for Engaged Couple and Newlyweds

Start Your Marriage on the Right Path

Open to all Brooklyn College and other CUNY Staff & Students

" Explore your expectations and your relationship style
" Strengthen your relationship skills
" Make plans and set goals to build the marriage you want

Give yourselves the best wedding present you'll ever get by attending this workshop. A skill-based marriage preparation workshop is the single most important investment you can make in the long-term success of your relationship according to the latest marriage research. Let us help you build a resilient marriage right from the start. Couples need every advantage to succeed in today's marriages. This workshop is a practical, fun, low-pressure experience. You'll experience the benefits immediately during the workshop and more importantly, you'll be planting the seeds for future growth. Not all marriage preparation is the same. Counseling by your officiant may not be sufficiently comprehensive.

Date: TBA

Sponsored by Brooklyn College Personal Counseling Program

E-mail Dr. Greg Kuhlman at Kuhlman@brooklyn.cuny.edu or call 718-951-5174 for inquiries & reservations

Free and Confidential

Leaders

The workshop will be led by Patricia Schell Kuhlman and Greg Kuhlman, Ph.D.

Is Pre-Marriage Preparation for You?

The short answer is a resounding YES. Pre-marriage preparation is for EVERYONE (or at least three-quarters of everyone). Why? Because half of all marriages end in divorce and only half of those that do not are truly happy in the long run. If you count on your luck to make your marriage a success, your odds are only one in four. But what choice do you have?

Most couples just don't realize that good, skill-based pre-marriage counseling or classes can reduce the risk of divorce by up to thirty percent, lead to a significantly happier marriage, and reduce the stress of the pre-wedding period according to marriage research. Just a little effort now can make your odds a whole lot better over the long run. You want to do everything you can to ensure that your dreams of a great marriage and a great life are realized.

Pre-marriage preparation is based on the reality that it's important to strengthen your relationship and prepare constructively for future challenges and conflicts that everyone will inevitably face at some point in their marriage, now while you have so much fresh positive energy in your relationship. Don't stick your head in the sand. The research shows that there is a window of opportunity during the year before the wedding and the six months or so after when couples get the optimum benefit from marriage preparation. Later, under stress, negative habits and relationship patterns can become established and be much harder to resolve.

A lot of couples rely on their relationship experience with each other (including perhaps living together) to prepare them for marriage. Surprisingly, research shows that this experience doesn't help them to make a successful transition to married life. They can be blindsided by the unexpected intensity of the challenges they encounter after the wedding. Marriage can be a haven for partners to restore and revitalize themselves or it can become just another demand on their energy in an already pressured world.

Couples now face more demands and have fewer supports than ever before. The typical complex marriage - managing two careers while rearing children - really requires that couples have very strong, well-established abilities to communicate, resolve issues, maintain mutuality and set goals. Without this foundation, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by stress and time pressures. Problems can intrude much more easily than most couples realize. Couples need every advantage to succeed in today's marriages.

What Is Pre-Marriage Preparation?

Most commonly, those couples who do receive some premarital counseling get it from their religious adviser. This can range from one or two meetings to an extended series of sessions. Sometimes an assessment inventory and skills training are included, often they are not. Non-religious professional counselors also provide premarital counseling services. Again, the content and amount of service depends on the orientation of the counselor and what you ask for. Often it doesn't cover all the preparation that couples need.

Marriage preparation classes or workshops are an alternative or supplementary approach to educating engaged couples and newlyweds in the skills, habits, attitudes, and enrichment techniques that research shows lead to happy, enduring marriages. Such marriage preparation programs, are education, not therapy. You might consider them in many ways analogous to career counseling. They address the normal issues and challenges that all couples face in the course of their marriage. Some people think that marriage preparation is well on the way to becoming as commonplace as driver's training or test preparation.

Susan Piver's, The Hard Questions: 100 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Say I Do is on the bestseller list. A marriage prep program can give couples the benefit of a supportive environment and framework in which to ask these questions and some skills to deal with the answers.

Whatever marriage prep couples choose - religion-based or religion-neutral, counseling or class -- should include activities to give them real skills, real expectations and real knowledge of self and partner to face the inevitable challenges of a committed relationship.

Schedule

The date of the workshop will be arranged to accommodate the schedules of as many of the couples who wish to participate as possible. If you are interested in taking the workshop, let us know asap about your schedule preferences. The workshop takes the entire day--probably 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. with a lunch break.

Workshop Rationale

A satisfying, enduring marriage is one key to a lifetime of happiness. Love alone is not enough to produce a wonderful marriage. Over time, all marriages evolve—pass through stages—and face challenges. Everyone knows that successful marriages require commitment and work. But even these are not enough to ensure the marriage you want.

What can you do to make sure that your marriage will grow stronger over time? That life’s challenges will serve to temper its strength and deepen your intimacy?

The key to building a wonderful marriage is not a secret. But surprisingly few couples understand all, or even most, of the ingredients that make for success. Do you know the stages that all marriages experience? The seven knowledge and skill areas that maximize long-term success in marriage?

Workshop Overview

The Marriage Preparation Workshop is a comprehensive program designed in accord with the latest research findings to help you achieve your marriage goals. The workshop is for engaged couples, couples considering marriage, and recently married couples. These couples are in the window of opportunity where they can most easily benefit from the workshop. Before challenges build up or become entrenched and before the demands of career and childrearing have intensified.

During the workshop, you and your partner will work together to learn about your relationship compatibility profile, to strengthen your relationship skills and to plan long-term strategies to promote growth and address areas of challenge. The program covers all seven knowledge and skill areas that research has shown to be essential to successful marriages.

Every individual and couple is unique. The workshop is not a one-size-fits-all program. The individualized nature of the program will help you focus on the areas where your relationship can benefit most. We guarantee that you’ll experience new areas of intimacy during the workshop. The workshop will excite and inspire you as it deepens the bond between you.

Unlike some other marriage preparation, the workshop is not a presentation or lecture format. The workshop is a relaxed, fun, inspiring experience. the workshop will actually lead you and your partner through the process of working together to begin building the customized relationship skill set that’s right for you and that will serve you for a lifetime.

How can this be done in one workshop? The workshop helps you to plant the skill seeds that will grow over time to enrich your marriage. Marriage research shows that a single workshop can produce long-term results. You’ll see results right away. But more important, you’ll see these results continue to blossom over time. Your relationship will grow now and keep on growing. And that’s what makes a great marriage.

The Philosophy Behind the Workshop

· Learning should be fun and relaxed
· Marriage preparation works best when based on research
· Each couple is unique, so the training must help them to focus on their own needs, vision and goals
· Every relationship can and must grow over a lifetime as it passes through natural stages

What You’ll Get from the Workshop

Research has identified seven specific areas of relationship skills and knowledge that contribute to successful marriage. The workshop builds your skills and knowledge in each of these areas and others by helping you to:

· Identify and enhance your relationship strengths
· Better understand yourself and your relationship style
· Better understand your partner’s background and style
· Understand your relationship compatibility profile
· Explore your expectations
· Set key relationship boundaries
· Accommodate your personality styles
· Appreciate gender issues that affect your compatibility
· Understand family-of-origin issues that impact on your relationship
· Strengthen your relationship skills, including conflict management, resolution and consensus building abilities
· Select the set of strategies and skills that work for you and your style
· Identify areas that need change
· Apply your own style and new skills to key relationship issues and challenges (including sexuality, finances, family-of-origin issues, personality and style conflicts, etc.)
· Avoid unhealthy or destructive relationship habits and behaviors
· Identify and develop attitudes and approaches that enhance intimacy and promote growth
· Deepen intimacy and enhance sexual compatibility
· Plan long-term strategies to build on strengths and address areas of challenge
· Plan long-term strategies to address the issues associated with the normal stages of marriage

In addition, you'll find that what you learn about your style and many of the communication, conflict management and other skills that you learn in the workshop will enhance your effectiveness in work and other social situations.

The workshop will provide:

· A relaxed, collaborative atmosphere for learning about yourselves
· An exciting, inspiring, fun experience that will motivate you to learn and internalize new relationship habits
· Encouragement to augment your strengths while building confidence to address challenges in a healthy way
· Accommodation for a broad range of relationship and learning styles—acceptance of individual differences within and between couples
· A format that allows couples to focus on their own needs and goals
· Support to discover, complete and follow your own vision of what you want your marriage to be
· A personal workbook that will track and record your the workshop experience
· Warm, caring workshop leaders who share examples from their own married life
· A sense of humor about the challenges of marriage and all the advice about marriage
· Religion-neutral content
· A first-class marriage preparation experience that covers all the bases

Workshop Structure

The workshop is carefully designed to provide the right environment to maximize your learning and skill acquisition. Each workshop is limited to five to eight other couples. Warmth, support and enthusiasm are the defining features of the workshop experience. The workshop is a here-and-now experience that helps you and your partner integrate marriage success skills and begin a personal and relationship growth process that is difficult to initiate on your own.

The workshop is structured to accommodate the diverse learning styles of different couples. Some people are highly participative learners, while others are more laid-back. Some are cognitive learners, while others are more emotional. It’s not at all unusual for the individual partners in the same couple to have different learning styles. The workshop has a role for each style and optimizes the benefit for each individual and couple. The workshop is a secure, safe place for learning. No one will be pressured to do anything that makes them uncomfortable. Participants who are less outgoing are not disadvantaged and can still enjoy the excitement of the engaging format.

The workshop uses many different approaches to cover the broad array of issues. Among these are structured dialogues between partners, discussions in supportive groups, guided exercises, and question and answer sessions. Each session is concluded with a leader summary that helps you to internalize the key points covered. Research has shown that this combination of experiential and cognitive learning is the most effective. You’ll also have the opportunity to ask questions individually during breaks.

You are never required to share anything personal about yourself or your partner, although you’ll be invited to participate in discussions and to ask questions when you wish to do so. No one is required to participate in any exercise. You’ll always be free to observe quietly, if you prefer, without being disadvantaged in any way. Everyone who participates in the workshop agrees to keep the proceedings confidential.

Pre-Workshop Relationship Inventory

After enrolling, each couple will complete a comprehensive relationship inventory that will help them to take stock of where they are now. In any learning process self-assessment is an important beginning. The inventory covers your values, expectations, personality, experiences, communication and conflict management styles. The inventory findings, which compare your profile with that of your partner, help you to understand your compatibility profile, including areas of strength and challenge.

The results are completely confidential and private. Only you and your partner will know your findings. You will not be asked to share any of these results, but they will be essential to you and your partner in the course of the workshop. In addition to many other benefits, your individual and couple profiles will enable you to customize your participation in the workshop. The results will guide you to identify and focus on your specific needs right from the beginning of the workshop.

We hope to meet you at the workshop.

Patty & Greg Kuhlman

Personal Counseling
Brooklyn College
2900 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11210-2889

Email: Kuhlman@Brooklyn.Cuny.Edu
Voice: 718-951-5174
FAX: 718-951-5734
WWW: pc.brooklyn.cuny.edu

Revised: 9/15/03