Dr. Wall Organizes His Blogs….Finally!

Dr. Wall straightens out his blogs so it’s a little easier to find the various series he’s done.   He breathes of sigh of relief.

After nearly a year and a half of regularly writing for this blog, the numbers add up.  Over 170 have been posted.  It’s hard to believe.  I’ve heard that Steven King writes 1500 words a day which is easily two books a year.  Discipline pays off.  Do something faithfully, consistently, regularly and pretty soon you have something to show for your labors.  I’ve appreciated the comments over these months (17 now) both in person and on the blog.  It’s been rewarding to see that many of my clients look to these blogs to help keep their focus in honoring and enjoying their marriages.  Several have told me they go back and re-read certain ones on occasion for encouragement.  Cool.

My hat goes off to my son, Marty, for his encouragement along the way.  As a father I’ve told my kids for years that God doesn’t steer a parked car.  In other words, get your butt in gear and keep moving and as you use you gifts and abilities, things will happen, doors will open.   When you use your God-given talent to be a blessing to others, God will use your generous spirit to bless you.  And now, after all of these years of planting these kinds of seeds, Marty is telling me the same thing.  Don’t worry, Dad, about how many blogs you have.  Just keep doing it.  Don’t worry about writing about the same topic.  Your readers are coming to you because you are writing about the topic that they need encouragement about.

At first I was a little concerned about running out of things to say.  I guess I needn’t have worried.  Actually, the writing process has helped me flesh out ideas.  I sometimes think I do this more for myself than for my readers.  That’s been an interesting twist.

Over these months I’ve done several series on different topics.  They’ve gotten lumped together on the Categories list and I’ve noticed it’s hard to differentiate them.  For example, I recently did a Five Part series on Communication, but if you tried to look up that series on the Category list, you’d get every article that was about communication, not just those five.  So in the last few weeks I’ve been lumping all the series together so that you, the read, can find them easily.  Again, my thanks to Marty for showing me how to do this!  He’s been our blog adviser behind the scenes.

Here, then, in summary form, is a list of the various blog series to date.  Click on the link for all of the blogs in the series.  Scroll to the bottom, then, to find the first one, as the blogs are listed with the latest one on top.  The oldest blog will be the first one in the series:

Five Part Series On Communication

In this series I look at mind reading, verbal and non-verbal communication, problem solving, anger and the not-helpful practice of forcing conversations.

A recent series that I’m in the middle of and plan to add more is on Sexual Desire.  There’s so much misinformation out there that leads to misunderstandings and hurt in marriages.  I see this every day in my office.  Sex is supposed to be this huge area of blessing for us and for many it is one of the major sources of hurt.  It’s hard to digest all we could say about it in a blog, so in a series I try to look at some of the extremes on either end of the spectrum and air some of the common concerns.  The first in this series is:

Part One On Sexual Desire: The Second Saddest Thing Said About Marriage

One of the most popular series to date has been the one comparing living as roommates verses living as husbands and wives.  This series grew to 13 blogs total.  The first one starts out pretty sarcastic and one reader chided me for being so mean.  My intent was to rattle people’s cages out of their comfort zone and to start taking their marriages seriously.  You avoid working on your marriage, you end up as roommates and roommates end up either hating each other or divorced or both, so let’s stop with the relationship laziness already and invest some time and energy to being everything wives and husbands are supposed to be:

Thirteen Part Series On Living As Roommates Verses Husband and Wife

One of my earliest series was on cohabitation.  So many in our our society are cohabiting without marriage, thinking that this will give them a heads up on their marriage and jump start their lives together and save them a ton of money to boot. NOT!  The research on cohabitation is scary and the net result is that cohabitation treats your future spouse as an afterthought and sets the stage for personal and couple habituation for years to come, habits that are hard to break once they start.  You think it’s hard to change your own personal habits?  Try changing a couple habit!  That’s where I come in!  For a lot of people, cohabitation starts them on the road to a lifetime of bad habits, setting themselves up for a many heartaches and for too many, terrible money problems, a rotten sex life, separate lives, severe trust issues and divorce and remarriage and divorce and remarriage or for a series of broke relationships.  Hey, you do this several times and it’ll play with your brain and you’ll turn into a weirdo, I promise.  One of my female cohabiting clients told me that my series on cohabitation was depressing.  Well, YEAH!  It is depressing.  You want misery?  Try getting something for nothing.  It’s called stealing and it doesn’t pay and only breaks the heart of the person stealing and the victim whose been stolen.  In cohabitation they are both stealing from each other for nothing and being stolen from.  And you aren’t supposed to resent that person?  HELLO!!  You can create your own private hell in no time.  The solution?  Get your butt in my office and work out your differences, find out how to build a life of trust and dependability together and then do the dependable, honorable thing and get your butts to the altar.  Pronto.  If you aren’t man or woman enough to promise til death do us part then you aren’t worth crap and you can quote me.  I wish you would.  For the entire series click here. For the first in the series see:

Dr. Wall starts a series on Cohabitation by exposing some of the unintended consequences of living together without marriage.  It’s not the road to happiness.

The news that Tiger Woods was leading a profligate private life put us all in a tizzy last winter.  I ended up writing 3 blogs on the lessons we could learn from his mistakes.  For the first see:

Part One: Two Lessons from Tiger

Al Gore’s announcement that he and his wife were splitting up after 40 years of marriage led to two blogs on my theories as to what could be behind long-term marriages ending up in the dumpster.  The first is:

Part One: Al and Tipper Gore: A Cautionary Tale

I also wrote a couple of blogs on Ben Roethlisberger on character and integrity.  The first can be seen here:

Lessons From Ben Roethlisberger: Character Counts, Part 1 of 2

Affairs and trust continue to be some of the biggest issues in my therapy office and, thus, in this blog.  A recent series on affairs addresses issues on healing for both the perpetrator and the hurt spouse.  For the first in this six part series see:

Part One On Healing From An Affair

Thanks for your interest in these blogs.  Keep checking back for updates.  I usually try to write and post 2 to three blogs a week, except when on vacation or during holiday weeks.  Sign up to get an email reminder when  a new one is posted and feel free to share ones that are helpful to you with your friends on Facebook, etc., or to make comments at the bottom of each blog.  Stay tune.  We’ve got some new changes in store.

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Dr. Bing Wall is a marriage therapist with a practice in Ames and Urbandale, Iowa.  To set up a time to see Dr. Wall click here or call 888-233-8473.  For more information about Dr. Wall click here.