 A lot of people wonder why a model therapy is different than typical marriage counseling. First of all, most people who are actually doing marriage counseling do not have much training in working with couples. Everyone who gets a master's degree in therapy and counseling social work has to take one class in marriage and family therapy, so that's about it. So if someone does not have advanced training in working with couples, which most therapists don't, you're already going to be at a disadvantage because couple therapy is very different than working with an individual. Working with an individual, you can focus on one person and deal with their issues. Working with a relationship, you're dealing with a dynamic. And if the dynamic is not safe, then the fights can break out and you can accomplish nothing in therapy, or you can actually make things worse. We hear of therapists who will take sides, they will side with one spouse over the other, or they'll give advice, they'll tell people to get divorced. All of these things are very detrimental to a couple who actually wants to make their marriage work. So first of all, you want to find someone who has advanced training in working with couples. But beyond that, Amago provides a whole context for understanding the relationship. And what that does is it gives a couple hope, because when a couple comes in the power struggle and they're fighting, they don't, they think of, well, maybe I should find someone else, maybe I made a mistake, maybe this is a wrong relationship. Amago already comes in with the assumption that you're in the right relationship. If you chose each other, then you're in the right relationship. You just need to understand the conflict and help you take that conflict and be able to use it for the purpose of growth and healing. We're showing them that their situation is normal, that it's normal for couples to experience conflict, which takes a big load off of a lot of people. And then we're giving them practical tools. So we're not taking sides, we're not blaming one person or the other, but we're helping, we're focusing on the relationship. That's the focus. So the couple sitting face to face, we're here facilitating their connection. And what we're doing is teaching them a very structured process that creates emotional safety where both people can feel heard and understood and seen. And some of the other modalities, they might give you helpful tools, don't roll your eyes, this is what you should do, this is what you shouldn't do, or they may help facilitate some form of connection, but it always involves the therapist. Whereas in Amago, the therapist is more of the facilitator. In the actual sessions, you're doing the work. It's not like, here, this is what you should do, do it at home, come back and tell me how it went. But you're actually doing it in person, in live in the office, in real time. You can actually experience your spouse in a different way in this session itself, and that can give you a lot of encouragement that your relationship can be better, because you see that it can be. You see that you can be heard for the first time ever. You see that you can express yourself in a safe and connected way. You see that you can have a conversation about something difficult without hurting each other's feelings. You experience it and then it gives you the courage to be able to apply it at home. I find a lot of people who have been in other modalities who come to a model and they said, you know, I did this, I did that, you're a seventh marriage counselor, how are you going to be able to help me? And what they found is that we give them a very specific process and tools that they can take home. It's not just kind of this amorphous thing that they come to therapy and they're dependent on the therapist, but we empower the couple to take the bull by the horns and do the work themselves.