the school for couples

Jack and I are trained counselors and Certified PAIRS Instructors. We’ve been married for 12 years. Our’s is a 2nd marriage for each of us so we know both the joy of love and the pain of divorce.

Today, we have a wonderful home and family, an outstanding circle of friends and a level of creative passion that years ago, we only dreamt about.

We want to help you experience the same kind of
magical relationship in your life!

We both married young, produced a family and stayed married a long time—but not happily. Our marriages were filled with conflict and distress and eventually we (me after 17 years, Jack after 27) divorced. We realized when we met several years later that we had each made the same decision on leaving our first marriages – that we would learn how to ‘do relationship’ before we married again.

Jack and I aren't the kind of people who tell others what to do while our own relationship is a mess.  We've been using the exact same relationship tools and concepts in our own relationship for the last twelve years.  

From what we’ve learned from the couples we've worked with, Jack and I suffered from many of the same relationship problems and challenges in our first marriages, that you suffer from today.
When we left our respective marriages, each of us chose to go into individual therapy. Believing that we had failed because there was something wrong with us, we sought to learn more about ourselves. And we did. However, as much as we had each learned about ourselves and our personal patterns, therapy didn't teach us how to create a successful new relationship. Personal insight can only take you so far. Independently (before we even met each other) we both came to these realizations. We realized that my 1st marriage failed largely because:

• We didn't know how to communicate honestly, especially about my feelings.
• We didn't know how to solve problems without blaming ourselves or the other person.
• Behaviour patterns we developed as a child (for survival) were now unnecessary and destructive patterns in our adult relationships

When we decided to marry, Jack and I realized that we would have to ‘do relationship’ differently if we wanted a different result than in our first marriages. Looking back, we realized that we had brought to our first marriages all that we had known about relationship – what we had been taught by our families and our surrounding culture. And that it hadn't worked!

So we knew that we would have to create a different paradigm for marriage—a whole new way of looking at marriage— if we were to create the kind of relationship that we wanted. Together, we committed ourselves to creating a relationship in which:

• Nobody blamed or criticized.
• We communicated clearly to each other about all our feelings and what we wanted.
• We shared responsibilities.
• We made time for being close to each other and for our own individual creative activities.

Years of intense learning and research followed. We worked with teachers both here and in the US. We went to college, attended workshops and professional trainings for Couples Counselors. We practiced what we learned. We fell down and got up - more than once. We discovered the tools we share with you at The School for Couples.

We weren't perfect by any means (and still aren't), so it took us the better part of four years to create the kind of relationship we'd originally envisioned. Old habits die hard, and both of us have a stubborn streak that would get a grip on us now and then, causing us to dig in our heels for long periods of a time.   

What really helped was the set of tools we acquired.

As we practiced using these tools, they gave us power over our old habits.   First, we were able to eliminate blame and criticism. This in itself was remarkable, because both of us had grown up in extremely critical families.

In the early years of our relationship, we considered it a cause for celebration if we could get through a whole day without blaming or criticizing each other. Now, after nearly thirteen years of using these tools, it's been a long time since either one of us has said anything critical or blameful to the other.
Then, we gained the ability to communicate clearly, keep our promises to each other and open the flow of creative energy in both of us.  These tools are the same ones we’ll teach you; the tools that helped us bring the relationship of our dreams into living reality.

You don't have to spend another day of your life enduring conflicts or struggles or just plain loneliness. At The School for Couples you'll learn to create all the love you want and deserve. We're very proud of our program. We've included everything you really need to know about relationships in it, along with the tools to bring the relationship of your dreams to life.