Practical, Usable Skills to Help Couples and Families Thrive
Through PAIRS, you are invited to:
- Connect heart to heart
- Experience the transformative power of empathy, mutual respect and compassion
- Express, listen to and understand emotions
- Create a shared environment of emotional openness and honesty
- Reveal hidden expectations to avoid assumptions and misunderstandings
- Resolve conflict constructively, and
- Bond through emotional openness and physical closeness.
Independent research has shown that PAIRS results in:
- Restored, renewed, and revitalized relationships
- Higher levels of relationship satisfaction
- Reduced symptoms of distress and anxiety
- Greater commitment to a shared vision of healthy relationships, and
- Increased resilience built on improved quality of marriages, families and relationships.
PAIRS training focuses on:
- Experiential learning
- Transforming couples’ understanding of keys to healthy relationships, and
- Exploring and experiencing emotional, empathic communication in depth as foundational for well being.
From that awareness comes a fundamental shift that leaves people more fully in accord with possibilities for expanding connection, intimacy and creating an environment in which compassion and empathy are more likely to provide a foundation for deeper experiences of love, healing and acceptance for themselves and others.
This shift provides an opening for people to think and act beyond existing views and limits as they explore new possibilities for expression, understand and embracing differences through experiential exercises that frequently lead to rapid breakthroughs for relationships in any stage, particularly including highly distressed relationships.
The Program’s Format—Experiential Learning
PAIRS Level One Training is conducted in a group setting, with a PAIRS Consultant/PAIRS Trainer, over approximately 32 hours. Trainers are skilled, perceptive, effective, certified facilitators from various disciplines. They have multi-year experience delivering PAIRS to diverse audiences and consistently earning the highest evaluations from course participants. Since 1984, PAIRS programs have been successfully delivered throughout the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Australia and the Middle East.
PAIRS is conducted with respect for the lived expertise of the participants. The general format is straightforward: the PAIRS Trainer introduces an evolving body of principles, tenets, and “tools” represented by PAIRS and invites dialogue before beginning experiential learning that typically takes place in groups of two to four people.
New Possibilities for Relationships
As the program proceeds, participants internalize their experiential learning. New perspectives emerge through a process of thoughtful inquiry and reflection. A deliberate sequence of experiential exercises provides safety for vulnerability, personal growth, and self-discovery and gradually expands the participants’ ability to confide and listen with empathy, resulting in new ways and new perspectives from which to relate. Dialogue develops into thoughtful inquiries and discovery of “ways of being” that may have been unconscious. Those “ways of being” are highlighted for their potential to limit confiding, connection, understanding and empathy, which are the foundations for healing and growth within intimate relationships. Participants are guided to integrate new skills with “conscious competence.” New possibilities for closeness, problem-solving, and love emerge. Throughout the process, participants are encouraged to recognize that they can choose behaviors that greatly determine the joy, pleasure and happiness they experience in relationships, a recognition woven within each aspect of the workshop.
