LEE BAUCOM

Doctor Lee Baucom of Save the Marriage

dot com. He became disenchanted with the

efficiency of traditional psychotherapy just

as he was finishing his PhD in training. He

began to expand his approach at that time,

25 years ago, to include coaching,

paradigm theory, community building, and

mindfulness. Doctor Baucom expanded his

expertise into the new fields of resilience

and positive psychology; since then, he's

worked to help couples and individuals

have thriving lives and relationships. Now

Doctor Baucom refers to himself as a

thriveologist, admitting he could also do a

better job of thriving. After suffering a life-

threatening illness, he realized they

needed to make important shifts in his

own life.

Now he's the creator of several online programs

designed to save marriages and relationships, has

authored the best-selling book on marriage, has

created several videos on dealing with stress, and

shares two podcasts each week; one on

relationships, and one on thriving. He's married

with two children, and in his spare time he trail

runs, paddle boards, and scuba dives.

There are lot of things that he thinks, they're not

throwaways, but they're just kind of the world

stuff. What he’s most proud of, he guess, is the

relationships they have in their family.

The most part of watching his kids grow up, he’s

most proud of the relationship with his wife, he is

proud of the bestseller stuff and things like that,

but that for him, is kind of the background noise to

really having a thriving life. You've got to do these

things to get through life, but what he’s really

proud of are the relationships.

His wife is a therapist, also. A lot of people go, "Oh,

a few therapists. You must be doing the, “Oh, I

hear what you're saying, “kind of stuff.” But the

reality is that it's a lot easier to be a kind of

dispassionate person when we're dealing with

other people than when it's your own life.

People would come into his office and say, “You

know what? I've decided to quit my job,” and he

had no bearing. You know, nothing mattered what

they said, and he was able to say, “Sure. If that's

good for you, that's great,” but it's little different

within a marriage, so he thinks we have a great

marriage, but every marriage has its struggles.

One of the things that he often tell people is,

“One hundred percent of marriages are going to have difficult times.”

One hundred percent. About 50% are going to figure out

some way to work through them. He never said, “Oh,

you're going to have a perfect marriage.”

Every marriage has its struggles and that's where you learn, so he thinks we have an outstanding marriage, but we always have the places where we've got to figure out a new way to find that

smooth surface when we're rubbing each other a little bit raw. How to use that more like smoothing down would with sandpaper, and he thinks that's

just kind of the nature of marriage. He thinks that's where you learn about each other, and more than

that he think that's where you learn about yourself.

There's some research about that. He thinks a lot of the

research that really holds some water is, the spouse we find

is usually a combination of both the good and bad

elements, really of both parents.

Certainly there's influence from the opposite sex

parent; research shows that there's actually

more influence for women and their fathers

than for men and their mothers.

But he does think we tend to find somebody that

has some of those pieces there, unfinished from

childhood, and some of those places where we

felt most loved from childhood. He gets a little

worried when people boil it down to being that

simple, kind of a parent issue, because there are

also sibling issues and a lot of life experience

issues that affect that also.

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