Boris Kodjoe's inspiring devotion to mental and physical health

Actor Boris Kodjoe couldn't be happier with the relationship he's forged with his wife and family, and he admits he has therapy to thank for that.

In an interview with HuffPost Live on Friday, Kodjoe commended therapy as a means of gaining “objective perspective” in his marriage to his wife Nicole Ari Parker.

“For us, [therapy] was important because we were dealing with a lot of stuff first when we were newlyweds with [our daughter] Sophie’s birth defect and all the stuff that came at us,” he told host Alyona Minkovski.

“At the same time, we didn’t want to lose sight of each other. We were here first, and that relationship is really important because everything else falls into place around that. So we had to make sure that we stay present in each other’s lives and that we stay connected as a couple.”

Therapy also played a huge role in helping his family cope with the “trauma” of his daughter’s spina bifida, a neural tube defect with which she was born. To help raise awareness of the disorder, Kodjoe and his wife founded Sophie’s Voice, with the goal of eradicating spina bifida worldwide within the next decade.

“It’s a 75 percent preventable defect, which is a huge, gigantic number, and the key to that is folic acid,” Kodjoe said. So all women of childbearing age must be on folic acid at all times to protect themselves and their babies.”