Marriage Therapy Radio

Zach talks with Yowei Shaw and Kyle Pulley, a married couple who make the podcast Proxy together, a show that investigates "emotional mysteries" by connecting people who feel alone in a specific conundrum with a stranger who has lived through something close to it. Yowei spent about seven years creating and hosting the NPR documentary series Invisibilia before she was laid off in 2023. Kyle co-owns a recording studio in Philadelphia and plays a hands on role in Proxy, mixing episodes, managing the spreadsheets, and generally functioning, in his own words, as Yowei's bedraggled podcast spouse. They met on OkCupid, where Yowei used a flimsy pretext (she asked Kyle, an audio engineer, for help recording a narration she had already written an article about how to do herself) to get to know a guy with cute band photos.
Most of the conversation traces how that early flirtation turned into a real, ongoing negotiation. When Yowei's NPR job pulled her to DC, Kyle stayed in Philadelphia with his studio and his music scene, and for years the two of them lived split lives, with Yowei commuting by Amtrak and Kyle rearranging his schedule, his living situation, and his role in the house to make it work. The bigger shift came when Yowei's income outpaced Kyle's and she became, unexpectedly, the breadwinner. She's candid that this new power showed up in their fights as an unfair trump card, and just as candid about how getting laid off in 2023 flipped the dynamic again, sending her into what she calls a complete mess of a stretch that Kyle met with support instead of shame. They talk through what stuck from couples therapy, and the concept from Yowei's individual therapist about not letting one partner absorb all the worry in a relationship, a framework they still use today around money, the future of the show, and the question of having kids.
What makes the conversation land isn't that Yowei and Kyle have solved any of this. It's that they've built small, repeatable structures, a weekly "proxy meeting" to keep the podcast's business from leaking into date nights, permission to have a real blowup about once a quarter and then let it go, honesty about which gender roles still sneak up on them even though they don't believe in them, that let two strong willed, creative people keep choosing each other. It's a warm, funny, unusually honest look at a relationship that runs on ongoing negotiation rather than a moment when everything got figured out.

Key Takeaways
Negotiation isn't a phase a couple moves past. Kyle says what convinced him he wanted to stay was that they always came back to the negotiating table, not that they stopped needing to.
A sudden shift in who earns more money changes the emotional balance of a relationship, not just the financial one, and both partners have to consciously renegotiate power along with the budget.
A recurring check in meeting, even a literal business meeting with a whiteboard, keeps one source of stress (in this case, the podcast) from leaking into every other part of a relationship.
Learning your own rhythm for conflict, how often you blow up and how you repair afterward, matters more than trying to avoid conflict altogether.
When one partner absorbs all the worry or responsibility for the future, there's no room for the other to step in. Deliberately pulling back can invite a partner to show up.
Gender roles a couple has rejected intellectually can still resurface underneath old fights, especially around money and caretaking.
Unconditional support through a layoff or career setback, without shame or pressure to hurry up, can become the turning point that redefines who carries a relationship's weight.
Couples therapy can feel like it's taking sides when it's actually just holding both partners equally accountable, and that discomfort is often the useful part.
Guest Info
Yowei Shaw, creator and host of Proxy, an independent, mostly listener-funded podcast that investigates specific, private emotional conundrums. She calls herself an emotional investigative journalist. Before Proxy she spent years at NPR as a producer, co-host, and editorial lead on Invisibilia, with earlier stints as a temp on Fresh Air and stories for This American Life. Invisibilia was canceled and she was laid off from NPR in 2023, after which she built Proxy independently from Philadelphia.
Website: https://yoweishaw.com
Show: https://proxypodcast.com
Instagram: @yoweishaw (personal), @proxypodcast (show)
Kyle Pulley, Philadelphia music producer, audio engineer, and bassist. Co-founder and co-owner of Headroom Studios (with Joe Reinhart). Production and engineering credits include Dr. Dog, Alex G, Hop Along, Jay Som, Adult Mom, Diet Cig, Shamir, and Kississippi, among others. Also plays bass and co-writes in the band Thin Lips. He's the mixing engineer on Proxy and married to Yowei Shaw; Proxy's about page credits him as Mixing Engineer / Bedraggled Podcast Spouse.
Website: https://kylepulley.net
Studio: https://headroom.studio
Instagram: @kylepulley (personal), @headroomphiladelphia (studio) Threads: @kylepulley
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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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