The 7 Stages of Marriage Workshop provides a practical timeline for understanding the journey and stages of marriage. Each stage has a set of missions that strengthen communication, passion, friendship, and addressing differences. Questionnaires will help you identify your stage as well as give you the missions for each stage and the exercises to help you master important challenges that all couples face. Discussion with your partner and other participants will highlight the normal issues of marriages. “Here’s my Heart” is a tool for establishing a safe way for sharing feelings and concerns. 

The benefit of this workshop is the freedom and hope you will gain when you understand the natural progression of marriage and intimacy. The workshop includes presentation, group discussion and private time for exercises. 

• January 20, 2010
  Tuesday, 7:00 pm - 9:30 pm in the Spring House, PA office

For more information or to register for this program, please contact Rita DeMaria, PhD at 215-628-2450.

Couples Communication Courses

The Couples Communication Course is a research-based approach to teaching couples (premarital, committed, or married) how to communicate effectively, manage conflicts without damaging closeness, and how to preserve and enhance commitment, friendship and intimacy. The premise is that it's not how much you love each other that makes a relationship or marriage work; it's how you resolve differences and preserve fun and sensuality that keeps a relationship strong. This one-day course uses teaching, videos, role-plays, group discussions and private coaching to educate couples in an atmosphere of informality and comfort. 

Communication Essentials - One Day Seminar

• February 20, 2010
  Saturday 9 AM - 4:30 PM in CFR's University City, PA office
  Course Leader: Chris Fariello, PhD, LMFT at 267-479-2388

Resolving Conflict - One Day Seminar
In this one day seminar you will learn how to identify and unblock emotional challenges that interfere with effective dialogue, how to establish loving patterns of emotional connection, and create empowering solutions to common relationship problems. The workshop will include lecture, exercises, and demonstrations of effective strategies to help your relationship grow.

• April 10, 2010
  Saturday 9 AM - 4 PM in CFR's Paoli, PA office 
  Course Leaders: Kerstin Miller, MDiv, LMFT at 610-889-0419, ext. 6 and Ray McDevitt, MSS, LSW at 610-558-4060, ext. 7

Strengthening Connection – One Day Seminar
This seminar is based on Sue Johnson’s ground-breaking book "Hold Me Tight", an effective approach that helps couples move from frustration and loneliness toward the creation of a secure loving bond. This one day seminar will provide a helpful roadmap to enhance the intimate connection by learning new ways to share feelings and needs and create a more loving connection. The class uses videos, role-plays, exercises, and group discussion to educate couples in an atmosphere of comfort and support.

For more information about these seminars or to register, please contact the leader of the class in which you are interested.

Council for Relationships offers workshops and seminars for couples who wish to explore and enrich their sexual relationship in a safe environment so that they can explore attitudes toward sex, improve communication skills around needs and wants, learn the language of sex, and learn ways to increase intimacy.

• Love, Sex, and Romance - A Workshop
  This 2-hour workshop will introduce you to the stages of love in intimate relationships and to the chemistry of romantic love. The emphasis of this workshop is to establish goals for improving romance, intimacy, and commitment.

• Creating a Passionate Partnership - One Day Seminar
  In this workshop you will learn the steps you can take and the skills you can learn to create passionate partnership and marriage in all its unique dimensions. Combining information, exercises, discussion and opportunities for individualized dialogue, the workshop will address essential tasks for creating a healthy, loving, passionate and transformative relationship, as well as outlining the possibilities for sexual pleasure in long term partnerships and marriages.

• Becoming Your Best Sexual Self:
  Rewriting Your Sexual Script - 1 Day Seminar
  Do you feel like there is something important missing from your sexual experiences? If your intimate encounters are less than fully satisfying, this intensive may have answers for you. Our everyday life is filled with messages and advice about regarding how our love life should be. Taken together, cultural, family of origin, friendship, and media influences are powerful forces on our personal lives and can lead to feelings of sexual dissatisfaction and inadequacy.

  This intensive has been developed to help you explore and identify unhelpful messages, relationship styles, and patterns of relating that you can change. Participants, individuals and couples will be empowered to create uninhibited intimacy in their lives, allowing them to free their sexual selves to engage wholly and fully in their relationship. The importance of mutuality as a guide to balancing giving and receiving within the dance of intimacy will be highlighted.

For more information about any of these courses, please visit CFR's website or call Rita DeMaria, PhD at 215-628-2450.

This workshop is for anyone who wants to understand more about how their unique family history provides legacies for living and shapes their individual strengths. Participants will learn how to use the genogram to create an action plan for growth and change.

For more information or to register, please contact Rita DeMaria, PhD at 215-628-2450.

Worldwide Marriage Encounter

"Worldwide Marriage Encounter offers a weekend experience designed to give married couples the opportunity to learn a technique of loving communication that they can use for the rest of their lives. It's a chance to look deeply into their relationship with each other and with God. It's a time to share their feelings, hopes and dreams with each other. (The weekend is Catholic in orientation and is expressed in the traditions and understanding of the Catholic Church. However, it is open to all faith expressions.)"  

For more information please call 800-456-8330. To make a reservation please call 610-449-1859 or you may register online from the Worldwide Marriage Encounter website.

Free Relationship Education Class Preview

Council for Relationships offers the best of nationally recognized relationship education programs available and has the most comprehensive program available anywhere in the country. These programs have proven success based on research and evaluation. Our programs, ranging from 2 hours to 120 hours in length, provide basic, intermediate and advanced skills for individuals and couples who want to strengthen, preserve and deepen their relationships. Privacy and a safe learning environment is a top priority in all of our programs. 

Our Previews are a free, no pressure opportunity to learn more!  While we have a wide range of programs at our various offices, our experienced workshop leaders are also available to lead programs at other locations throughout Philadelphia as part of our commitment to outreach and community services. 

To register, please contact Rita DeMaria, Ph.D., LSW, LMFT, Program Director at 215-628-2450.

Upper Dublin Lutheran Church (UDLC) Marriage Ministry

Weekend retreats in the Pocono's, Café for Couples, workshops, special sermons, monthly Couple's Relationship Club, and eight week courses in PAIRS - Practical Application of Intimate Relationship Skills, are all part of the Couple's Ministry at Upper Dublin Lutheran Church. Organized by the Couple's Relationship Team, these regular events are the way our congregation is more than a wedding blessing machine. We are a congregation that supports healthy vitalized relationships. Like all ministries at Upper Dublin, we invite and welcome all people to take advantage of what we offer.

For more information please visit UDLC's website or call 215-646-7999.

Getting The Love You Want: The Imago Couples Workshop
Presented by The Wissahickon Center for Relationship Therapy

"This workshop consists of five processes: re-imaging your partner, restoring empathy, restructuring frustrations, renewing romance and re-visioning the future. The weekend is composed of a carefully constructed blend of educational lectures and films, group discussions, self-exploration and writing work. You will learn new skills - ways to communicate that will allow you to truly see and hear each other with compassion, to melt anger and move through conflict to a place of profound connection and compassion. A significant portion of the workshop is spent practicing these new tools with your partner. While you are invited to share your insights and experiences within the larger group, all such sharing is optional."

For more information or to register, please contact Laura Marshall, LCSW, QCSW at 215-699-1238.

"The word Retrouvaille simply means 'rediscovery'. The program offers tools needed to rediscover a loving marriage relationship. Thousands of couples headed for cold, unloving relationships or divorce have successfully overcome their marriage problems by attending the program. The Retrouvaille Program consists of a weekend experience combined with a series of 6-12 post-weekend sessions over 3 months. It provides the tools to help put your marriage in order again. The main emphasis of the program is on communication in marriage between husband and wife. It will give you the opportunity to rediscover each other and examine your lives together in a new and positive way."

• February 12 - 14, 2010
  Malvern, PA

For more information please visit Retrouvaille's website or contact Bob & Joyce Gillespie at  302- 832-8044.

PREPARE/ENRICH Program:
Counseling Program by Life Innovations

Helping couples enrich their relationships, the PREPARE/ENRICH program is based on a set of five inventories that examine major relationship issues a couple may experience.  These inventories must be administered by a trained PREPARE/ENRICH Counselor and include 4-6 feedback sessions in which the counselor facilitates discussion between the couple based on their inventory results.

If you are interested in participating in the PREPARE/ENRICH Program, check with your local counselor or clergy person to see if they are already using it.  Or if you unable to locate a trained professional, visit the Find a Counselor page on the Life Innovations website.

Military Family Support Services:
Delaware National Guard Family Readiness Program

Delaware National Guard Family Readiness Program provides support, training, enrichment, social events, support groups, summer youth camp and array of services for military service members and their families. For more information please visit their website or contact Mrs. Frank Vavala, Advisory Council Chairperson at 302-326-7001 or CMSgt Dawn Peet, State Family Program Coordinator, at 302-326-7268.

Marriage & Family Builders/PREP Workshop

This workshop is a Prevention & Relationship Enhancement Program for all singles, cohabitating, dating, engaged & married. PREP is education, not therapy and is a research-based approach to teaching couples how to solve problems, manage conflicts without damaging closeness, and preserve and enhance love, passion, commitment and friendship. This skills and principles curriculum is designed to help people say what they need to say, get to the heart of problems, and increase their connection with each other. Program is available in English and Spanish. Please call for more information at (610) 299-0961.

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