Recommended Resources for Marriage Enrichment
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This Gratitude Journal by Jim Merhaut has helped many couples develop the spirit of appreciation that is essential for any thriving marriage. It includes 40 pages of inspirational reflections on gratitude with space for the proven practice of gratitude journaling.
Hold Me Tight gets to the root of marriage success by going deeper than the technical skills of making a relationship work. While the technical skills such as communicating, budgeting, task-sharing, managing calendars, etc. are very important, they are not the foundation of a successful marriage. Dr. Susan Johnson digs into the deeper emotional life of a committed relationship and addresses that critical question that rests in the heart of every lover, "Will my partner be there for me in my greatest need?"
Dr. John Gottman is perhaps the greatest marriage researcher in the world. He has studies thousands of couples, straight and gay, in a setting he calls his "Love Lab". Gottman has learned to spot, with remarkable accuracy, whether or not a couple has adopted an approach to their relationship that will make their marriage soar. He can predict divorce in the first six years of marriage with an accuracy rate upwards of 90% simply by observing a couple in a conversation for 5 minutes. If you're serious about marriage, you need to know what John Gottman knows.
This book is an introduction to the basic marriage concepts developed by Dr. Willard Harley that help married couples identify and strategically meet the most important emotional needs of each spouse. Ten essential emotional needs are covered in detail with practical suggestions on how to meet them.
The big issues such as anger and dishonesty as well as the seemingly small issues such as those annoying habits are all addressed in this book by Dr. Willard Harley. Reading and applying the concepts taught in Love Busters will take a strong marriage to the next level. These are the things, left unchecked, that will slowly erode away the strong foundation of your marriage. Learn what they are and how to overcome them as a team.
This celebrated book by Dr. Gary Chapman shows how love is communicated much like language. Each person has both a language and a dialect with which he/she communicates and understands love. Married love is communicated in primarily five essential languages: affirmation, time, gifts, service, and touch. Your marriage will succeed if you are communicating your love for your spouse in a language and dialect that he/she understands.
Anger is an emotion that baffles many of us. We all experience anger, but we don't all know what to do with it. Too often, it is unleashed on others in a way that destroys or at least seriously damages relationships. Dr. Gary Chapman helps readers to understand the emotional and spiritual dynamics of anger and how to use anger constructively in your life and in your relationships.
Dr. Roberta Gilbert makes the family systems theory of Dr. Murray Bowen quite accessible in this book about relationships. While introducing readers to the basic concepts of family systems theory, she also provides clear illustrations of how relationships can get into a rut, and she follows these illustrations with practical suggestions on how to build extraordinary relationships.
