WELCOME TO THIS SEVEN PRINCIPLES CLASS
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work is the acclaimed culmination of four decades of research made widely available for couples like you who long for better relationships. Congratulate yourself for taking time to begin or continue your journey of deep and loving partnership.
Our goal for you is simple:
To strengthen your relationship.
The main goal of The Seven Principles Couples Program is to help couples strengthen their relationships in a variety of ways including deepening their love maps, fostering fondness and admiration, facilitating turning toward each other, accepting influence, solving solvable problems, overcoming gridlock, creating shared meaning, and maintaining gains. This is considered a program for relationship enhancement.
The Seven Principles Couples Program is appropriate for couples contemplating engagement, or pre-marital couples, for couples living together, and for couples who have been together or married for decades. Contemplating marriage, or being married is not a requirement, this class is also appropriate for any couple in a committed relationship.
Psycho-educational classes are not appropriate for all couples, including those with severe relationship distress, significant emotional or physical abuse, serious emotional or mental health problems, relationships where one or both partners are actively addicted to drugs or alcohol, and relationships with serious compulsive behavior with gambling, sexual acting out, and other disruptive behaviors. If you are seeking couple's therapy, please feel free to contact us to set-up couple's therapy, rather than attend a seminar.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE CLASS
Will we have to share our personal problems and issues with the class?
No. The class does not include sharing problems or issues publicly. Couples Exercises are done privately.
Must both partners attend or can I come alone?
Since the class involves couples doing exercises together, both partners must participate. If the class is offered over a period of time and one partner must miss a particular class meeting, then the other partner is encouraged to attend the lecture portion of the class. He or she may use the Couples Exercise time to do part of the exercises and then do the full exercise with their partner later. They may also use exercise time to read the Seven Principles book.
My partner isn’t a reader. Can we still come to the class if he/she won’t read the book?
Yes, still come to the class. While the book provides very valuable information, the class lectures will summarize the content of the book. Each person will need a Couples Guide, however, to do the Couples Exercises efficiently.
Should we do the exercises in the book at home or save them for class?
The class will involve doing some of the exercises from the book so doing them first at home would duplicate some of them. In some cases, the directions for doing the exercises in class have been revised and updated from those presented in the Seven Principles book. The Leaders also role-play how to – and how not to – do some of the exercises in order to help participants get the most out of each exercise. There are some exercises in the book that the class will not have time to do, and couples are encouraged to do them at home after that chapter has been covered in class.