie if she'd ever heard of John Gottman and she said she owned everything he'd ever written. From there the two of them talk candidly about where the Gottman Method runs out of answers, the couples where one partner is in and one is out, the ones who've gone flat instead of fighting, and where they'd push back on John Gottman himself if the science let them.
The back half of the episode turns to The New Marriage Clinic Casebook, a new collection Don and Carrie edited for the Gottman Institute, seventeen chapters from seventeen different clinicians, including one contributed by Zach himself. The throughline of the book is that almost nobody walks into couples therapy with just a relationship problem. Depression, addiction, trauma, eating disorders, and affairs all tend to show up in the room too, and Don and Carrie talk through which chapters from their contributors surprised them and why. Zach's read on the whole conversation, echoed straight back to him, is the throughline of just about every good relationship the show has ever featured: take care of your own side of the street first. For anyone who assumes the experts have it figured out and the rest of us are just behind, this is a look at two people who wrote the research and still have to work at it.

Key Takeaways
Learning to speak up about your needs, instead of stuffing them to keep the peace, is what prevented Don's second marriage from repeating his first one's slow build of resentment.
Surviving an abusive first marriage taught Carrie two rules for her second: never allow herself to be mistreated again, and never let anyone tell her no. That's what she credits for her lasting gratitude toward Don.
Once you control for blended families and stepchildren, the divorce rate for second marriages isn't actually higher than for first marriages, it just looks that way in the aggregate.
"That makes sense" is Don's shorthand for accepting influence. You don't have to agree with your partner's plan to validate that their reasoning makes sense, and doing it consistently changes the emotional temperature of a marriage.
Repair after snapping at your partner isn't about placating them. It's about recognizing you crossed a line with someone you love and making it right, which is a different motivation entirely.
In relationship research, mutual negativity between partners is actually a better sign than indifference. A partner whose mood isn't affected at all by their spouse's distress is a worse predictor than a couple who fights.
Real validation has three steps: naming the feeling, having your partner accurately reflect it back, and confirming out loud that they got it. That third step, confirmed understanding, is what actually lands.
The hardest couples to treat aren't the loud ones. They're the ambivalent couples where one partner is in and one is out, and the "disaffected" couples who've stopped fighting because they've stopped caring.
Guest Info
Dr. Don Cole Clinical director of the Gottman Institute
Dr. Carrie Cole Research director of the Gottman Institute
They've been married almost 30 years, a second marriage for both, and blended a family that included Carrie's two children from her first marriage and Don's son. They're on the episode to talk about their own relationship and to introduce The New Marriage Clinic Casebook, a seventeen-chapter book they edited for the Gottman Institute featuring contributions from clinicians across the field, including a chapter written by Zach himself, on couples therapy when depression, addiction, trauma, neurodiversity, eating disorders, or affairs are also in the room. The book releases at the end of September and is in presales now, with an audiobook edition to follow.
Presale link: https://link.amazon/B00O0vBDw
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Zach sits down with Adam and Judith Nisenson, a husband and wife who both work in the betrayal space from opposite sides. Adam is known online as the betrayal shrink and works almost exclusively with men who have been cheated on. Judith works with women who have cheated, and hosts her own podcast, Women Cheat Too. They're four years into their second marriage together, and Zach opens by asking who they are as a couple before getting into the work.
The conversation moves through their own story first: seven years of friendship before their first date, and Adam telling Judith he was all in before their first weekend together was even over. From there they get into the parts of betrayal that rarely get said out loud. Judith argues that women almost never cheat for sex itself, that it's usually a transactional stand in for validation and attention they aren't getting at home. Adam pushes back on the double standard that lets men off the hook for cheating while women who cheat get treated like the lowest part of the earth. They also talk candidly about their own healing: Judith describes losing her voice in her first marriage and slowly rebuilding it through yoga training and years in Landmark Worldwide, and Adam traces his own change back to the Mankind Project and the fear he carried into his first marriage of ever speaking his truth.
Where the episode really lands is Adam's phrase for it: the gift of betrayal. He tells the men in his groups that if they aren't willing to look at their own part, not the affair itself, but the avoidance or unconsciousness that made room for it, there's no gift in going through it at all. Judith and Adam agree on something bigger too: betrayal is betrayal, whether it's an affair or a partner who quietly checked out of the marriage years before they said so, and nobody gets to rank whose pain counts more.
For a couple listening who suspects they're further along in this than they want to admit, or for anyone bracing to hear that their own version of betrayal doesn't count because no one physically cheated, this episode makes the case that the work is the same either way: find your voice, stop pretending, and do the far harder job of understanding what happened instead of just surviving it.

Key Takeaways
Women rarely cheat for the sex itself, it's usually a stand in for validation, attention, and feeling seen
Society punishes women who cheat far more harshly than it punishes men who cheat
An emotional affair can do as much damage as a physical one, sometimes more
Losing your own voice in a relationship is its own quiet form of betrayal
Healing starts with the individual work, not the couples work
Reframing an affair as "the gift of betrayal" only works if you're willing to look at your own part
Betrayal isn't only an affair. A partner who checked out long before they said so counts too, and the impact isn't a competition
Small, consistent rituals, like a monthly love letter, keep a relationship honest over the long run
Guest Info
Adam Nisenson, LMFT, CSAT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist and certified sex addiction therapist known online as The Betrayal Shrink. His own betrayal journey started 13 years ago, and out of it he created the Masculine Betrayal Trauma (MBT) framework for how men uniquely experience and process partner betrayal. He wrote A Man's Guide to Partner Betrayal: Overcoming the Pain and Repercussions of a Cheating Partner, hosts the podcast Men Get Cheated On Too!, and runs private coaching, men's betrayal groups, and Brotherhood in Betrayal retreats.
Website: betrayalshrink.com
Instagram: @betrayalshrink
Judith Flores-Nisenson is the founder of WomensWRK, an ICF Associate Certified Coach (ACC) and APSATS Certified Partner Coach (CPC) who works with women on every side of betrayal, including women who've betrayed a partner. She hosts the podcast Women Cheat Too!, now more than 50 episodes in, and runs coaching groups including an 8-week Women Cheat TOO track. Also known professionally as Judith Nisenson.
Website: womenswrk.com
Instagram: @womens.wrk
Adam and Judith are married, and often present complementary sides of betrayal work, Adam with men who've been cheated on, Judith with women who've done the cheating.
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Zach sits down with Neal and Rachel Miskell, a couple who got married in 2008, divorced, and remarried years later, and asks the question most people never get to ask a couple who made it back: what actually happened in between? Rachel is a mom of three and a marketing director for the 11th Force Support Squadron on an Air Force base. Neal had just come home from Afghanistan when their marriage started to unravel, carrying PTSD, contempt, and a habit of projecting his pain onto Rachel. The conversation is less about what broke them than about the specific, unglamorous work that put them back together.
Neal traces his turning point to therapy, and to one question from his therapist that he still remembers word for word: have you ever listened to yourself talk? That's the moment he learned what congruency meant, that his thoughts, words, and actions weren't lining up, and started doing the harder work of owning his part, including a small, petty story about refusing to buy Rachel a birthday gift that he still isn't proud of. Rachel tells her side plainly: she wasn't interested in fixing anything at first. She wanted to tolerate what was happening, not repair it, and she refused to go to therapy until she'd decided for herself whether the marriage could actually be different. The shift for her didn't come from Neal's effort alone. It came the day their divorce was finalized, watching how hurt he was, and realizing she'd made a mistake.
What makes the episode land is how unsentimental both of them are about the process. Neal describes the two and a half years he spent doing his own work while Rachel wasn't ready to meet him there, and the moment he finally had to be at peace with the possibility that she never would be. Rachel names her own condition plainly: therapy, together, or nothing. They talk about the R3 framework Neal built out of that period, regulated, respectful, repairable, and Reframe, the communication tool he created to help couples catch toxic patterns before they cause damage. Zach's read on the whole thing is the throughline that ties it together: people don't change until something forces them to, and the real skill isn't avoiding the blowup, it's learning how to repair after one. For anyone wondering whether a broken marriage can actually be rebuilt, or bracing for the possibility that it can't, this is a rare look at two people who did it twice.

Key Takeaways
Repair matters more than perfection. Neal and Rachel are explicit that their second marriage isn't conflict-free, it's just better at recovering from conflict.
Change that only happens under threat of losing the relationship isn't the finish line. The real work is learning to keep changing once the threat is gone.
"The pattern is the problem, not the person" reframes blame into something both partners can actually work on together.
Refusing therapy isn't always avoidance. For Rachel, it was about deciding for herself whether the marriage could change before she'd risk being hurt again.
Congruency, when your thoughts, words, and actions actually line up, is a specific, checkable thing, not a vague self-improvement goal.
Small resentments compound. Neal's story about withholding a birthday gift shows how petty moments build into the bigger pattern that ends a marriage.
Watching a partner sustain change over years, not weeks, is often what makes reconciliation possible.
A shared condition, like committing to therapy together, can be the line that turns "maybe" into "yes."

Guest Info
Neal Miskell is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and the founder of WEreFrame LLC, creator of Reframe, a communication tool built on the R3 framework (regulated, respectful, repairable) that helps people catch toxic communication patterns before they cause damage. He and Rachel married in 2008, divorced, and remarried after several years of individual and couples therapy. He's on the episode to walk through what his own accountability work looked like from the inside, and to talk about the tool he built out of that process.
Rachel Miskell is a mom of three and a marketing director for the 11th Force Support Squadron, supporting programs for single airmen and families on an Air Force base. She's Neal's wife, and she's on the episode as a voice in her own right: the partner who refused therapy until she was ready, who needed real evidence of change before she'd risk trusting it again, and who ultimately chose to rebuild the marriage on her own terms.
Website: wereframe.com
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Zach steps out of the host chair for this one. In a swap with Heather Shannon of Sex for Couples, Zach is the guest, and the conversation goes straight at a question most couples never ask out loud: what is sex actually for, and does that answer change over the life of a marriage? Zach, who's been married almost thirty years, and Heather dig into why frequency becomes the default target when quality and clarity would serve couples better.
The conversation moves through the different eras a long marriage passes through, the anthropological reasons couples tend to hit a reset every few years, and the idea that any long marriage is really four or five different marriages stitched together. Zach shares specific, practical scenes from his own relationship, including a three hour float down a river with his wife where they talked about sex without ever touching, and describes a couple in his practice who solved their standoff by simply negotiating who gets what on which night. Heather brings in patterns she sees in her own client work, particularly the tendency to take sexual disconnection personally and the exhausting decision fatigue around initiating. Together they name two questions Zach uses to open nearly every session on this topic: what's it for, and what counts.
The takeaway isn't a technique. It's a shift in framing, from sex as an obligation or a performance with a pass or fail outcome, to sex as something couples can actually get better at on purpose, the same way they'd get better at any skill they cared about. For anyone who's felt the pressure of "we should be having more sex" without ever stopping to ask what sex is supposed to accomplish, this conversation gives language for that gap, and permission to define it differently.

Key Takeaways
Frequency is the wrong target. The better question is whether the sex you're having is actually good, and whether you're willing to get better at it on purpose.
Sex is a skill, not a talent you either have or don't. It can be learned, practiced, and improved the same way any hobby can.
Ask "what counts?" Narrow definitions of sex (intercourse only, simultaneous orgasm only) create a lot of ways to fail and very few ways to succeed.
Intimacy is broader than sex. Physical closeness that isn't sexual, and sexual conversation that isn't physical, both count and both matter.
Spontaneity is a myth for anything you actually care about. Couples plan meals, workouts, and sleep. Sex deserves the same intentionality.
When you don't want sex, get specific about what you don't want. It's rarely your partner. It's more often boredom, exhaustion, or feeling obligated.
A long marriage isn't one marriage. It's several different eras, and checking in roughly every three years, with a therapist or a trusted person, helps couples pivot into the next one.
The most durable relationship habit isn't avoiding conflict, it's getting good at repair, and doing more of what your partner likes while doing less of what they don't.
Guest Info
This episode centers on a conversation between Zach and Heather Shannon, LCPC, CST (she/her), an AASECT Certified Sex Therapist and host of the podcast Sex for Couples. Heather refers to working directly with clients around sex and communication in relationships throughout the conversation.
Listen to Sex For Couples: podfollow.com/askasextherapist
Website: HeatherShannon.co
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Zach sits down with baseball legend Darryl Strawberry and his wife Tracy for a conversation that has almost nothing to do with baseball. Both are on their third marriage. Both are in long term recovery, Darryl more than two decades sober, Tracy twenty five years clean. And both point to the same turning point in their story: faith. Zach wants to know what actually sits underneath a phrase couples say so easily, Christ is at the center of our marriage, especially since, as he points out, scripture itself says very little about marriage directly.
What follows is unusually candid. Darryl and Tracy talk about the difference between humility and humiliation, and why fighting dirty means trying to shame your partner instead of solving the problem with them. Tracy describes watching Darryl in active addiction and reaching the point where loving him didn't mean rescuing him anymore, a moment she names plainly: he was too painful to love, not unworthy of it. Darryl traces his own turning point back further than the drugs, to the rejection of his father and the bitterness he carried underneath the addiction itself. And Tracy explains how she knew his recovery was real, not because he said the right things, but because his actions stayed consistent over time. They also get into raising nine kids across a blended family, the moment Tracy told Darryl to take his baseball uniform off and figure out who he was as a man, and what it actually looks like to stay married to someone you see only a few days a month.
The reason to press play is that this isn't a highlight reel of two people who fixed their lives. It's a working theory of how repair actually happens: naming the wound before you can heal it, choosing consistency over grand gestures, and refusing to let ego, which Darryl defines simply as Easing God Out, decide who wins the argument. Anyone piecing a marriage back together after addiction, infidelity, or just years of distance will find something to hold onto here.

Key Takeaways
Humility and humiliation aren't the same thing. Humility invites you both to the same level to find a solution. Humiliation is fighting dirty, trying to wound your partner instead of working with them.
Trust isn't rebuilt with an apology. It's rebuilt through consistency over time, doing the same right thing again and again until it becomes believable.
Unhealed wounds from your past don't stay in your past. Left alone, they bleed into your marriage and erode it from the inside.
Recovery isn't only about quitting a substance. It's about dealing with whatever is underneath it, for Darryl that meant confronting the bitterness and rejection wound from his father.
Loving someone in active addiction can reach a point where stepping back isn't giving up on them, it's refusing to keep enabling the behavior that's killing them.
Blended families take a village. The Strawberrys say it takes nineteen people, across both sides of two divorces, to make their family work.
You don't have to make love complicated. A home cooked meal, a card, or a phone call can matter more than a big gesture.
Adult children still carry the wounds of a divorce they never chose. Being a great listener matters more than being right.
Guest Info
Darryl Strawberry, former Major League Baseball player who spent much of his career with the New York Mets. author of the book Another Life. In long term recovery from addiction, more than two decades sober at the time of this conversation.
Tracy Strawberry, Darryl's wife, a pastor who works at the Dream Center in St. Louis, a recovery home for men and women. Twenty five years in recovery herself.
Book: Another Life, out now, available wherever books are sold. https://amzn.to/4cqjAAs
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