In this episode of Relationship Radio, Dr. Joe Beam interviews a couple who were able to overcome a limerent affair and build a stronger marriage than ever before.
Sometimes people wonder, “You guys at Marriage Helper tell all these stories, but do we ever get a chance to actually see some of these people? See what they look like? Hear their own stories from their own mouths?” Today, you get that chance right here on Relationship Radio. Hi, I’m Dr. Joe Beam and I have Jordan and Priscilla. We’ve known them for some time now. Welcome to Relationship Radio! Glad you guys are with us.
Jordan & Priscilla:
Thanks, Joe. Thank you for having us.
Dr. Beam:
They’re just such pretty people. I’m looking at your pictures thinking, “why am I not pretty? This is not fair.” As we get started here a couple of questions if I may ask, how did you guys meet each other?
Jordan:
You want to take that one?
Priscilla:
Yes. We actually grew up going to the same church as each other. Our church was a pretty large church so we actually didn’t run in the same circles, but we knew of each other. We started getting to know each other actually, when we started attending college together in Birmingham, AL.
Dr. Beam:
Okay. So, you had some seminar classes or something?
Jordan:
In the common area, we bumped into each other and said, “hey, I know you from church, but for whatever reason I never really talked to you at church.” Then all of a sudden there it was.
Dr. Beam:
How long did you guys date before you got married?
Jordan:
From February until July before I proposed. The following May we got married, so pretty “bang-bang”.
Dr. Beam:
So, six months before you proposed and then how many more months before you married?
Priscilla:
It was less than a year, 10 months later.
Dr. Beam:
Okay. So, a pretty quick relationship? What was marriage like at the outset?
Jordan:
We were kids and made a lot of mistakes, but good. We had a good relationship I’d say.
Priscilla:
I thought that it was going to be just a dream of a marriage, so I tried to create that reality. I thought, this is great and wonderful, and I think he thought that too. In the beginning it seemed pretty happy.
Dr. Beam:
I know you said you were kids. How old were you?
Jordan & Priscilla:
21 and 22.
Dr. Joe Beam:
Yes you were kids, no doubt about it. That’s pretty young. I remember when Alice and I got married the first time. For those of us who are regular listeners of this program, you may remember that Alice and I are in our second marriage to each other. We’ve never been married to anybody else, but we married the first time in 1969, shortly after I turned 20.
Priscilla:
Wow.
Dr. Beam:
My grandmother said to me, “if you get married before you’re 21, you’ll never be a free man.” I’ll always remember that. You guys have been married for a while then. How many years now?
Priscilla:
This May, it’ll be 17 years. Give or take six months.
Dr. Beam:
Give or take or something. At some point you guys started running into troubles that were more than just the typical troubles of marriage. How far into the marriage before that happened?
Jordan:
A good little while. We got married in 2004 and in 2017, so 13 years just about. We really ran into a crisis, we didn’t really see it coming until all of a sudden we were in a marriage crisis.
Priscilla:
When you say, “running into marriage trouble,” we had trouble, but we thought it was typical trouble. The way that we handled typical trouble was just a sweeping under the rug to deal with it. Whenever we would run into those everyday things, we would sometimes try to address it and could never come to any kind of resolution. So, we would just sweep it under the rug.
Dr. Beam:
So, things just kind of built up over a while then?
Priscilla:
Yes.
Jordan:
Joe, we were a pastor’s family. It was one of those things. We’re on the stage, we’re in front of people. You don’t have problems in front of people or at least, you keep that up.
Dr. Beam:
I understand that. I mean, I really, really do. I do understand that. All right. So you were in those kinds of situations, then 13 years in what happened?
Priscilla:
What happened was Jordan was full-time pastoring and I was a stay at home mom. We had five children at the time.
Dr. Beam:
Five children in 13 years?
Priscilla:
Five children in 13 years. I had struggled to kind of find my worth in what I was doing, because Jordan was always gone. I was always at home with the kids and I felt like there was more for me to do, that I’m not really serving in the best way possible, just being at home with these kids. So, we began this college age ministry out of our home and I started working very closely with this young adult that we were trying to encourage to take the lead of this group.
Jordan:
We both were.
Priscilla:
Yeah.
Jordan:
He was a friend of mine. We were both on board with trying to help him kind of get leadership of this group and get it off the ground.
Priscilla:
Yes. So, where the big trouble started was he was very busy with ministering in the big church and I was very busy ministering to this young adult group alongside this other person.
Jordan:
Which by the way, when you’ve got five kids, having college aged kids over at your house until two o’clock in the morning, a couple nights a week, that’s not really healthy, but we were excited. It was a ministry that was hot, it was going and…
Priscilla:
And I found purpose.
Jordan:
Yeah.
Dr. Beam:
And so something didn’t go well?
Priscilla:
So, we ended up getting closer and closer and he would stop by regularly in order to work on things for that group. Jordan was all on board with it. I mean, he would call Jordan and be like, “Hey! I need your wife,” and Jordan’s like, “sure. I’m busy doing this, but she’ll help you do that.” Eventually, there was some attraction. Then, there was the confession of, I don’t know if you want to say confession of love or whatever, but at that point, it started turning into something more. At that point it was just emotional. There was no physical, but it did start turning into something more. Where it started to get physical was he continued to tell me that he could not have a relationship with me outside of marriage with me. So, in order to have a relationship with him, I needed to leave Jordan. That sounded like a reasonable thing. I thought that was a good Christian thing to do. One day we were on the way to a marriage retreat, actually, Jordan and I, and I decided to confess to him that I was seeing this person. So, that’s how it came out. I would say that’s kinda where it started. That was not the ending or the middle. That was actually kind of the beginning.
Dr. Beam:
How long did that relationship take to develop?
Priscilla:
It developed over probably the course of three months or so of working pretty closely with this person.
Dr. Beam:
Okay. All right. So you told Jordan about it and what happened then?
Priscilla:
Do you want to take it?
Jordan:
It was a bomb blast. We were on this marriage retreat down at the beach dealing with that bomb blast. Within a day we were headed back to Birmingham with the mind that we were going to work it out. When I went through seminary, I had some counseling classes. I called my counseling professor and she agreed to talk to us. We really felt like we were going to work it out, but things really just didn’t get better. I was a big snooper. I’m very anti-snooping now because I was a big time snooper. I kept digging up the phone records and saying, “Hey, look, you talked to him for three hours today. That’s not okay.” I kind of kept that flooding for about three weeks, before I finally escalated it. I said, “Hey, look, I’m going to go talk to his uncle. His uncles are big preachers in our denomination and I’m going to go talk to them and go to his family. That’s terrible advice by the way. I pushed it to that point where there was a break and when I did that, she went to live with him for a couple of days a week or so. The affair just split wide open at that point.
Priscilla:
Yeah.
Dr. Beam:
Okay. So, you lived with him a couple of days a week, where were you for the rest of the week?
Priscilla:
What would happen is I would go over there and stay the night and then I would come home during the day because we had five children. So, I was living there at night and then living at home during the day to be there with the kids while he was at work. That actually was when Jordan found Marriage Helper. When he found Marriage Helper, he said the reason why I started to live with him was actually because he told me I could no longer stay at home if I was going to continue to see him or talk to him.
Jordan:
There’s some bad information on the internet. I don’t know if you know that Joe, but there’s some really bad information out there.
Dr. Beam:
I’ve come across a thing or two.
Jordan:
So, I ran across something that said, if you really want to save your marriage, tough love, you gotta throw it down… If you want to be with this person, you can’t stay here. I approached her in that way, then a week later I found Marriage Helper.
Dr. Beam:
How did you find us?
Jordan:
Somebody else referred. It was a friend of mine that I trusted that said, “Hey, I know this couple that have been through this thing.” I called up one of the CRs, Amber, I still remember she was so sweet. I told her what I had done. She said, “we don’t exactly recommend that. You haven’t gone too far, but if she can stay in the house, we recommend you let her do that.”
Priscilla:
So, he called me and told me that and I said, “oh, sure, I’ll move right back in.” No, that’s not happening.
Dr. Beam:
You had me fooled there for a second.
Priscilla:
No, that’s not how it happened. Actually, I did have several people kind of reach out to me from the church and that actually didn’t help either. I was very much what’s the word? I was fighting all of that, but just my convictions and the way that I was feeling, I just couldn’t stay there any longer. Which further on in our story, that’s not how it ended, but that is how I started to feel. Through a little bit of internal tug of war, I did finally go home, because he had already signed us up for the workshop and just said, “here’s when I signed us up for the workshop, I really want you to attend with me.” He was just kind of hoping that I would attend. To be honest, just my personality, even though I was not going to let him know that I felt obligated because the money had already been paid, and because he had already scheduled that internally I felt an obligation to go. So, I moved back home. Then two and a half weeks later, we were attending the workshop.
Dr. Beam:
What made you decide so quickly that you would commit three days of your life and an enrollment fee to the workshop? How long had you been exposed to us before you made that decision?
Jordan:
77%. That’s why I committed so quickly. If anything works, this will. That immediately got me. I mean, it’s true. It’s the facts. That’s what got me.
Dr. Beam:
So, our success record and of course, Amber. Amber is one of our client representatives. I guess she told you her story.
Jordan:
Yes
Dr. Beam:
So you believed if it’s got that kind of odds of success, I’m going to go ahead and commit to this, but what made you do it before you asked Priscilla if she would go?
Jordan:
I talked to so many people that say, “Oh, that’s awesome for you guys, but my wife would never go, not right now.” I say, “you would be surprised,” because I was shocked that she did decide to go, but I was desperate. I was losing my family and I was looking for anything.
Priscilla:
Well, and that might’ve been one of the controlling behaviors that he exhibited.
Jordan:
You know what? It worked!
Dr. Beam:
You decided to come home, you decided to get a little workshop. When was that? What year was that?
Priscilla:
This was 2017. It was in February of 2017.
Dr. Beam:
February 2017. So that was when we were still doing only in-person workshops. We didn’t start the online workshops until COVID forced us to do that, which turned out to be a great thing for us.
Priscilla:
Yes.
Dr. Beam:
This was an in-person workshop, 2017. You remember who led the workshops?
Jordan:
Jim. I think Kimberly had some portions.
Priscilla:
She did. Kimberly did. Then it was Jim and Kimberly, and Alice were doing the breakouts.
Dr. Beam:
We have quite a few people that work with us at Marriage Helper. There’s a lot of us, but they were just primarily naming people who are related to me. Not all of them. Alice is my wife and she was there. Kimberly is our CEO. She actually runs this organization and she is my daughter. Alice was doing a breakout group and I think you were in Alice’s breakout. Is that correct?
Priscilla:
I think we were in Kimberly and Jim’s breakouts.
Dr. Beam:
Kimberly Jim’s breakouts, okay.
Priscilla:
Alice did talk to us a lot. I think it was because we had made some past connections.
Dr. Beam:
How did you feel at the end of the first day of the workshop?
Jordan:
Still very tentative, tense. It got warmer. I’ll tell you, the horseman thing was huge for us.
Dr. Beam:
So, that’s the second day when we talk about that. No no, we do talk about that on the first day.
Jordan:
So, the first day at lunch, because the horseman is right after lunch. We had a horrible day.
Priscilla:
Horrible time.
Jordan:
But as soon as we signed that contract, that’s magic.
Dr. Beam:
So, lunch on the first day you guys were not getting along very well at all?
Jordan:
Nope.
Dr. Beam:
Okay. And in the in-person workshop, we asked people to make an agreement if they will, with each other, not to use what we call, “the four horsemen of the apocalypse”. You guys actually honored that, right?
Priscilla:
Yes. It really was just an enjoyable weekend after that. It was like, how can we cut these things out and actually enjoy each other in the middle of this mess? But it worked
Dr. Beam:
The end of the first day you felt?
Priscilla:
So at the end of the first day, I actually felt a little bit, not necessarily hope but acceptance. Because I had been feeling so much rejection from Jordan, from family members, from our church family. So, I did not want to come to one more place that was going to tell me how wrong and bad I was. I came very skeptical and very guarded. At the end of that first day, like I said, I don’t know that it was hopeful for our marriage, but I felt very accepted and comfortable at the end of that day.
Jordan:
I’ll say too, one of the things she had been telling me up until that point was, “I need you to be a safe place. You’re not a safe place. This other person is a safe place.” I really didn’t know how to be a safe place, but going through the workshop and the workshop is the safest place you’ll ever be. I could start to see how I could be a safe place too. So that was very cool.
Dr. Beam:
By the end of the first day, you were at least feeling safe?
Priscilla:
Yes.
Dr. Beam:
Okay. So, you go to the second day and the third day. At the end of the third day, I’m assuming that you went to some place that served margaritas because we don’t do that in the workshop. So were you getting along better with each other by then?
Priscilla:
Yes. So, limerence was a very eye opening topic for me and it really did make sense. I did try to justify and say, “no, I’m not really a limerence because I wouldn’t go to these extremes.” But it really was an eye-opening topic for me, so that really did start to give me hope to think, “hmm, I’m not the only one that has gone through this and there’s like scientific reasons for why I’m going through this and what I’m going through. “
Jordan:
It was huge for me also, because I knew she was in limerence. Absolutely, she was, but it gave me hope too, because I could see this thing does end. At the time they were saying 3-36 months and it can give me some things to look for and know that it’s going to pull through. I had hope because of the limerence section.
Dr. Beam:
Good.
Priscilla:
At the end of the workshop, we were actually on board. We had won the book, “The Most Transformed Couples”, whatever that was, we won the book at the end of the workshop. So, we had so much hope. We spent our whole drive home coming up with our plan to go to sleep early and have regular date nights and eat right. We were going to get on track after the workshop was over.
Dr. Beam:
Is that what happened?
Jordan:
No. We still had problems. Little things happened that frustrated me. I saw she was still with him and talked well with him and that really bothered me. She wasn’t always completely as warm to me as I wish she was, the hugs and snuggles and everything. Just a little bit by a little bit, over a course of a few days, I got very frustrated again. I was hoping to see things move a lot quicker than they actually did. We had a meeting with the church leadership lined up because I was the pastor. They want to know how that workshop went. By the time we got to that meeting, I completely threw her under the bus in the meeting. How did you feel?
Priscilla:
Good question. After that, I had committed, I told the other person, “I cannot see you. This would go completely against my beliefs and values. I can’t, I love you.” I hate even saying that now, but I said that, “I cannot be with you because of this reason.” I had completely cut it off, but like he said, I still have good thoughts of this person. I was mourning, I was kind of down and like he said, not very engaged with him. Things that typically he would never have noticed before, he was just very hypersensitive to. When we got to that elders meeting and he threw me under the bus, of course I was crushed, I’m in a room full of leaders, all these men. I felt defensive and I did end up picking up where he left off and saying, “by the way, the workshop was wonderful.” So, we left that meeting. Basically, I had been given a list of rules of how you have to behave, and this is what you need to do. When we left that meeting, we actually had a counseling session scheduled. He said, “do you want to ride together? I don’t have anything to do”. And I said, “I’ll see you there.” Actually at that point, when I took off from that church meeting, I called the “LO”.
Dr. Beam:
The “LO” for people who are not familiar with the way we talk at Marriage Helper, stands for limerent object, the person at that point, Priscilla felt she was madly in love with. That’s what the LO is. Just want to make sure our audience understands what you’re talking about. So, you call him and what happened?
Priscilla:
Of course he was not totally happy with me because I had been doing this yo-yo thing. He was not totally happy with me, but of course he was right there, ready to swoop in and emotionally coddle me and just be angry with me against those leaders. Then we reconnected.
Dr. Beam:
That night?
Priscilla:
I don’t think we actually physically reconnected that day. I cannot remember how long it took to physically reconnect, but there was a time that I did kind of stay with him some. I think when it really got serious again was probably within a month, it was not immediate that I started. I would need to go back.
Dr. Beam:
So from the time you left the workshop until the time this happened, how much time had passed?
Priscilla:
Only three days.
Dr. Beam:
So three days after the workshop, before you went into the elder’s meeting of your church, and that night you made contact with him again. Jordan, you felt that in three days, she should’ve made so much more progress than you felt that she had made. Which I’m assuming at this point, you begin to see is not really realistic expectation, right?
Jordan:
12-steps for codependency throughout this whole process, because I’ve found that I was very dependent upon her. So, yes. I was very unrealistic in what I was expecting out of her.
Dr. Beam:
So, you finally reconnect with him. Are you still living at home or have you moved out at this point?
Priscilla:
I still lived at home at that point. I would just come and go. Whenever Jordan was home, I would try to go out and see him. When Jordan was gone, I would come home and stay with the kids. We were not really having a lot of good interactions and actually we weren’t even co-parenting well at that point. But we weren’t really talking about divorce at that time. We were just kind of living in that Valley, I guess.
Dr. Beam:
Jordan, you knew that she was going to see the other guy?
Jordan:
Yeah.
Dr. Beam:
Okay. So how long did this go on?
Priscilla:
It probably went on for about a month and then there was another weird twist. We planned a Disney vacation because we thought, we have these Disney rewards, so we’ll go ahead and use them. Because he said, “well, who knows if we’re going to end up divorced anyway, let’s just go ahead and get them together.” We plan this trip and he ends up saying that he’s not going to go just within a few days of us leaving. I had the brilliant idea that I would just take my LO with me.
Jordan:
I had the brilliant idea of while she’s gone, I’ll bring a girl over to my house as well. So that’s when my affair started at that point.
Dr. Beam:
Do you mean somebody you had already been developing a relationship with?
Jordan:
About two weeks or so after the workshop, I reached out to a girl. Then another two weeks later, she went to Disney World and that girl came over to the house. So we were very chaotic, Joe.
Dr. Beam:
Where were the kids during this vacation trip?
Priscilla:
They were with me. The room situation doesn’t really matter, but he went as a friend because he had been a very close family friend up until this point. So, the kids just thought he’s a family friend going on this vacation.
Jordan:
There was a couple from our church that was also down at Disney at the time that saw them. So, get this, that word gets back to my youth minister. My youth minister drives over to my house with his wife to tell me in person what he heard and the girl is over there. So I came to the front door and I was like, “yeah, dude, I’m sorry. I’m counseling somebody right now .”
Dr. Beam:
Things got really pretty messed up all the way.
Jordan:
Really messed up.
Priscilla:
It really did get messed up.
Dr. Beam:
Get to the part where things began to change in a better way.
Priscilla:
Yes. So, at that point it really started breaking open. The church was going to disfellowship me because of that trip.
Dr. Beam:
For those that are not familiar with church talk. The group that you were with practiced a thing of “church discipline,” where they actually will cast a person out of their group or “disfellowship” as they call it. So, the church was getting ready to do that for you.
Priscilla:
That kind of busted things open a little bit. Later on I ended up leaving the church. He was still a minister, but we had still thought we could make it through this. We were just kind of living in limbo. So we did not do a legal separation. We just did our own separation, where he was in the house with the kids for a week. Then I would live with someone else, not the LO. Then I would be in the house and he would live with someone else, not anybody inappropriate. We did that for a couple of months and things were just not getting better. He was getting tired of the way things were going. So, he started kind of tightening up and being more controlling. The more controlling he got, the more I fought against it. What ended up cracking, it was he cut off my credit card and took all of our money out of our combined accounts. He said, “you need to get a job to pay your bills.” And so I filed for divorce, because I had been a stay-at-home mom. I had no income besides him. So I filed for divorce then.
Dr. Beam:
So Jordan, you were still involved with the other woman during this period of time?
Jordan:
No, that was very short-lived. It was not a limerent affair. It doesn’t make it any better, but it was not long-term. It was not a strong, emotional connection. It was a lonely response to what was happening. It was a response to pain. She was not around. I was just going to add, I was a good snooper, of course. I saw an email where she had emailed out to a lawyer. So, when she did that, I cut off the credit card. When I did that, she filed for divorce. It was just a chain.
Dr. Beam:
I know at some point things turned around to get better. So when did that happen?
Jordan:
Okay, so we got divorced and we did not speak to each other. We had week on week off custody. We saw each other’s faces once a week, but no conversation. We got divorced in September and this went on for about good five months until she plugged into a church where she really had some breakthroughs there. Her heart began to change around Christmas.
Priscilla:
So, we were apart and we couldn’t blame each other for any of our problems anymore. I just started working on my PIES. Physically and emotionally, like he said, spiritually, I started going to a completely different church. I had a completely different mindset and just really started working on myself. I still was seeing the other person, but it was very secretive because I was not proud at all about this relationship. I would have said that I probably would not have wanted to divorce Jordan so badly if I didn’t feel so controlled in the middle of that. Just working on my PIES and getting healthier myself. I started realizing how unhealthy the LO was and how Jordan wasn’t really as bad of a person as I was making him out to be at that time. That if I had been in his shoes, I probably would have been a whole lot worse than he had. Then I started remembering, we did have good times back in our first marriage. My eyes just started opening little by little. I would not say it happened overnight. It was probably over the course of two months that my eyes started opening to how unhealthy this new person was and actually how good Jordan had been.
Dr. Beam:
For those that are not familiar with PIES, she’s not talking about a particular kind of pie, like blueberry or peach. She was actually talking about what we call PIES, which stands for an acronym. It stands for physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual. Just want to make sure that people that haven’t heard that before know what you’re talking about. Are you saying that the workshop that you guys went to didn’t really help at all?
Priscilla:
It was amazing if we had followed the principles from the get-go. But what happened was we were in so much chaos that until we calmed down and were able to really apply the principles, it didn’t really do us any good to have the tools.
Jordan:
Right.
Dr. Beam:
So you had the tools, but you weren’t using the tools. Now you’re reconsidering things, you’re already divorced. How long have you been divorced at this point?
Priscilla:
We’d been divorced for about three months when my heart started changing.
Dr. Beam:
So, what positive progress did you have after that?
Priscilla:
We went from, we didn’t even speak when we would exchange the kids saying things like, “Hey, I’m sorry. I forgot to bring the shoes for the kids”, which would have never happened before my heart started changing. Like I said, it was just because I was getting healthier. I didn’t need a certain action or reaction from Jordan. I just knew who I wanted to be and how I wanted to treat him. He did not jump on board with that in the beginning. He still was looking at me like I was some kind of alien whenever I spoke to him.
Jordan:
In my mind I felt like they were trying to go on with the relationship and she was trying to make nice. So, yeah. Thanks for the shoes, whatever. But she continued to soften and she texted a pretty long apology one day and I still wasn’t ready to receive it. I said, “well, thanks for that. I’m not really sure I know who you are, but thanks.” Then she texted a long apology a day later, and I said, “well, I really appreciate that.” Then she texted, “can we talk?” We talked that night for three hours, and had not had a conversation in five to six months, but we talked for three hours that night. The next day I was very, very angry with God because I could see what he was doing. I wasn’t ready to embrace it yet. I got angry.
Dr. Beam:
God can be inconvenient.
Jordan:
Yes! He didn’t ask me. I threw a fit for a day. At the end of the day, I texted her and said, “hey! Would you like to come over for dinner?” She did and I don’t know if she ever left after that. When you’re going through it, you can almost see it in the other person’s eyes. You are not the same person. But this time, it’s you again. The fog was lifted and it was my wife again. It was pretty convenient at that point, what God was doing.
Dr. Beam:
So, did you reconnect with Marriage Helper as well, or was that kind of ended? What happened with us helping out?
Speaker 1:
It was immediate that we reconnected because we had had a really bad experience with our marriage counselor. Actually, our marriage counselor had recommended that we divorced and that he was going to “help us land that plane smoothly.” That was his exact quote.
Jordan:
It was a young guy. I remember one of his comments to me, it was like, “Oh man, I don’t know what I do in that situation.” Me neither.
Priscilla:
He was getting paid a whole lot to tell us to do that. Anyway, we had a really bad experience with our marriage counselor. So, we did look for help in town so that we could have someone walk with us because we were kind of at a loss. The first thing that we did was pay to come back to the workshop for the second time, because we knew that those principals were working already. That we wanted to hear it again, because it is a lot of information and I had a lot different ears the second time.
Dr. Beam:
Who led the second workshop that you came to?
Priscilla:
That was also Jim, but you were also a big part of that one as well.
Dr. Beam:
Okay. So, Jim and I did it together then? So between workshops, how much time had passed?
Priscilla:
A year and one month.
Jordan:
Yeah.
Dr. Beam:
Okay. So, a year and one month. Did you hear things you didn’t hear the first time?
Priscilla:
Of course. (Laughing) You completely changed the whole workshop.
Dr. Beam:
Everybody who comes back, “you changed everything!” And we didn’t change much. It’s just, like you said, you have different ears. You hear things differently than before. So was that beneficial to you then?
Priscilla:
Totally. Absolutely. It has been life-changing. Our second marriage has just been a much different marriage and not on the surface. On the surface, people think we look the same and we act the same because we were always a happy couple. People would always make comments about, “Oh, y’all act like newlyweds.” But internally we feel so differently. We feel safe with each other. We talk with each other. We know what horsemen are, so we haven’t cut them out completely, but we’ve minimized the horsemen. When there are high stress times, we know how to handle those times much better.
Jordan:
Controlling and push behaviors have been cut drastically.
Priscilla:
Yes. Yes, it is. It is just a night and day difference underneath the surface.
Dr. Beam:
So, did you use any of our other services other than the workshop itself?
Priscilla:
I have been through the Save My Marriage course, but only as a breakout leader for Marriage Helper.
Dr. Beam:
Let’s explain what that means. You guys got to the point where Priscilla said, I want to help marriages as well. So we trained you to be a breakout leader to come back to our workshop to help couples. How many workshops do you think you’ve done as a breakout leader ?
Priscilla:
At least 15. I’ve been working since September of 2019, but then took a little break during COVID. So, it’s been a year and a half or a little over a year and a half.
Dr. Beam:
Okay. As a result of that, because you work with us, you have exposure to all of everything that we have. That’s cool. That’s very good. By the way, just for those who are listening or watching, I realized that sometimes people will just hear the audio. Sometimes people will get to see the visual. If you see the visual, this is a very handsome couple here. They’re very pretty people, but they’re even prettier inside than they are outside, and their outside is very pretty. Priscilla’s become one of our favorite breakout leaders. People just brag on her big time when they are in her breakout groups. So what would you tell a couple… I think you’ve already, by the way, proven one thing very much by your story, which is no matter how much good material we teach, and we think we teach a lot of really good material, it doesn’t work until a person applies it.
Priscilla:
Yes
Dr. Beam:
It’s not like a magic bullet, you hear this and all of a sudden your whole world is different. You actually have to do something with it. But you guys learned that and illustrated it perfectly. So what would you tell a couple that is contemplating coming to the workshop? What would you say to them? Let’s start it two different ways. Priscilla, what would you say to somebody who is at this point “madly in love” with somebody else? Jordan, what would you say if your spouse feels that he or she is madly in love with somebody else? What would you say to those people about what we can do to help them?
Jordan:
I was frantic at the end of my rope in a very emergency situation. I would just begin by saying, “look, you didn’t get here overnight. It’s okay. It’s okay. If there’s any way you can get your spouse to that workshop, just give them a call. Here’s the number, just give them a call. They’ll help you in kind of how you approach your spouse with angles you can take to talk to them about it. Just give them a call. But look, you’re okay and there is hope. Listen to my story about Disney World, it got Jerry Springer. I can tell you more stories than that, but as bad as it gets, and I’ve talked to other couples at Marriage Helper workshops that their stories are up there too. There is always hope.”
Dr. Beam:
So you wouldn’t wait for your spouse to say, “I’m ready to make this work.”
Jordan:
No, not at all. Make that call today.
Dr. Beam:
Even if your spouse won’t come, even if they are convinced they want to leave the marriage. If they’ll come to the workshop, ask them to come with you anyway.
Jordan:
Joe, when we came there was no such thing as a solo spouse workshop. So, today I would also highly encourage that if you just can’t get them there, go to the solo spouse workshop.
Priscilla:
Yes.
Dr. Beam:
It’s basically the same workshop, it’s the same material, but emphasized a little bit differently because we don’t have both spouses in the room and that was something we couldn’t have done before we started doing online workshops. I didn’t want to take a whole bunch of people who are hurting and in pain and put them all in a room with each other because I’m afraid that they would start connecting with each other. Now that we can do this online and we now do the solo spouse workshop and basically can answer a lot more specifically questions without having to be careful that we’re not going to offend the other person. The solo workshop’s really excellent so thanks for bringing that up. Priscilla, what would you tell them if man or woman, “look, I don’t think I’m in love with my spouse anymore. I’m in love with this person over here.” Why in the world would that person gain from coming to our workshop?
Priscilla:
Well, first of all, I would say whether you want your marriage or you don’t want your marriage, Marriage Helper workshops will change your life. I know that sounds like, “oh, that’s too big of a promise to make”, but I am not exaggerating. I had seen as a breakout leader couple after couple after couple come in or individual after individual come in with very low expectations and leave just mind-blown. So, the workshop will change your life. It is the place where you will feel the most acceptance, especially if you’re in the middle of doing something that might be looked down upon by the rest of the world. You will find so much acceptance and you will see that you are not alone, that this is not something that you’re going through, and you’re totally unique, and nobody’s ever experienced this before. There will be people in the workshop with you that are going through similar experiences. So, it is just the safest place, the place where you’ll find the most acceptance and it will change your life.
Dr. Beam:
Cool. Very good. Well, our time is almost up here. Is there any last thing you would like to say to the people who are either listening or watching about Marriage Helper, about you, about your marriage, about the workshop, about anything whatsoever?
Priscilla:
Sometimes, when we do talk about our story, it is a pretty crazy story. It actually sounds kind of terrifying and just really bad and I think sometimes people think, “man, wow, if you could go back and do that over again, I bet you would do things completely different.” And I would say that with Marriage Helper and working through and finding so much healing through all of this process, I don’t want to go through it again in the future, but I would not trade our marriage now for what we had in the past. I would go through it all again to have the marriage that we have now. Absolutely.
Jordan:
Absolutely.
Dr. Beam:
You feel the same way right, my friend?
Jordan:
Absolutely. It’s just it’s night and day. It’s freedom. It’s a real relationship. Yes. Thank you.
Priscilla:
Yes. Thank you.
Dr. Beam:
No. Thank you. Thank you for taking time to do this program with us. I really do appreciate it very much. Everything you guys do for people. Particularly, Priscilla, thank you for helping us out in those workshops because you’re a great part of those workshops. Thank you very much. And thank you guys for watching or listening to Relationship Radio and keep looking, keep coming back because we have a lot more to offer. Thank you, Jordan. Thank you Priscilla.
Priscilla:
Thank you, Dr. Joe.
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