Marriage Therapy Radio

Zach has watched the People Make Games documentary about Jerry's Map twice, and cried both times. So when Jerry Gretzinger and his wife Meg Staley join him, almost 45 years into their marriage, he sets the map aside and asks about the two of them. They met in SoHo in 1979 when Jerry hired Meg to handle press and sales for a designers' co-op. She was 29 and newly sober. He was nine years older, divorced, and a father of two. They became friends, then business partners, and eventually built Staley/Gretzinger, a one-of-a-kind clothing line sold in Nordstrom, Bloomingdale's, and Bergdorf Goodman.Two designers in one small company meant they had to make rules early: whoever led a product line got the final say, and the other could only offer a critique. Meg calls marriage a system of agreements, most of them unspoken, that only get looked at when they stop working. Jerry is honest about how hard it was to hand Meg the lead design role in a company that started as his, and how a small product line of his own, maybe 15% of the business, eased the resentment. They talk about bedtime fights, a hard stretch with a teenage son that sent them into couples therapy, and how the 12-step programs they both work gave them a shared language. Jerry still remembers the first question of his fourth-step inventory: what was your mother's relationship with her family?The last third gets tender. Jerry describes sobbing over the documentary's comments every time a viewer mentioned the couple's affection. Meg explains why his "do something and see what happens" process drives her crazy in the garden, and why the move from their Hudson Valley community to the family farm in Michigan, a sacrifice for her, started the sweetest 10 or 15 years of their marriage. If you want to hear what long love looks like when two people have already done the hard work, press play.Key TakeawaysMarriage runs on a system of agreements. Most of them are intuitive, and you only examine them when they collide.When two strong people share one space, decide in advance who gets the final say on what. Then let the other person critique without taking over.Resentment often comes from feeling you have no control or agency. Carving out even a small area that is fully yours can ease it.Kids change how you use your time. What used to be "my time" now takes an agreement with your partner.Couples therapy can work by giving you practice talking to each other, so the communication carries on after the sessions end.Understanding your parents often means understanding how they were parented. The question "what was your mother's relationship with her family?" can open a lot.Small acts of care, like asking whether your partner is drinking enough water, are how couples protect each other day to day.A marriage lasts when the relationship matters more than either person alone, and both are willing to give up something to keep it.Guest InfoMeg Staley Colorist, printmaker, and clothing designer. Meg grew up in Bellevue, Washington, graduated from Smith College as a printmaker, and worked at Nordstrom before moving to New York to represent small designers, one of whom was Jerry. Together they ran Staley/Gretzinger for about 25 years, with coverage in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Elle, before selling the company. She now works as Meg Staley Handmade, making one-of-a-kind women's clothing, home goods, and commissioned legacy quilts from a family's own clothes, out of a studio in Cedar, Michigan, where she also hosts a women's AA meeting. She doesn't sell online. Website: megstaley.com Jerry Gretzinger Artist and clothing designer, born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1942. Jerry studied architecture and liberal arts, served in the Peace Corps in Tunisia, and moved to New York in 1973, where he started a handbag company before co-founding Staley/Gretzinger with Meg. He is best known for Jerry's Map, an imaginary world he started as a doodle at a summer job in 1963. It has grown to more than 4,000 eight-by-ten-inch panels that keep changing according to a custom deck of cards. Website: jerrysmap.com Instagram: @jerrysmap_1963 YouTube: @jerrygretzinger9861 Facebook: jerrysmap1963The documentery film is found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is8N7B9b0GQMeg and Jerry have been married almost 45 years and live on their farm in Maple City, Michigan. They have four children: two sons together, plus Jerry's daughter and son from his first marriage.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Zach flips the usual format and welcomes two fellow podcasters: Iona Monk and Pam Stewart, the therapists behind Relationship Dish. They're podcast partners, not romantic partners, and they're quick to add that they'd be a terrible match anyway (Iona pursues, Pam withdraws). Iona started the show to take the shame out of couples therapy. Couples tend to show up six or seven years too late, like walking into a dentist after years away and asking them to save the tooth. If two therapists can talk openly about their own marriages, maybe everyone else will get help sooner. Pam brings a different lens from years of family therapy, where parents often believe everything would be fine if the kid would just change.That idea turns into the backbone of the conversation: systems resist change. Iona calls it homeostasis, the pull back to whatever the body and brain already know. Pam calls it the "misery stabilizer," and points out how much energy it takes to keep things stuck. Zach pushes back on the idea that people hate change. They change their clothes every day. What they hate is loss, and they don't move until the cost of staying the same outweighs the cost of changing. From there, the three of them run with a Home Depot metaphor. Couples come in asking for tools, but a good helper asks what you're building first, and you don't hand a power saw to a kid. Iona shares a story about a couple who wanted "tools" mostly so one could hit the other over the head with them.The episode closes with Iona's new book, Happy for the Long Haul, which looks at marital conflict through five lenses, including relational trauma and what she calls the biological need for speed: the way growing up in chaos can leave your body craving the adrenaline of conflict. Zach connects it to what he calls relational recovery, the idea that all of us are hooked on the protective systems we learned as kids. It's a smart, funny, and practical conversation about why couples stay stuck and what it takes to finally move.Key TakeawaysPeople don't resist change. They resist loss. Name what the change will cost you, and it gets easier to face.You won't change until staying the same costs more than changing. Part of good therapy is helping you see that cost clearly.Staying miserable takes more energy than it looks like. Couples often realize this only after they've changed.Sometimes a couple avoids doing the work because failing would be scarier than staying stuck. Not trying protects the fantasy that things could be better "someday."Tools don't help until you know what you're building. Figure out whether you need fresh paint, a remodel, or a new foundation.A relationship tool can become a weapon. If you're using what you learned in therapy to prove your partner wrong, you're missing the point.The problem is rarely one person. It's the cycle you've built together, and that cycle is your common enemy.The survival strategies that protected you as a kid can sink you as an adult. You can survive or you can thrive, but you can't do both.Guest InfoIona Monk is a registered clinical counsellor in the greater Vancouver area with a graduate degree from the University of British Columbia. She works with couples and individuals, mainly through the lens of attachment and defense systems, with emotionally focused therapy as a core approach. She has 25 years of experience as a couples therapist. Iona co-hosts Relationship Dish and is the author of Happy for the Long Haul, a practical guide to building a marriage that goes the distance, drawn from her client work and her own 30-year relationship. The book came out September 22 and is available on Amazon.Pam Stewart is a registered clinical counsellor with master's degrees from the University of British Columbia and the University of Colorado. Her clinical focus is parents and children, helping families build healthy attachment relationships, often alongside child therapists and psychiatry as part of a coordinated care team. She says she's retired, but she still does some family therapy and has a side business in interior design. Pam and Iona met in grad school and co-host Relationship Dish together.Relationship Dish is a podcast where two therapists talk honestly about their own romantic relationships. New episodes come out every two weeks on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast apps.Iona's practice and show page: ionamonkcouplestherapy.com/relationshipdishBook: Happy for the Long Haul (Amazon)Show socials: Instagram @relationshipdishCrossover note: Zach also appeared on Relationship Dish to talk about the movie The Invite.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 TakeawaysLearning 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 InfoDr. Don Cole Clinical director of the Gottman InstituteDr. Carrie Cole Research director of the Gottman InstituteThey'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/B00O0vBDwSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.