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Spirituality
May 3 – 16, 2014
67
Book ‘No Longer Two’ helps couples BY TRACY HOUSE
Jennifer Miller wants to help empower couples by providing a guide to a how to have a happy and successful faith-based marriage. Miller has been a therapist for 11 years and a pastor for eight. Through her experiences she’s spoken to many couples about relationships and started to notice patterns. “The more that I started to research and back up what I was sensing in people and the message I was giving them, both as a therapist and a pastor, my husband kept encouraging me to write everything down. It’s been a collection of information, insights and wisdom I’ve gained over the past decade,” she says. She finally sat down last year and let all that knowledge and experience flow into the book “No Longer Two: A Guide to How God Created Men, Women and Marriage.” She says jokingly, “This is probably thousands of dollars’ worth of therapy in a $10 book. It’s everything I’ve ever told anybody about relationships.” Miller says she started to notice that women were complaining about the same things about their husbands, and men were complaining about the same things about their wives. “When I started listening, I started to realize what they were complaining about is that they were married to a man or that they were married to a woman. It wasn’t this specific man, it was just that
he was acting like a man and she didn’t understand that men are different than women and vice versa.” She says in a lot of instances she found herself explaining the basic gender differences to people. “That was all it took for light bulbs to go off and for them to realize ‘I need to quit expecting my spouse to think exactly like I did, to react to life the way I do.’” Miller backs up the differences she presents with brain science explaining women live life emotionally and men tend to be more aware of the external and focused on the task and getting things done. “If you think about women coming from the internal place and men coming from the external place, we actually balance each other out really well, unless we attack that difference.” She explains, “If you think about how God created us to be in families and be in tribes and to survive, it makes sense that’s why our brains are wired this way, and why we would be inclined to have these different abilities and different perspectives and how the Divine is actually genius. We’re all meant to make each other stronger, but we get in the way of that when we start attaching values and judging each other for being different.” Helping couples to understand differences and turn toward each other instead of against one another is what Miller is hoping to accomplish with her book and through her marriage retreat. She says the book is meant for single
people as well as married people. Because of the feedback she’s received, Miller has also developed three free study guides for the book; One for singles, one for dating or engaged couples and another for married couples. Couples don’t have to read the book together, Miller says. “It’s really about understanding yourself and then learning to appreciate your spouse, realizing how your differences are meant to come together.” She states, “The book is called ‘No Longer Two’ because the key to marriage is oneness—figuring out how we fit together and work together. It is shifting from being about ‘me’ to being about ‘we.’” Miller and her husband will be hosting a No Longer Two Marriage Retreat Aug. 15 through Aug. 17 in Oracle. The Christianbased retreat will be limited to 10 couples to keep it personal and intimate. “We really want to bring what is written on the page and bring it to life,” Miller says. “My husband and I are coleading it, so it’s going to be designed for a couple to learn together but then experience something as a large group and then have opportunities to break off and do something, just the two of them to reinforce and bring to life that experience.” Miller is the co-executive director of The Center for Living Well, a nonprofit Christ-centered wellness ministry that offers programs that helps people find health and healing in mind, body, heart and spirit. The Center for Living Well is
AUTHOR, AUTHOR: Jennifer Miller, author of “No Longer Two: A Guide to How God Created Men, Women and Marriage,” is married to her high school sweetheart, Brandon, and lives in Chandler with their two boys, Nathaniel and Samuel. Submitted photo
located at 1655 W. Chandler Blvd., Suite 5, Chandler. “No Longer Two: A Guide to How God Created Men, Women and Marriage” is available on Amazon.com. For more information about the book, the retreat or The Center for Living Well, visit www. centerforlivingwell.org or www.nolonger2. com. Tracy House is the news editor for the SanTan Sun News. She can be reached at tracy@santansun.com.