Greetings! I’m Andy Atwood, the “Content Expert” for www.HopefulSolutions.net. The inspiration for creating this website came from my colleague and friend of more than 30 years, Bob Huizenga. Bob worked diligently for a few years to change his life after a personal crisis in his own marriage. In a heroic way, Bob let go of just about everything in his life. He moved into a simple apartment, eliminated his personal possession, and created a vacuum. In fact, Bob still challenges me with the “Vacuum Theory.” Empty your life and create a vacuum, and then you get to make new choices about what you allow back into your life. It is a way of redesigning your life, and Bob dramatically changed his. It was inspiring for the rest of us to watch. Six, sometimes seven days a week he worked from sunrise to sundown on his computer at our office. He tried one business model, and then another, and then a third… and then Bob stopped and asked himself, “What do I have personal experience in that I can use to help other people?” The rest is history. Go ahead and Google “affair” and you will find Bob’s website, www.break-free-from-the-affair.com ranked within the top sites. Today it is ranked 2nd out of 109 million. Bob took his decades of professional experience and wed it to the lessons he learned as he recovered from his own painful loss. Bob survived and is now helping others whose spouse has had an affair to learn from the experience and grow stronger. My son Dave is a computer guy. He went to Columbia College in Chicago for a few years in their Multimedia Program. Dave just gets the technological side of building websites. Years ago, when we started this all, publishing an ebook through www.clickbank.com was pretty straightforward. Today, with our own shopping cart, merchant account, blog, article submission program, affiliates, tracking systems… wow… it is all way too complicated for me. So Dave is our webmaster while also working at Circuit City and being a great husband and father. As for me, well I’m the “Content Expert” for our website. I grew up on Long Island and Northern New Jersey (always close to Manhattan) and then moved to Michigan to attend Hope College. It was there that I met Jan, my best friend and partner for almost 4 decades. We have two children, a wonderful son-in-law and a wonderful daughter-in-law, and two great grandsons! We have lived and worked in Grand Rapids since 1974, the year I co-founded the Fountain Hill Center for Counseling and Consultation. I was the Center’s Executive Coordinator for 30 years. You can learn more about us at www.fountainhillcenter.com. I’ve been to school; seven years post-college earned me two masters’ degrees and my doctorate. I’ve been a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Licensed Master Social Worker, and a Clinical Member of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (www.aamft.org) since 1980. From about 1974 until 1995 I worked forty hours a week providing therapy to individuals, couples, and families. In 1995 I began working some with Family Owned Businesses and in 2005 formed a partnership with my buddy Greg Kuhn. You can learn more about our consulting practice by going to www.Atwood-Kuhn.com. I’m out of the office three-days a week now working with larger family systems in large Family Owned Businesses. So why “sexless marriages”? In my career I have spent more than 62,000 hours sitting face-to-face with some of the most wonderful people and I have learned a great deal from them, and frankly, for them. I am a learner. When couples have presented specific challenges to me, I have gone out and studied and researched whatever it was I needed to know to help them. I made myself an expert in a number of areas. For more than three decades my practice has been sustained strictly by word of mouth; I’ve even taken my name out of the phonebook in order to control the number of people that call me for help. One area of particular interest became an area of specialty for me – couples that came to me with a lack of sex as a presenting problem. As I did my research and began working with couples I realized that few therapists really used the challenges facing sexless couples as springboards for deeper intimacy and profound personal growth. I couldn’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent working with couples around the many issues involved in a sexless marriage; it must be well into the thousands. “I believe that we have floundered in the struggle to save marriages because we haven’t understood that the struggle, done well, leads to profound personal and interpersonal maturity, and so, is entirely worthwhile.” That’s what I am about. I believe that a couple’s struggle with their sexual relationship can, and should lead to profound personal and interpersonal maturity. When a couple says to me, “We have the coolest relationship now, and you know… our sex is out of this world!” then I am pleased. You should know that I am also an “Integral Therapist.” Integral Theory has been developed most significantly by Ken Wilber (learn about him at www.KenWilber.com). I’ve been studying and applying Integral Theory since 1995, and it forms the backbone to the advice I offer through www.HopefulSolutions.net. I should also mention that Integral Theory informs all my clinical and consulting work because it, more than any other map of reality, provides a guide to great depth and profound intimacy. Most of the advice offered at on my website comes directly from my own study, research, and reflection on personal and professional experience. I also have invited some selected others to add their own tools and resources to the site. There is a lot of advice offered over the internet and none of it is quit like mine; I am a fan of marriage and a persistent coach who encourages people to use their marriage as a classroom in which the lessons of life can be learned. If you haven’t had enough of me yet, then go to www.AndyAtwood.com where you can learn a little more. Want some more FREE information? Go back to our homepage and visit my Blog. I believe sex is a window through which I can observe how a couple handles the challenges of intimacy. Sex is challenging in 5 ways, as you will learn if you dig into my thinking and advice. Work at those challenges in your sexual relationship with your partner and you will become a more mature human being. And, for having done so, you will be profoundly rewarded. Dr. Andrew D. Atwood, B.A., M.Div., Th.M., D.Min. |
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