Dear Young Married Couple

🎉 BIG ANNOUNCEMENT! Coming to an Amazon near you in February: FUNDAMENTOS Baraja de cartas 🎉
♥
You guys! We can't tell you how excited we are for this project to come to fruition. So many of you have asked about the DYMC card decks being available in Spanish because you have a spouse, friends, or family members who don't know English, but would love this resource. This has been in the works for a long time and it will finally be ready to ship to you (2-Day Prime shipping on Amazon) in February. Listen to Adriel and Magdiel (who also served on the translation team) share their experience with the #DYMCdecks:
♥
“The FUNDAMENTOS deck has been such a blessing to us! Every Friday, we have date night and on our way to the place, we do the DYMC cards (but we usually only get through one card)! We spend all 30 minutes talking about ONE thing. Oftentimes, the one card gets us started talking about different topics that we really needed to talk about.
♥
In our culture, it’s not common for men to be very open. On top of that, even if the husband IS being open, sometimes we don’t even know where to start. It can be so frustrating to have the desire for your suppose to really understand how you’re feeling, but not know the words to start a deep conversation like that.
♥
The cards do a great job of breaking down the wall for men to be sensitive about your feelings. It just takes a little card from this deck that can provide an opportunity for you to express yourself and be vulnerable to your spouse.
♥
Sometimes my husband even wants to dig further and says, ‘Tell me more about this!’ These decks have been such a blessing to our marriage that now we even keep them in our car.” — Adriel Solís and Magdiel De Salas de Solís.
♥
Listen to this episode with our Dominican (+Puerto Rican, +Wisconsian 😅) friends as they share some powerful insights about their experience in a Hispanic culture and observing many other Hispanic cultures.

3 Blended Family Pitfalls that Can Destroy a Marriage:

1. Putting your children before your spouse
2. Reactive instead of proactive communication
3. Thinking you’re alone in the storm

Cynthia shares practical solutions for each of these challenges in this episode. Listen in to become equipped as a blended family.

You can contact Cynthia at:

• www.imaginemeefc.com
• IMCynthia@imaginemeefc.com
• (916) 272-0950

Cynthia recommended these resources:

• Building Love Together in Blended Families: The 5 Love Languages and Becoming Stepfamily Smart by Gary Chapman and Ron Deal
• Black and Married with Kids
• Smart Stepfamilies - Ron Deal
• STEP PARENTING: 50 One-Minute DOs and DONTs for Stepdads and Stepmoms
• Family Life Blended

While these books are written to help children and teens understand their blended family, their messages are great for the entire family. 

• Do You Sing Twinkle? A Story About Remarriage and New Family
• Step One, Step Two, Step Three and Four
• The Things About Leftovers

"But when you turn off your emotions to the people you love, all it does is create distance. Especially us, as men. We tend to turn off all emotion, even when we don’t need to. That used to be me, but it all changed after I found myself on Ground Zero as a firefighter during 9/11.⁠
♥️⁠
The NYC fire department lost 343 firefighters. Being there on that day was like being on another planet. I saw so many people I knew just... vanish. But it was the months afterwards that were incredibly stressful.⁠
♥️⁠
We firefighters don’t get a lot of help with learning to talk about stressful events. We learn to separate our work from our home and that’s about it. The problem was that my wife was stressed out too. She felt like she couldn’t talk to me because she didn’t want to make me feel worse. Then, I couldn’t talk to her because I didn’t want to bring work home. What do you think started happening to my marriage?⁠
♥️⁠
There was no oxygen to give life to my marriage, so the distance crept in. So much of what I teach now is what I learned to do back then. It's called Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT). I never thought I’d be traveling around the world talking about emotions. It’s all about flexibility. If we’re okay getting help to turn it off, we should all be okay getting help to turn it back on.” — George Faller, MS, LMFT

You can reach George Faller at:

• www.georgefaller.com
• www.successandvulnerability.com - for therapists
• New York Center for EFT

George recommended:

• Magnificent Sex by Peggy Kleinplatz
• Sacred Stress by George Faller
• Created for Connection by Sue Johnson

In this episode, Adam and Karissa reflect back on October 8, 2007 - a date that Adam was 10 minutes from death and called Karissa while stuck in the cab of an old truck at the bottom of a 40-ft ravine (while his lung filled up with blood). Listen in to hear the story and lessons learned.