I've been poking around on the site and I'd like to find a local church or counselor that implements mb. Is there a list somewhere? Thanks.

Not that I know of, not on this website. You can call around in your area.

You can get phone coaching through MB. Here

Also, a really good program is the MB Online Seminar. For $1000 (can be paid with credit card) you get the materials, a year of accountability, help by phone when you need it, and you can access the private forum in which Dr. Harley answers your questions directly.

I found out about love busters from our counselor and she is going through the book with us. Might want to just start calling around and asking if anyone is familiar with the books and if they base their counseling off the books or if they would be willing to go through the book with you and your spouse.

$1000 is pretty steep for most people. i wish we could afford it.

A thousand dollars IS a lot of money.

But we went through a private counselor years ago at $85 a session. For $1000 that would have been about 12 sessions, which turned out to be unhelpful. We thought it was helpful at the time, but it didn't serve to build love or to protect our marriage from future infidelity.

Going through our insurance company would cost a co-pay of $35 (to see a specialist.) That would give us about 28 sessions. The problem is that most of the MCs are not helpful to marriages. I'm sure they try to be. But they just don't know how to restore love to a marriage. And they don't understand how adultery works.

But if the online program and the coaching is more than a couple can afford, and if the couple will be disciplined, then getting the books and following through is a good step to take. Some people have a hard time with the follow through.

Read this.
How To Find a Good Marriage Counselor

Yes follow through and motivation are difficult.

Why is it so pricey?! $225 for one phone call? How is that even realistic for families in this economy? Ugh. Anyways my h did agree to watch the DVDs at least. I'm hoping to find a local counselor who follows this program. It's the only one that makes any sense & I've been married 16 years. I wish I had this info sooner.

Can you afford the workbook 5 sreps to romantic love?

Also if you email the radio show and ask them a question they will send you a free book.

Email your questions to Joyce Harley at mbradio@marriagebuilders.com.

What would you like help with? There is so much free information here on the website that we can help you with.

So how can we help you?

Dr. Harley's online program is really a bargain compared to the coaching center. You get access to Dr. Harley directly on his private forum and a coach trained by Dr. Harley to assist you through the program, covering every aspect of what is needed to have a good marriage.

That's not to minimize the great work done by the coaching center, which is staffed by Dr. Harley's son and daughter, both great marriage counselors themselves. It's just that if price is a concern, you might want to go straight to the online program.

We did some of both.

And there is so much free stuff here. Look into the radio show. Dr. Harley gives away a free hour of counseling every day. I don't know how the man stays in business! He must make it up in volume, or something. Seriously, I have listened to hundreds of hours of Marriage Builders radio, and it is fantastic, and nearly all of it has proved relevant to me and my wife learning to put this program into practice. And you can email Dr. Harley and talk to him on the show free, and he and his wife Joyce will send you a free book.

Access to past shows is also very affordable.

There are also free videos on this site, and enough articles to fill a Library of Congress.

Plus, there is this forum, where many of us who have paid thousands of dollars for Marriage Builders books, coaching, seminars, etc., are willing to share all of that with you for free, on our own time, at our own expense.

Please give all of these a try.

Care to start a thread and share your situation, to see if we can help you?

The other thing to realize about the price of a phone call with Steve Harley or Dr. Jennifer Harley Chalmers is this: you truly get what you pay for. And you are paying for the best of the best. Trained by Dr. Harley himself, both Steve and Jennifer have good marriages and are in a family that has had good marriages for generations. They have counseled hundreds of couples. Jennifer helped Dr. Harley write his book Surviving an Affair.

Every dollar we spent with other counselors was wasted, I'm sorry to say. We saw three before we came to Marriage Builders.

Steve and Jennifer also know how to be efficient with the time they are spending. Other counselors might keep you there for years, whereas Dr. Harley's methods typically take 6-8 sessions unless there are problems with somebody refusing to do the assignments. Dr. Harley learned decades ago that he had to be highly organized and efficient to make the best use of his time in his sessions; he details this information in his book on Marriage Counseling, and he has passed it on to his son and daughter.

How Marriage Builders coaching differs from other Marriage Counseling:

First of all, the goal is romantic love, which most other counselors will claim is lost after a few years and can never come back:

http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi8118_real.html

Second of all, they use an organized approach for a proven plan to achieve this goal:

http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi7100_counselor.html

This is another excellent free resource.
How to create your own plan to resolve conflict and restore love

One of the reasons the Marriage Builders website exists is to help people who cannot afford counseling. The coaching center is there, but it is in high demand, hence the high price. But theoretically, any couple could follow the program on their own, and there are plenty of couples who have done that.

At a bare minimum, with the books His Needs, Her Needs; Love Busters; and Five Steps to Romantic Love (workbook), you have essentially the entire Marriage Builders program at a very affordable price (I think that comes out to less than $60). Using the workbook as a guide, work through the books, fill out the worksheets, institute the practice of the suggested worksheets, and if you do everything recommended, at the end you will have a happy marriage. Again, failure to follow the assignments may become the problem, and in that case you might need some more help. But tell us more specific information about your circumstances, and we can let you know how likely that will be.

Supplementing that basic program with the free radio show, the free articles on this site, and this free forum could be a killer solution to most marital problems.

At an even barer minimum, the book Fall in Love, Stay in Love describes all the essentials of Dr. Harley's program in one volume.

Most marriage counselors we talked to were aware of some of Dr. Harley's books, but they were proud of their "eclectic" approach, meaning they combined material from many different sources to make their own "unique" approach. They were always so proud of this.

And they always failed to help our marriage. We went to three.

We would've been better served to spend our time and money dating.

For a year of traditional marriage counseling, I'd suggest anyone buy a subscription to the radio archive here, and spend the rest of the money on dates. It would be better for their marriage!!! Your average marriage counselor makes all kinds of mistakes like having you constantly go over mistakes of the past (you don't have to resolve those in order to fix your marriage -- trust me -- I have plenty of them!!!) or counseling you in the same room together where you make massive love bank withdrawals. Not to mention trying to get people to stay together on bases that don't work (check the radio program link in my signature for a short clip of Dr. Harley talking about his early counseling failures, and his discovery of what worked).

The problem with looking for a local marriage counselor who completely uses the Marriage Builders approach is that there are very, very few. I won't say there are none, but the number is vanishingly small. And odds are, you will get a counseling approach that is tainted with lots of dangerous and unsubstantiated ideas.

How Dr. Harley Learned to Save Marriages

Most marriage counselors are still trying to do what Dr. Harley did in his early days as a counselor, when he was a failure. Dr. Harley took a scientific approach and studied marriages that were happily in love in order to find out what they did to achieve that. He has NEVER had a failure when both husband and wife have followed his program. It always restores romantic love, ALWAYS, when followed.

Some excellent posts on this thread. I think it should be added to notable posts!