Read this before the rest

This course teaches skills for two people who are both trying. Those skills are not safe everywhere, so there is a gate before the door, and it is here rather than buried at the end.

Read this list. You are afraid of your spouse. You change what you say to avoid a reaction. You have been hurt physically, even once. You are not allowed to see people, hold money, or go out alone. Your phone or your movements are checked. You have been threatened. Sex happens when you do not want it.

If any of those is true, stop here. Not because your marriage is beyond help, and not because anyone is telling you what is happening in your home. It is a mechanical problem. Where one person is controlling the other, communication skills hand that person a better script, and anything you say honestly in a shared exercise can be repaid afterwards, at home, where nobody is watching. That is not a small risk. It is the reason clinicians screen every couple before any joint work.

There is another course for that, called When home is not safe. It is recognition and routing, it teaches no technique, and it will not tell you to leave. Go there instead, and come back to this one another time if it turns out to be the right one.