Inspiring Conversations with Dr. Glen Hong of 12 Week Relationships

Today we’d like to introduce you to Dr. Glen Hong.

Dr. Hong, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
In terms of my background, I am a doctor of psychology, a full-time professor and a department chair, and I have spent over 20 years of my life providing traditional counseling services in a private practice setting. During this time, I balanced my life between direct patient care and at the same time, teaching undergraduate and graduate students who were seeking to become therapists and clinicians themselves. I have also written 2 clinical textbooks that are being used throughout the United States, have written a book called Upside Down that focuses on relationship trauma and have written for various news outlets that include Newsweek, Authority Magazine and Wellbeing Magazine. The point is, during this time of my life, I had the so-called “credentials” to understand and speak upon how to make healthy relationships work. The problem though was that even with all of these credentials and all of my clinical training that I had, my marriage was still suffering, And honestly, we were on the verge of divorce.

I was always able to navigate with my wife the individual issues and pains that we both brought to the relationship, but once there, we never really knew how to navigate forward in terms of cultivating and establishing a healthy relationship. And this was the consistent issue with traditional therapy, is the assumption that once you fixed yourself, you would automatically know how to have healthy relationships moving forward. Once I began to humble myself and accept that the traditional counseling space did not have all the answers that I needed, I made the decision to leave traditional therapy all together. From there, I began a journey of opening myself up to seeing life and relationships in a more holistic way. I did not care about traditional credentials anymore, and my only focus was seeking out individuals and perspectives who could provide real answers that I was looking for. I sought out spiritualists, coaches, healers and other experts in the relationship field, and to my surprise, what I was looking for was found through my next door neighbor!

My neighbor and eventual business partner Pye, is a wedding photographer, educator and entrepreneur who has multiple successful businesses. We ended up meeting each other through another neighbor of ours introducing us, and we just clicked. I shared my frustrations about traditional counseling and my journey for answers regarding my own marriage, and he shared his story about how he stayed in an unhappy marriage for years, went through a traumatic divorce and eventually turned his life around to have a successful relationship now. And on top of that, he also shared that he wrote a book on relationships and wanted me to read it and to try and prove it wrong. I was a little skeptical but I was open to seeing his perspective. After reading it, I shared my excitement about what he had created, and I discussed with him how this could actually be integrated and formed into a working therapy model. Pye through his work had created a logical roadmap, but it needed the emotional components to help individuals to navigate their healing. It was then that we decided to take our passions and form our business partnership together.

This was the beginning of how 12-Week Relationships was formed!

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I wouldn’t call this so much a challenge but the goal was to make sure that we had a truly authentic product. It was my personal desire to honestly assess and take what worked in traditional therapy, identify the components that did not work in traditional therapy and improve upon it, and take the roadmap that Pye had created through his work to integrate it into one cohesive and comprehensive model. The work was extensive, but when we were doing the work on ourselves, and especially when I started to see real change in my own marriage, I knew that we had created something really special.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about 12 Week Relationships?
Our motto is “Better relationships in weeks and not years.” What we do is not traditional therapy or counseling, but it is relationship coaching that offers an evidenced-based approach to relationship psychology, that is proven to help people create better relationships period!

We offer individual and couples sessions where you would be working directly with me because you are seeking a personalized experience to get the answers that you need now. We also have group coaching sessions run by myself and Pye, where through a built-in community, you are able to navigate the relationship answers that you seek while also receiving emotional support from your peers.

When we were in the infancy stage of this process, I gathered my research team and after putting our efforts together, we took over 600 case studies, five years of writing and development, peer review work and refinement from our research, over 20 years of clinical and academic experience, and over 20 years of framework and education, and put our model together.

We went to clinical trials to test and make sure that we had a viable product, and over one and half years later, here we are! Within six months of being launched, 12-Week Relationships was receiving praise and peer recognition as we had over 350,000 podcast downloads, 135,000+ Instagram followers, 200,000+ Tik Tok followers, and television and podcast invitations.

However, for all of our success, our biggest flex is the success of our clients!

We are so proud and grateful for what 12-Week Relationships has become.

Have you learned any interesting or important lessons due to the Covid-19 Crisis?
When it comes to Covid-19, I think it forced everyone including me to reassess my life and to focus on what is really important. This literally made me refocus on the basics of life which was my health and my relationships. There is that saying that your “health is your wealth” and there is nothing that ringed more true during the pandemic. Also, because of the health and safety protocol to quarantine, it also emphasized the importance of relationships and how much meaning it has in our lives.

I really used that time to reconnect and to prioritize the relationships that really mattered to me. I also became more introspective and accountable to myself in terms of defining the life that I want to live. And even though things are back to a more normal way of life now, these lessons continue to stay with me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://12weekrelationships.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/12weekrelationships/?hl=en
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpzPXnGXtb0UKpxx3KnUBnw
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/discover/12-week-relationship?lang=en

Image Credits
Photos taken by Anthony R. Kim