Couples who invest a weekend or more in a leading evidence-based marriage and relationship skills training program can expect to leave the experiential class with a lifetime of benefits, including a better ability to:
- Identify needs and feelings and learn how to communicate them so that they get met without others feeling resentful, smothered, burdened, manipulated or inadequate.
- Recognize when the style of communication style is more of a problem than the problem.
- Communicate painful, upsetting feelings without destroying love and know how to accept and express anger comfortably and nondestructively.
- Recognize and deal with covert, indirect expressions of anger.
- Cope with either a fight-phobic or aggressive, hostile partner.
- Clear the air of strong feelings of fear, pain, or anger before starting sessions of problem-solving and conflict resolution.
- Negotiate in a way that you actually resolve the issue at hand — including problems related to sex, money, children, time (work and leisure), in-laws, ex-spouses, housework, fidelity and jealousy. Learn to fight for the relationship using a win/win approach, instead of the win/lose approach that makes losers want to withdraw emotionally or get even.
- Satisfy the biological need for bonding — that combination of physical closeness and emotional openness that humans nee.
- Clarify the need for bonding as distinct from needs for sensuality and sex; and add avenues of closeness beyond sex.
- Know and nurture self and others in ways that include recognizing, acknowledging, and enjoying differences rather than seeing them as a threat or attack.
- Recognize the different roles you and your partner play — the masks you don, the behaviors you assume in different moods and circumstances — and find out how they work, or don’t work together.
- Avoid the mind reading that so often leads to misunderstandings between couples; learn to make no assumptions and not to expect that “if you loved me, you would know …”
- Uncover the hidden expectations and defensive communication styles (learned through parental messages and family models) that may be sabotaging your relationship.
- Get your own needs met, so you are free to feel real empathy for your partner, instead of secretly resenting the role of caretaker or provider.
- Create a road map to a relationship in which you can both live joyfully.
