1. It’s Your Ship, You’re the Captain: Relationship
education is about helping people find strategies and solutions that fit for
their unique circumstances, values and relationship goals. That includes
respecting their own personal responsibility for their success and the
decisions they make for their lives. Evidence-based skills training provides
techniques that are easy to understand and use to surface greater awareness of
what lies beneath the tip of the iceberg, navigate typical relationship
challenges, and overcome differences that are a natural part of any close
relationship.
2. One Mouth, Two Ears: Relationship education provides
safe, time-limited structures for conversations that matter, which are often
much more about listening than talking. Learning to actively listen with
empathy and respect to another person’s perspective and experience –without
judgment, defensiveness, blame, or an effort to quickly try to “fix” the issue
or the person — makes it safer for intimates to develop greater awareness of
themselves and each other.
3. Riding the Waves: Relationship education teaches
practical, usable skills for better understanding and safely expressing the
full range of emotions, including anger, sadness and fear. Upsetting feelings
held in eventually either implode or explode. Confiding painful feelings to a
significant other leaves more room to experience feelings of love, pleasure and
happiness. Just as the most powerful waves lose their energy when they break
against the shore, the same is generally true of emotions.
4. It’s Rarely the Problem that’s the Problem: Relationship
education enables distressed couples — with good will towards each other,
openness to learning, and a desire for the relationship to succeed — to deal
with differences and problems in ways that often lead to greater closeness,
understanding, acceptance and commitment. The issues that surface are typically
symptoms of communication breakdowns, hidden assumptions and expectations,
behaviors that come from holding in upsetting feelings, or lack of skills for
constructive conflict resolution.
5. Love is a Feeling: Relationship education helps people
develop their emotional intelligence, including understanding that feelings of
love come from the anticipation of pleasure in our interactions with others. If
instead of anticipating pleasure, we expect pain, feelings of love are unlikely
to survive, let alone thrive. What’s a pleasure changes during different stages
and passages of life. Sustaining feelings of love requires learning what it
takes in today’s circumstances to stay a pleasure in each other’s lives. And
doing it.
6. Marriage is a Contract: Relationship education recognizes
that although nearly all traditional marriage vows include the promise to “love
‘till death do us part,” the marriage contract itself cannot be dependent on
“feelings” of love, which naturally wax and wane. That doesn’t mean commitment
or obligations wax and wane. Emotions are affected by many factors, often
unrelated to issues inside our closest relationships. Marriage is the glue
that’s meant to hold couples and families together during periods of growth,
change and challenge that are natural part of life.
7. Relationships are Work: Relationship education is built
on the understanding that what happens in our closest relationships impacts
quality of life, fulfillment, happiness, and the ability to pursue cherished
dreams and aspirations. Relationships take regular attention. Without
intentionally nurturing relationships, it’s easy to become strangers, for
relationships to wither and become vulnerable. Beyond staying a pleasure in
each other’s lives, the work of an intimate relationship is to consistently
meet each other’s needs for bonding (emotional and physical closeness).
Relationship education provides a road map and usable skills for sustaining
healthy relationships that are an ongoing source of love, pleasure, happiness,
and fulfillment for both partners.
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*taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_education
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