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The Life of And podcast is for high-achieving women and working parents who are ready to stop living a life of “have to” and start designing a life they actually want. It’s a space where we talk honestly about the things we’re often afraid to admit — even to ourselves. The exhaustion. The ambition. The loneliness. The joy. The tension of wanting more without losing yourself in the process.
If you’re in the thick of it — feeling stretched, tired, hopeful, driven — this is your invitation to take a breath, get real, and find your way back to your own Life of And.
Tiffany Sauder [00:00:00]:
You're two complicated people trying to live life together in a way where you bring way more joy than pain to one another. And I think at marriage counseling, we were also just reminded that we really did want to be good for the other person, and we just had lost how to do that.
Tiffany Sauder [00:00:20]:
I'm a small town kid, born with a big city spirit. I choose to play a lot of awesome roles in life. Mom, wife, entrepreneur, CEO, board member, investor, and mentor. Seventeen years ago, I founded a marketing consultancy. And ever since, my husband J.R. and I have been building our careers and our family on the exact same timeline. Yep, that means four kids, three businesses, two careers, all building towards one life we love. When I discovered I could purposefully embrace all of these ands in my life, it unlocked my world. And I want that for you too.
Tiffany Sauder [00:00:55]:
I'm Tiffany Sauder, and this is Scared Confident.
Tiffany Sauder [00:01:02]:
Okay, so this episode is about J.R. and his experience with marriage counseling. Invariably when I talk about my journey or share with an audience that. That our marriage went through a really hard time and that we went to marriage counseling, it is probably the contact information that I give out. The most people will message me over LinkedIn or just reach out and ask me, like, what did you guys do? Where did you go? What was it like? Did you both want to go? Did it fix everything? Like, just a bunch of questions. And so I'm recording this episode kind of as a resource even for me to share. When I get questions like this, I can say, hey, go listen to this episode of kind of dump my brain. If we can be helpful. If there's other questions, let me know.
Tiffany Sauder [00:01:51]:
But it just kind of also, I think, tells the whole story. As we're kind of double clicking into J.R.'s journey, celebrating 20 years, I feel like it's authentic to also talk about the fact that it wasn't always perfect. And last week, you, if you listened in, in our marriage, check in for the second year in a row, we quantitatively pick a number between 1 and 10 and we say where we think our marriage is at. And for two years in a row, he said a six. And we had some really good conversations that are best left private after that recording because I said, who wants to be in a six year after year after year after year? Like, I need to know more about this. I have more questions. What does a six mean to you? And again, I don't want to go into this into on the microphone because this is a private conversation between he and I. But I will tell you that the tools that we learned in marriage counseling have provided a foundation to be able to walk into difficult conversations.
Tiffany Sauder [00:02:57]:
I think better. I know better than we could do it before. And so it's been a big part of our toolbox to stay together. It's been a big part of just, I think, maturing into our relationship as to highly motivated, I don't know, just people that have big dreams. And we can both be difficult in different ways. And. And we know that. I know that.
Tiffany Sauder [00:03:22]:
And so I'll do my best to represent at least my side of the story on this. I'll share some things that I believe to be true for J.R., but he's not going to be in this episode with me. So anyways, marriage counseling. So it would have been. I don't know if the year is totally relevant, but I think it was in 2019 that we went or the end of 18, possibly end of 18 maybe was when it was. And we were going through a really hard time. And we had tried going to marriage counseling, like in Indianapolis and sitting down, like in a one hour increment where the beginning, you, like, get into a topic and at the end you spend like the last 10 minutes, like paying for the session and scheduling the next one. And in my memory, which may or may not be true, they were like Tuesdays at 3:00.
Tiffany Sauder [00:04:10]:
And so I would be like doing my day. I'd be like, okay, I gotta get in the car, I gotta go across town, I've gotta fight traffic. I've gotta like, park the car, get in there and like get into this space where it's like, okay, now I'm working on the most important thing in my life, my marriage. And my brain is breaking. It's in the middle of the day. I've got 10,000 other things that I'm trying to solve and I'm thinking about. And we were both running, you know, teams. And it was just like, oh, my word.
Tiffany Sauder [00:04:36]:
I felt like we were making a snail's pace of progress because it was just happening in and around all of our life. And I just was like, I think nervous that we weren't going to make the progress that we needed to make as fast as we needed to make it to be able to really get back to us. And I just felt like I was like, just bleeding on center stage. Like, we're going through this. Our marriage is not in a good place. And I'm making. I'm like putting a band aid on a gaping wound. And I was just like, we.
Tiffany Sauder [00:05:05]:
I need more progress than this. This Is like, not working for me. And so I was literally up late one night praying and googling and just trying to figure out, like, what do we do? And I came across this organization called Hope Restored is the name of what we went to, Hope Restored. And it is a marriage intensive. So we did the three nights, four days, I believe was the duration. And they say it's the equivalent of six to nine months of therapy condensed down into it. Was it three or four full days of therapy? So we did the one on one or two on two where it was he and I just kind of give you the construct of kind of how it worked. And then I'll talk a little bit about how we got.
Tiffany Sauder [00:05:52]:
I don't know, just some things, but we'll start with that. So it's called Hope Restored. And we went to the one in Branson, Missouri. So they have two or three different locations, and it's like a retreat center. Like, you're in the middle of nowhere. Your cell phone doesn't work. You eat your meals there, you sleep in, like, little cottages there. Your therapists are there.
Tiffany Sauder [00:06:12]:
So it's very much like in intensive, like you're going to rehab. And when we pulled up, J.R. was like, I feel like we're going to juvie. And it did kind of feel like that. So the place is beautiful. The appointments are very, like, nice, but you are in the, like, way off the beaten path. And it is a retreat center, so it's not like you have quick access to things. And I'm pretty confident our phones didn't work. Like, we were like, off the grid.
Tiffany Sauder [00:06:39]:
And the format of it is it was the two of us with two therapists, so we were always in the same room together. And we had two therapists that were with us and the two of us. And for eight hours a day, we dug through our pile of crap and we both learned about one another. We both better understood our upbringings and childhoods. We both unders better understood and had vocabulary for what we wanted our relationship to look like. And, you know, like, in a normal therapy environment, you just kind of start peeling back the layers and understanding yourself better. We got some shared vocabulary that became really important for how to listen better with one for one another. And again, I don't know that this episode is really about talking about specifically, like, the practices that we learned, but more about the, I think, fairly peculiar experience that is this marriage intensive.
Tiffany Sauder [00:07:37]:
And it was. We have friends and family who have gone through it, and it's just like a way to fast forward this process, when you're, like, going through something really difficult and you feel like this is a big problem, that merits a really big response. And I need to get into this quickly because I can't just pick through this huge. Like, I felt like I had. I'm picturing, like, this huge bag filled with 10 million Christmas tree needles, and you're taking out four at a time versus I need, like, a big scoop, and I need to be able to take a bunch of these out at a time, because we're never going to get through this. That was how it felt when we were just meeting one week at a time, one week at a time. I was just, like, dying. So that was the format and kind of what it looked like.
Tiffany Sauder [00:08:19]:
We did go, like, off site for dinner. You could eat on site or you could. It's not like you can't. You're grownups and you're there under your own free will. So it's not like you can't do whatever you want to do, but you are there to kind of do some work. So you want to engage in what you're paying for. My recollection is that it was like five or six thousand dollars. So it's not zero dollars at all.
Tiffany Sauder [00:08:42]:
But again, it was. We needed to invest in us. And I was like, it was going to take several sessions for us to get through what we were working through. So that was about the price of it. So one of the questions that I get a lot was, did we both want to go? And what I would say is, like, clearly you're both adults and you, like, a police officer is not going to take you. You need to go under your own free will. Like, that's part of the whole thing. But when you fill out the input paperwork, really, the primary questions are, you have to answer that.
Tiffany Sauder [00:09:18]:
Are you open to your, like, marriage working? Like, both of you have to say that we're open to that. Because if one person is not open to that, then, like, the treatment, obviously, like, the therapy is going to go in a different direction if one person just does not want to be there. But I would say I was the one who put it on the table, and I was the one who did the research, and I was the one who, like, pushed the button to add to cart and sign us up and called the number for more information. But J.R. was very much understood why I was, like, recommending that we go do this. So he wasn't like, the instigator of it, but he was definitely, like, supportive of it. And when you're really busy finding, like, making those dates work because it's not like it happens every single day of the year. It's like you have to, like, force it on your calendar. And there's going to have to be some things that move aside, and you're going to need some support from your community to watch your kids because you can't take them with you, obviously.
Tiffany Sauder [00:10:17]:
So in that sense, we, you know, leaned on our families to help us. And he was definitely supportive of us going. He wasn't like, hey, I think that we need to go do something different. Different than go to weekly therapy. But he was super supportive of us going and, like, recognized, yeah, we've got to work through some things. I think one of the things that is part of the experience that they don't, like, certainly espouse as a benefit on the website, but to me was part of us feeling like us again was the fact that, like, going to this experience is completely new for both of you. And if I, like, go back to the very beginning of our relationship, that's like, part of the excitement and part of the newness was that it's like, totally new relationship, a totally new person. You're getting to know each other in new ways.
Tiffany Sauder [00:11:09]:
You're, like, going to new places. You haven't been together before, or you're going to familiar places, but you're going with that person. And so it feels new. And so there was this sense of, like, walking out on a tightrope together. And it took. I don't know, there was something about that very nature of us both getting in the car and being like, we are going to experience a thing that neither one of us really understand what's going to happen. Both of us, as very capable grownups, are giving ourselves over to this process that we really don't know what to expect. And, I mean, Branson, Missouri, from our house is a long drive.
Tiffany Sauder [00:11:47]:
I think it's like six or seven hours. So it's like this long drive. So you have a really long time to, like, think about it, and you're on this road trip. And just the whole sense of that, to me was like, the, like, very beginning of the whole experience being like, us feeling just, like, connected in this new adventure together. And, yes, it was. I don't know, it was like, some of it was like, wow, we're really doing this. I can't believe my marriage is at a place where we need this kind of help. And also a sense of, like, hope.
Tiffany Sauder [00:12:18]:
And I think the name Hope Restored is Such a beautiful name for the whole experience because it is really restoring your belief, restoring your hope that this marriage and this version of yourself that you dreamed of when you were young or new in your marriage, like it is possible and. Or at least some version of that is. So I don't know, that's a little bit about, I don't know, I guess my own experience. And I just felt like there was a sense of hope and belief and in a weird way, excitement, I think. I don't mind doing hard things. I hate being in the unknown. And so it was like, okay, I have a plan. I know what to put my energy into.
Tiffany Sauder [00:13:00]:
I know what to focus on. I kind of know what to win when we have a plan. So that was what that looked like. Other questions that I get, maybe this is relevant to share is it has a Christian worldview in this Hope Restored. Whether you need to be a committed Christian or not to attend is a question to ask them. I don't actually know what their stance is on that. My husband and I both had chosen that as our, you know, individual religions and just beliefs. So it was easy to get aligned behind that.
Tiffany Sauder [00:13:31]:
Okay, so the other question I get is what happened afterwards? And, well, I mean, like, clearly we're still together, but they definitely recommend once you leave the intensive that you get additional just like ongoing support. And I got a counselor that I met with online, like virtually once. I don't know, I think it started once a week and then moved to every other week. And I did that for a year. Like literally every single time it was on my calendar. I wanted to cancel it. It was never convenient. It always fell on a terrible day.
Tiffany Sauder [00:14:05]:
And I just think that's how it goes when you're busy. And so keep it, make the appointment and keep the appointment. Most of the time I lock myself in my closet to have the session, which feels completely inconducive to like any kind of progress. But it was like really important for me to keep, like doing some work, keep working through some things that I needed to. And it just gave me a place to kind of keep talking and keep learning. And I'm such an external processor that that was a really important part of the journey for me. J.R.’s looked differently. He picked just like trusted person in our lives that he stayed connected to and still does.
Tiffany Sauder [00:14:46]:
I would say at the beginning I was a little judgy of his choice, not because it's not an amazing person that I respect and love, but I felt like he should be doing it the same way That I was. Which is like finding a qualified professional to, you know, keep learning from. And it just looked differently from him. For him, that's not what he needed, and he knew that. And I needed to kind of, like, get over myself a little bit, which is maybe a bit of a theme. And so he picked an individual that I knew that that was the purpose of that relationship. And here we are, like, six years later, and he still talks to that individual at least once a month in just, like, an accountability framework and just, like, just a close relationship. So which one was right and which one was wrong? The point is that neither.
Tiffany Sauder [00:15:32]:
They were both right. They were just solving differently. And I needed to just make space for that instead of being weird about him not doing it the way that I was doing it. So that's kind of what after looks like. Has our marriage been perfect since? Absolutely not. But I do feel like we have shared framework, we have shared vocabulary. We have a way of articulating to one another and with one another, like, what great looks like for us and what we're working towards. And I think that was.
Tiffany Sauder [00:16:01]:
That was really helpful. And you know what I learned, I think lots of tools in marriage counseling. But what I also learned, kind of two things, is, like, you are still a whole person. You are first a whole person. And as whole people, we come into this relationship of marriage, and whenever we expect the other person to fill in gaps of our, like, wholeness, it doesn't work. Like, it doesn't work. And there were things that I was expecting J.R. to be for me that he was never going to be able to be consistently. And there were things that he was expecting me to be for him that I was never going to be able to be for him consistently.
Tiffany Sauder [00:16:38]:
And so that was a big. Just aha. I think, particularly in, like, the Christian world, this idea of, like, to become one, it's like two halves make a whole. And that's not really how it is. Like, yes, to become one in the eyes of God, but us as individuals, as singular people on the planet, while we are underneath this covenant of marriage, I still am one whole person. And I think that was a big aha for me. And the other piece is that most of us who are in conflict in our marriages, there's, like, one thing that cycles in lots of different scenarios, but it's kind of this, like, core conflict that if you can solve that, it plays out in different ways in different vignettes in your life. But it's kind of this, like, core conflict that when you start to have the tools to be able to recognize it, to understand it, to stop the crazy cycle and to put your like, grown up self into that instead of your hurt, wounded child version of you, then the relationship can really move forward.
Tiffany Sauder [00:17:47]:
So we do not have a perfect marriage. We have a more mature marriage than we had in 2018 when we were going through this. We have a much richer toolbox of things to navigate the complexity that is life. I mean, you're two complicated people trying to live life together in a way where you bring way more joy than pain to one another. And I think at marriage counseling we were also just reminded that we really did want to be good for the other person and we just had lost how to do that. And when you hurt, you become selfish. And when you hurt people, hurt people, all those kinds of things. So anyway, this is a little double click.
Tiffany Sauder [00:18:28]:
There's way more I'm sure that I could add to this, but this is a little double click into our journey with marriage counseling, specifically with the Hope Restored intensive. We'll put links in the show notes to Hope Restored if you're interested in it and if it's something that would be important to you and you can it's not financially accessible, I would love for you to reach out to me selectively. J.R. and I do sponsor people to go to Hope Restored. We believe so much in it, and so if the financial aspect of it is the only reason you're not going, please reach out and we'll see if your situation is such that it would make sense for us to sponsor you. So thank you for listening to this. This may not be the episode that has the most amount of downloads on my feed, but I'm hopeful that if you're at a place where you're trying to figure out what to do because your marriage is at a place where it feels hopeless and not filled with hope, that maybe Hope Restored could be an option for you. So thanks for listening to this episode. I am grateful that we are crossing 20 years and know that the next 20 years will have lots more growth and growing in it.
Tiffany Sauder [00:19:35]:
So thanks so much.
Tiffany Sauder [00:19:37]:
Thank you for joining me on another episode of Scared Confident. Until next time, keep telling Fear. You will not decide what happens in my life.
Tiffany Sauder [00:19:46]:
I will.