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Riley Risto: It's our great pleasure to welcome LDS counselor and coach Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife. Jennifer, we're so glad to have you on the program. Jennifer specializes in fostering couples in their intimate relationships.  We've been talking about doing an episode on the Divine Feminine. But one thing always slowed us down. What is that?  Christopher Hertado: We needed a feminine guest, a female guest. We just don't have the authority to talk about this. It's just not how it works.  Riley Risto: Just having the input and perspective of a female is really important for us, and...

Some people have written in expressing concern about this week's Come Follow Me lesson in which we address our beliefs about polygamy.  In my work with Latter-day Saint women, it is clear how many women privately and quietly struggle over this topic.  Our collective understanding that God ordained polygamy historically and, on a more personal level, believing that polygamy might be a part of our future, points to a troubling view of God, and more specifically how God views women relative to men.  This is the meaning that many women have suffered under.   Many clients of mine have feared that i...

This live is a follow up from the live we did in November, where I was talking about overcoming resentment in marriage. Several people in the group asked about how you overcome the feelings of resentment that you might have about ways that you felt you were inducted into false ideas, either through church culture or family culture that really limited your life, shaped your choices, but perhaps in ways that are hard to support or feel good about now. These aren’t easy topics, and I’m going to be trying to give you some of my best thoughts about how to think about this, how you overcome this, ho...

Monica: I just want to start this whole interview off with a thank you. Thank you for the work that you both do, and for being here together, it’s such an honor! Let’s talk about the topic. We see this come up a lot in the women all of us serve together, this power dynamic that we have within partnerships. We’re going to talk specifically about marriages today. We all have dynamics in marriages, but there tends to be one more about power. I've learned so much from both of you about how to increase partnership in marriage, and that is our topic today. But we can’t talk about that without first ...

I think a lot about sex—-although maybe not in the way that some people do. In particular, I think a lot about why people like and don’t like to have sex, what ignites desire and what suffocates it. As a therapist, I meet with people almost daily who are trying to figure out why they don’t like to have sex, why their spouse doesn’t like to have sex, or why their spouse does like to have it. It is an elusive question sometimes as well as a painful one for many couples.   My dissertation research focused on the question of Mormon women’s sexual agency. That is, Mormon women’s capacity to be acto...

The transition from pre-marriage into marriage can be wonderful. Beginning a life with someone you love is exciting and hopeful, and captures much of what many of us hold dear—the possibility of finding love and creating a family unit of our own. With high expectations of what marriage will be, many of us do not anticipate how stressful and even disillusioning early marriage can be. When the wedding celebration and honeymoon end, and we are left to work out a life with another flawed human being, we are often unprepared for the disharmony experienced in those early days. When so many of us ant...