A seminar that teaches couples skills to strengthen their marriages will be held next weekend at Lake City Church. The seminar features Dr. John Van Epp, the author of the book How to Avoid Marrying a Jerk. The seminar is sponsored by the Madison Marriage Ministry Task Force.
The Task Force was formed a half dozen years ago after a large number of Madison area pastors signed a covenant to better prepare couples for their marriage relationship. They committed themselves to provide better pre-marital counseling so that couples had the communication skills to help them survive the inevitable rough stages of their relationship. Similar covenants have been signed in communities across the country and in many of those locations the divorce rate has dropped dramatically.
The Task Force currently contains eight members, representing a variety of local churches, both Protestant and Catholic. Beverly Hartberg, who is retired from her former position of Associate Director of Family Ministry for the Madison Catholic Diocese, currently chairs the task force.
Dr. Van Epp has a PhD in counseling psychology and is licensed in the state of Ohio as clinical counselor.
Dr. Van Epp’s website, http://www.nojerks.com provides some hints as to what next weekend’s seminar will focus on. It contains a graphic that depicts what he calls his Relationship Attachment Model (RAM), which is the focus of his seminar. In an interview with madisonchristians.com, Dr. Van Epp eplained the significance of the model and how it originally was formulated.
The model shows five sliders that change position. Those levels go up and down and represent the five primary connections or bonds that contribute to the overall level of love and closeness. The higher trust, the higher the bond, the higher the level of commitment, the higher the bond, etc.
The point is that you can have these become out of balance with each other. Then people may be confused about their relationship. They end up having mixed feelings. Ideally these levels should keep growing together. For a long term relationship, a couple should keep working to put them to the top.
MC: So that’s what you’ll be focusing on at your seminar in Madison?
Exactly. My program has five sessions, one on each of these five areas. What are the communications skills, how do you keep trust and respect. How do you forgive each other when trust is broken, how do you rebuild it? The third one is on meeting each others needs. I have ten categories that represent what couples do together: social activities, romantic activities, etc.
Obviously we don’t always have these things always in balance. The program teaches couples how to monthly take four steps, which includes having a meeting together and looking at these five areas. This way they can stay on top of their relationship.
MC: So if a couple has been to relationship seminars, other marriage seminars, would this be significantly different?
Yes. I have not yet found any marriage course or book that teaches couples a visual representation of their relationship. Most programs tend to be skill-based, or they focus on the differences between men and women. Both of those things are important, but they only focus on part of the picture. What I’ve found is that many programs don’t really empower the couple to feel like they’re running the relationship.
This gives them a very simple, but deep, picture of what their relationship really consists of. It’s how well they know each other, trust, meet each others needs, keep the commitment strong, and fulfill each other sexually.
It gets translated to this easy-to-use monthly meeting, giving them an agenda they can use to look at their relationship every month. To be honest, couples that have a pretty good relationship already do that informally. The vast majority of couples don’t do it. When they finally get out, they say, "that felt so good, to get out without the kids, we’ve got to do this more often." But the reality is they usually don’t end up going out again for months.
MC: So you’re giving couples a map. They can pull the map out and see where they are in these different areas.
That’s exactly right, where is our relationship? Is there anything we need to talk about? That’s step one, they look at how they’re talking and what they’ve been talking about. Then step two is, do you feel like I’ve been appreciating and affirming you? Trust promotes a feeling of positive regard for the other person. Step two begins by asking them to actually summarize what they appreciate about the other person. Even if they’ve already said it, it doesn’t hurt to say it again.
Some couples have significantly experienced a breakdown of trust. This helps them to see if they’re moving in the right direction as they’re trying to rebuild trust. Truly, in some of the crisis times of life, it’s all the more important for them to sit down on a regular basis and talk about this.
The third step would be, what are we doing together? Almost always there’s some imbalance of what they’re doing together. Many times couples are busy with family things but they haven’t had time to go out as a couple, alone.
The fourth step is commitment, putting the rubber to the road. They take a calendar and put down what they need to talk about. They make a date to talk about what they need to talk about. They make a date to be alone. They make commitments for the different areas of their relationship.
If a couple do that, they won’t always meet all of their goals on the calendar. But if they keep meeting in a monthly huddle, they could avoid one of the two most common breakdowns of marriage relationship, which is erosion of closeness. Usually it’s a major crisis, like a job loss or a move that didn’t adjust well, or an illness, things that were unforseeable that created a crisis. Or even a breakdown of trust in a relationship.
Those can throw a couple into crisis and the levels on the model would change drastically. Something would drop. But the other thing is that a couple with a decent relationship still goes through valleys and various changes. And then some kids come along. What was working before the kids doesn’t work afterwards.
And if they don’t have a way of monitoring it, they start to fall out of the things that they did to help them stay close. Maybe they’d take a walk and talk. They don’t notice that they’re talking less and less. Then three to five months quickly turns into five to eight years. Their relationship, in terms of intimacy and bond, becomes very eroded. They don’t have a system of staying on top of things. They’re not really running their relationship.
Then their vulnerability has really peaked. They’re really vulnerable to conflict and breakdowns and they start doubting their love at that point, because the bonds have eroded over the years.
MC: What was it that got you originally focused on this kind of model. How did your program start?
The model came from two main sources about 20 years ago. When I worked with couples I would draw out the major areas of their relationship. They were confused and conflicted. Love wasn’t a single emotion or a singular concept. It was complicated. I would ask, "Where are you in meeting each others’ needs?" Then I would ask, "And how would that compare with how your partner knows you?" And "What about your commitment?"
When we would sketch it out, it would become much clearer to them where the conflicts were. It would help them to know what they needed to work on, and what didn’t need as much work.
Secondly, I’ve been an adjunct professor in the university setting and the seminary setting and I’ve taught advanced marriage and family course work. I’m very familiar with the research and the theoretical models. But nobody had provided a picture of what a relationship involved, the bonds of a relationship. So I put together this model, and presented it to classes as a model to portray what a relationship is and to help couples assess themselves and empower them to run their relationship. It captured so many concepts in one picture that the students usually called it their favorite model.
MC: What you’re presented sounds like it’s on-target with what couples today are looking for.
Our grandparents looked at marriage more as a job to fulfill. Our grandfather could say, "I’m a husband, I need to be a good provider." Today, men and women are interested in running their relationship to achieve a feeling of closeness, being a soulmate. They want a better outcome, a lasting romantic, intimate relationship. But no one has taught us to do anything different than what our grandparents did.
Couples will walk away from our seminar next weekend with something very unique. They’ll have an agenda to look at, to see where they are. But they can also set some goals, with a structure to stay on top of their relationship.
For more information on the Five Love Links Seminar in Madison, click here.