Marriage Therapy Radio

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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Zach sits down with his cousin Kara and her wife Stacy, two women he has known since before they were officially a couple, for a conversation that starts as a family reunion and turns into something much deeper. Kara and Stacy have been together for 26 years, married twice (once in civil union, once when it finally became legal), and are raising two kids, Rylan, 11, and Avery, 13, in a household they describe as running on accommodations instead of an off switch.
The conversation moves through family history most people don't say out loud, including an unaddressed abuser in Kara's extended family and the trickle-down effect it has had for generations. From there, Kara and Stacy talk candidly about parenting a neurodivergent son, the grief of letting go of the parent they each expected to be, and the strategy, cost, and constant vigilance behind things as simple as a trip to an amusement park. They also get into what makes their marriage work: they don't fight, they disagree and stay in the room, and their professional lives in education and mental health mean they never fully clock out.
What makes this one land is the honesty. Kara names her own theory of generational trauma, "the story you tell yourself," and traces it back to her mother, who buffered her from the worst of it without either of them ever naming it that way. Stacy, in turn, reflects on being raised by people with hot tempers and choosing, quietly and consistently, not to pass that down. By the end, Kara turns the mirror back on Zach and Rebecca's own marriage, and the answer she gives him, that you can't rationalize your way out of anything in a relationship, is as much a takeaway for the listener as it is for Zach.
Key Takeaways
Generational trauma doesn't move in a straight line. It finds new paths even when you think you've closed off the old ones.
"The story you tell yourself" can outlast the actual event, and revisiting your own history later in life can change what you thought you knew about it.
A buffer parent, someone who absorbs hardship so their kids don't have to, can shape a person's resilience without either of them realizing it at the time.
Disagreement doesn't have to mean conflict. Communication skills, not avoidance, are what let a couple skip the fighting altogether.
Parenting a neurodivergent child often means grieving the parent you expected to be, even while embracing who your child actually is.
Accommodations can be a love language: constant, invisible planning (escape routes, VIP tickets, visual aids) that a child may never recognize as an act of love.
You can't feel or rationalize your way out of relationship problems. Longevity comes from staying honest and staying in it, even when one partner is healthier than the other at a given moment.
Space, grace, and time: not every conversation needs to happen immediately, and giving people room to come back to it matters as much as the conversation itself.
Guest Info
Kara and Stacy are Zach's cousin (by marriage on his wife's side). Both work in education and mental health: Kara does professional talks and introductions related to her field, and Stacy is a science inclusion teacher. They live in New Jersey with their two children.
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Zach sits down with Deborah Rozman, Ph.D. and Howard Martin, the married couple who have led HeartMath Institute since its founding in 1991. Zach came in curious after hearing his mentor Terry Real rave about HeartMath at a Relational Life Institute faculty meeting, and he opens the conversation admitting he still does not fully understand what it is or how it works. Howard and Deborah, who are married to each other and have built HeartMath's research and technology together for over three decades, walk him through it from both a science angle and a lived-in-a-marriage angle.
The conversation moves from the physiology, heart rate variability, coherence, the connection between the physical and emotional heart, into a story about a couple named Tammy and Raynor who came to Deborah through the Dr. Phil Show on the edge of divorce and, after learning to get into a coherent state individually before talking to each other, fell back in love within a handful of sessions. Deborah also teaches a version of the Quick Coherence technique live on air. Howard, meanwhile, shares the three things he actually practices in his own marriage: looking at himself first instead of blaming Deborah, staying neutral instead of jumping to judgment, and what he calls compassionate latitude, stretching compassion further than feels automatic.
What makes this one land is that Howard and Deborah are not just explaining a technology, they are describing how they have stayed married and mostly conflict free for 36 years using it. Zach's own admission, that a bad afternoon of tech problems left him dysregulated for four days, gives the science somewhere real to land. Listeners get both the research behind why nervous system regulation changes how couples fight and a technique they can use in the next argument.
Key Takeaways
Your nervous system state, not your communication skills, often determines how a conversation with your partner actually goes
Getting yourself into a calm, coherent state before you try to talk about a conflict changes the outcome more than any script or tool
A couple on the brink of divorce turned things around by learning to self-regulate individually before communicating with each other at all
Compassionate latitude means stretching your compassion further than the point where you normally shut it off, especially with the person closest to you
When something feels off in a relationship, look at your own contribution first before looking at your partner
Neutral is not passive, it is a highly aware state that has not yet rushed to judge something as good or bad
Your heart rhythm is picked up by people near you, even without touching, so the state you walk into a room with matters
Quick Coherence, heart-focused breathing paired with a feeling of genuine gratitude, is simple enough to use in the middle of an argument
Guest Info
Deborah Rozman, Ph.D., is President and co-CEO of HeartMath, a behavioral psychologist who helped found the Institute of HeartMath in 1991 and helped develop the emWave and Inner Balance heart rate variability technologies. She co-authored the Transforming book series with Doc Childre.
Howard Martin is Executive Vice President, Strategic Development at HeartMath, where he has served as a key spokesperson and executive since helping Doc Childre found the organization in 1991. He co-authored The HeartMath Solution with Childre and has spent over thirty years in personal development and business.
Deborah and Howard have been married to each other for 36 years.
Links
Website: heartmath.com

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