Revive. Renew. Restore.
We don’t believe in divorce or murder, so we have decided to get even by staying together and making each other miserable. We just need to know how!
Sound like Your Marriage?
This is our flagship program: For years, The Gorgeous Redhead and I have trained mentoring couples and encouraged marriages young and old, healthy and in trouble alike to have some regular time every week to be accountable for learning and practicing new skills.
The entire industry of marriage and family therapy is based on perhaps three models that we find to be incomplete:
· Marriage enrichment workshops
· Weekly marriage and family therapy with a licensed professional counselor
· In-patient work at a treatment center
Here’s why we think those are just not enough. Workshops may be as short as 2-4 hours or as long as a couple of evenings, but the ability and commitment to drill down to do real work and not just give out resources that will most often gather dust when the couples get home is almost non-existent, IMHO.
Weekly sessions with counselors are just too short, because 50 minutes per week is not enough time to really practice the skill sets that are so foreign to the natural way of doing things.
In-patient recovery for all sorts of behavioral issues that impact marriages and families is both expensive and time consuming. Not everybody can access these resources
Now don’t rush out of here thinking I am finding fault with any of those resources. I am not. We applaud anybody who participates in any or all of these. Help is where you find it…and finding help beats the tar out of not finding it.
What I am saying is they are simply not enough.
We have found over a long period of time that if we can have the hearts and minds of couples in a concentrated intensive weekend format for study and practice, we can help them create miracles that will transform their lives.
As long as we have couples who do not have clinical issues that must be addressed by licensed professionals, we can make a difference.
We began this approach by opening our home to one couple at a time for a long weekend beginning Friday evening after work and continuing until early afternoon on Sunday.
We now offer this service to both individual couples and to small groups of as many as six couples at a time and have found that to be about the maximum number we can effectively accommodate for a weekend.
Our preference is to have at least one coaching couple for every two couples in the intensive weekend, but that is not always possible.
Still and all, one-on-one couple work is the Rolls Royce for the weekend work.
Schedule and Agenda
Here’s how a weekend usually proceeds. We send couples the electronic version to the PREPARE/ENRICH assessment that they will complete online (costs them $35/couple and they can pay online with a credit card).
Once we receive the results of the assessment, we schedule a weekend for the couples to come see us. The results of the inventory/assessment let’s us customize the agenda for our time together.
The weekend starts Friday afternoon at the venue and begins whenever they can get here. Our preference is to have a home setting in which to do this so we can cook together. We have a custom designed home with a private suite for our weekend couples.
Barb and I cook and we eat well Friday night and do some get-acquainted bonding and then send them to their quarters with a couple of pieces of homework for the night that include their review of the expectations lists.
Saturday morning, we get up and cook breakfast together and get to work doing some or all of the following:
· Review PREPARE/ENRICH inventories
· Barb and I each have one-on-ones with the men and the women. We get the inside story from each spouse.
· Afterwards, Barb and I huddle while the couples take a break.
· Once we tee up the weekend, we begin with a review of the expectations homework from Friday night.
· When we reconvene, we talk about behavior modification and why that is so important
· We discuss how all relationships progress and why
· We look at some family-of-origin issues (we call these the originally installed genetic operating system software that all of us get)
· We talk about expectations and why they are such killers in relationships , and what they can do to make unrealistic expectations go away
· We frequently step out for lunch at some neighborhood eatery.
· When we return from lunch, we talk about the importance of learning how to communicate and resolve conflicts (the heart of what we do) and begin some of the elementary practice routines. We do some practice sessions on either the Safe Conversations (with a tip of the hat to Harville Hendrix for his seminal work in Getting the Love You Want).
· We introduce them to the concept of a Servant’s Heart and Gift Jars and giving and receiving Random Acts of Kindness.
· We end the day with a discussion of the ultimate goal for relationships and during the day we sometimes intersperse video presentations like The WAR Room or From This Day Forward.
· We usually let them be on their own for a date at the evening meal on Saturday or just snack on leftovers. We send them back to their rooms with several exercises that we want them to practice...we’ll do some practice runs during the sessions.
Sunday morning, we generally do waffles, bacon, and fresh frt for breakfast together or we make homemade Egg McMuffins.*
· When we reconvene, we get them talking about re-romancing their relationship and the value of building traditions, dates, and memories together
· Finally, we reinforce their need for spiritual and covenant relationships around the concept of forgiveness and commitment (Scott Stanley’s YouTube video).
· We conclude the day with a written agreement for each couple to sign committing for a period of time to work the processes they have learned regardless of how they feel about them. We prefer a 12-month agreement, but will take whatever the couple is willing to commit. We schedule a checkup at the end of that time.
· We dismiss around noon
*Typical Breakfasts
· Sauté yellow onions in butter
· Fresh eggs beaten in a bowl with milk or cream
· Add a teaspoon of baking powder
· Stirred constantly while they are being cooked and
· Medium hard with no white showing
· Added ingredients include:
o Chopped onions
o Grated cheese
o Fresh minced garlic
o Crushed corn chips to make a migas-like finish
Melt the butter or margarine and sauté the onions and garlic until the onions are transparent. Add the eggs (BTW 2-3 eggs will easily feed 4) and stir the eggs over medium heat until softly scrambled. Add the grated cheese, At the last, add the crumbled chips and finish over low heat. Hard to beat. Sometimes we add crumbled cooked sausage.
Nobody goes away hungry.
Follow up
One of the behavior modification principles we teach is that new and functional behavior feels very unnatural and awkward while old and dysfunctional behavior feels known and comfortable.
Since as we believe, the powers of evil in the world do not want families to be happy and healthy, we are prepared for couples to succumb to the temptation to react to each other in their old natural patterns that led them to us in the first place.
Sometimes these exchanges can be very painful and even brutal in their ferocity.
That is where the follow up needs to take place. It can and usually does take one or more of these forms:
· A phone call to us for an SOS (the Doctor makes house calls)
· A tune up with us to revisit the skill sets they learned and to practice them on a specific issue that occasioned the recidivism in the first place
· A call to their coach to come alongside and mentor them
Availability
We schedule these weekends one-two weekends per month if we are having groups, and at least one other time per month if we are doing an individual couple by themselves.
We have a list of referring sources who send couples to us
Cost
The value proposition for the weekend experience is without dispute. Here what others have said about it.
“It is with great pleasure and enthusiasm that I am writing to endorse Dick and Barbara's 24K Gold Marriage training program and workshop. I met Dick Ivey back in 1990. He recruited me over to work on a sales team he led and my life was changed forever. Dick was the best leader and sales manager I have ever had in my career. But more than a Sales Manager, he was a friend, a mentor, a coach and a shoulder to cry on from time to time. He helped me during a very difficult time in my life and managed to get me back on life’s wonderful path. When I got engaged to my husband, Dick and Barbara were there to provide us with guidance, counseling, friendship and lovely advice on making a marriage last. Dick married us on October 26, xxxx and I am happy to say we recently celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary. He and Barbara changed my life on so many levels. I urge you to consider 24KGold Marriage as it will be the most remarkable experience ever.
“Dick and Barb Ivey bring energy, compassion and dedication to their gift of mentoring marriages. It doesn’t hurt that a healthy dose of humor and life’s experiences are mixed into the package that will benefit relationships in crisis and those who just want to strengthen against the rigors of life’s challenges.”
The cost for the weekend is $350-500/couple plus the cost of the PREPARE/ENRICH inventory assessment of $35/couple. If we are not doing the weekend at our home, couples are on their own for accommodations and food for other than Friday night, Saturday breakfast and snacks/coffee/tea/water/soft drinks that we provide.
Got a news flash for you. Compare that to the cost of filing for divorce and this is a monster bargain.
In the event that it is a real hardship for a couple, we do have limited scholarship help available.
We do believe, however, couples will put more into this process and get more out of it if they have some skin in the game as well. If couples do not think they get their money’s worth in one of our weekend Marriage 3.0 workshops, we’ll refund all the contribution they make. No questions asked.
Please feel free to refer couples to us within a couple hundred-mile radius of Dallas anytime.
We can also schedule a weekend intensives in remote cities for travel expense and a venue to hold it. We require at least 6 couples for a remote location.
