Coach Jaimee

I was unhappily married for 21 years and my marriage felt like a life sentence.

We had some happy and connected times, but overall I felt let down and misunderstood by my husband.

I concluded that I must have married the wrong man. 

This unhelpful perception simmered under the surface of our marriage and festered into resentment and deep discontentment.  I was not willing to consider divorce, due to my faith, and therefore I felt like a victim, trapped in a miserable marriage.

 I often felt lonely and used.

 I eventually accepted that I would probably never be happily married, and so I wasn’t. 

The emotional distance between us escalated after an abrupt and unexpected move back to Australia in 2014.  We had been living and volunteering on a remote island of Indonesia with our four young children and had planned to stay there for many years.  As foreigners we could not own land there, but my husband had spent three years building a house for us on the college property where we were working.

When we unexpectedly lost our visa, we also lost our home and our shared vision for the future.  

We had two days to pack our lives into six bags and leave. This gave us very little time to process and prepare for such a big move. 

I didn’t want to find myself in such a precarious and vulnerable situation again, so not long after returning to Australia, I enrolled in university to upgrade my qualifications in order to support our family financially.  Our youngest was only two at the time. 

I juggled study, working on-call as a student midwife and volunteering on the Bible college campus where we lived, while trying to mother four children and deal with the grief and trauma from the sudden move and the impact that had on our family. 

I was in full-blown survival mode, which took a real toll on my ability to connect with my husband.  I was stretched so thin that I felt I had nothing left to give him. 

This hurt him deeply, especially as he was trying to come to terms with the loss of his life’s vision, so he withdrew from me and found comfort elsewhere. 

This hurt me even more, and my resentment grew into hatred—and then indifference. 

He was often angry and I felt uneasy and unhappy at home, so I threw myself into my work and nurtured a friendship that gave me the love and connection I craved.

When I eventually reached out for help in early 2022, I was told that I was in an abusive marriage, which only fuelled my victim mentality and confirmed to me that my husband was to blame for our problems.  My counselor suggested I stop having sex with him until I felt loved.

This plan did not go well and led to us having a huge verbal fight that turned out to be the breakdown before the breakthrough. 

As we were calming down, we started talking and connecting openly and vulnerably.  He quietly admitted he did not want to grow old alone but that I was free to leave him if that would make me happy. 

When I heard him say that, my heart started to thaw, and for the first time I felt I really had a choice. I finally had a ‘get out of prison free’ card.

I spent the next few weeks seriously considering leaving my marriage. 

During that time, I came across Laura’s work and it was so different from the other books and advice I had found.  A glimmer of hope broke through my confusion and despair, and I realised I couldn’t break up my family.  I decided to get off the fence of indecision and indifference, and recommit myself to my husband. 

Unfortunately, he was on a different page by that point.  

So despite my renewed dedication to my marriage, and the inspiration from Laura’s podcast and books, the next year was incredibly painful for me.  I felt very insecure and uncertain about whether he still wanted to be with me.  It caused me enormous pain to see him giving priority, time, and attention to others over me. 

I became clingy and controlling, and started having massive panic attacks and emotional melt-downs. 

I didn’t recognise myself. 

Throughout all of this turmoil, I continued to stretch and experiment with the Six Intimacy Skills™ and with the support of private coaching, I slowly shed my victim mentality. 

At first, I assumed the Skills were a special formula that would change my husband—if only I could get them right.  But I gradually began to realise that the Skills were for me!  I learnt that I was responsible for my own happiness.  The Intimacy Skills helped me to become someone I liked and respected. 

Although I was clumsy and inconsistent in my practice of the Skills, gradually my husband warmed to me again.

I started off by talking less and listening to him more.

I expressed gratitude, had sex with him willingly, and started smiling at him again.  Smiling felt the strangest to start with because my face was so used to frowning!

I noticed he wasn’t as angry, and he started mirroring gratitude back to me. 

Then, one day in early September 2023, we were sitting in the sun having a cuppa, and out of the blue he thanked me for saving our marriage.  He thanked me for all the ways I had changed, and told me how much it meant to him that I was warm towards him and receptive to sex whenever he initiated it.

That felt like the pinnacle of my life! 

From then on, I sensed he was back—that he was fully committed to us again. 

A month later he told me how he had always wanted a wife who was happy and peaceful, someone who respected him, and that I had become that wife! 

Even though I haven’t lived the Skills perfectly, they have still worked! They have helped me to become the woman, wife and mother I want to be. It feels like a beautiful landscape has opened up before us. 

He often tells me how much he likes me now. He says I’m soft towards him and happy within myself, and that he loves being married to me. 

The feeling is mutual!

Things are relaxed, connected, and fun in our home. 

Our marriage is better than it has ever been!

And I am better than I have ever been, thanks to the Six Intimacy Skills, compassionate coaching, a patient husband, and the grace of God.