In this episode of Extending Branches, Dr. Mike Courtney sits down with his wife, Doris Courtney, for the conversation he has been building toward for 20 years. After a series of affairs cost them their marriage, their finances, and their place in ministry, Doris was left living with her sister with no job and no idea what came next. This episode is not about what happened. It is about how she got through it.

Doris talks about becoming desperate, then becoming intentional. She shares the books, scripture, and music she used to crowd out the negative thoughts, the night she gave her sons back to God, and what she calls her transfer of trust, moving her identity and security off her husband and onto Christ. She also talks about the women across the country she counsels now, and why the hope is the same even when the outcome is not.

Extending Branches is a biweekly podcast from Branches, a nonprofit dedicated to helping people recover hope, find healing, and experience growth through Christ-centered mental and emotional care.

Thanks for joining us! You can find us online at branches.org.

In this episode of Extending Branches, Dr. Mike Courtney sits down with Tracey Robison, clinical director at Branches and his friend of more than 20 years, to trace the small decisions that shaped both of their lives. Tracey tells how a ninth-grade home economics assignment pointed her toward counseling, how a woman at her church insisted God wanted her at a conference she could not name, and how a 30-minute phone call with Doris Courtney led her to leave the private practice she thought she would keep until retirement.

They also talk honestly about trauma, including the things that happen to us that should not and the things we needed that never came. Tracey shares what changed in her counseling once she stopped relying on getting it right and started relying on God in the room, and how Branches has watched provision arrive at the exact number, over and over.

Extending Branches is a biweekly podcast from Branches, a nonprofit dedicated to helping people recover hope, find healing, and experience growth through Christ-centered mental and emotional care.

Thanks for joining us! You can find us online at branches.org.

In this episode of Extending Branches, Dr. Mike Courtney sits down with Brad White, men's minister and associate pastor at New Vision Baptist Church, for a conversation that starts as a reunion between two families who met around a lunch table decades ago. Brad shares how a call to ministry he felt as a teenager gave way to a career in aquatics and leadership with the YMCA, and how God used a wife's honest question, a pastor's phone call, and years of quiet preparation to bring him back to the work he was made for.

The second half of the conversation goes deeper. Brad talks openly about a pornography addiction that began in the fourth grade and followed him through college, engagement, and the first months of marriage, and about the day he finally told the truth to his father and his wife. He and Mike discuss why confession alone is not the finish line, what real accountability looks like, and how naming the patterns and planning for them can break a cycle that shame keeps intact. Brad is the author of A Little Book About the Big Lie of Pornography, linked below along with the resources he recommends for parents.

Extending Branches is a biweekly podcast from Branches, a nonprofit dedicated to helping people recover hope, find healing, and experience growth through Christ-centered mental and emotional care.

Thanks for joining us! You can find us online at branches.org.