PAIRS Essentials

Language of Love

Welcome

PAIRS Essentials offers a new framework for the relationship journey and practical, usable skills for successful relationships. (Curriculum Guide pages 11-35)

PAIRS is an acronym that stands for "Practical Application of Intimate Relationship Skills." The educational program has helped strengthen marriages and families for nearly half a century.

Language of Love

Throughout PAIRS Essentials, participants learn new terms and a unique meaning of some that may already be familiar. Language itself increases the potential for deeper understanding, closeness, and healing. (Curriculum Guide pages 36-37)

PAIRS offers a unique language that helps people better understand themselves and others.

Levels of Learning

Past upsetting, hurtful, painful relationship events are more likely connected to unconscious incompetence than bad intentions. Developing new behaviors/habits requires recognizing the desired change, making the change, and sustaining the change under stress. (Curriculum Guide pages 38-39)

Incompetence is a leading cause of marriage and family breakdown, not because of bad intentions or any other kind of malice, but because people don't know what they don't know.

Stages of Relationship

Relationships typically go through four predictable stages. Recognizing the impact of our behaviors during times of disappointment brings new possibilities to create long-lasting accepting, loving relationships. (Curriculum Guide pages 40-41)

Love relationships typically start in a stage of illusion - like a fairy tale that will surely last forever. Learning to anticipate the stages that naturally follow offer the best chance to keep those hopes alive.

Relationship Road Map

Framework for the PAIRS journey based on biological needs and how we tend to experience life when our needs are not met. (Curriculum Guide pages 46-49)

Exploring logic of love and emotion helps us recognize that we have more power than we may have thought in determining which side of the road map we find ourselves on.

Communication Stress Styles

Recognize styles of communication in ourselves and in others that keep us disconnected when we are under stress and become aware of impact on bonding of masking thoughts and feelings. (Curriculum Guide pages 50-59)

Unexamined, learned behaviors impact relationship dynamics. It's helpful to recognize multi-dimensional aspects of communication.

Invitation Rule

Creating a safe space for conversations that matter is vital. The Invitation Rule encourages appreciation for the value of making engagement a priority within an agreed upon period when requested; generally within 24 hours. (Curriculum Guide pages 60-61)

It's natural to be eager to talk about anything and everything when the opportunity is there. After a while, when we don't get the response we wanted over and again, it's easy to feel hurt, disappointed, and become distance. It doesn't have to be that way.

Daily Temperature Reading

Creating an environment of open, flowing communication and proactive problem-solving in a way that strengthens connection, understanding, and resilience doesn't happen by itself. The Daily Temperature Reading helps couples and families increase their ability to confide, build self-esteems, and encourages intimacy. (Curriculum Guide pages 62-65)

Imagine giving our closest relationships the same time and attention we'd give a garden we want to grow. The world would be a very different place for many children and families.

Talking Tips

Differences are a natural aspect to every close relationship. Talking Tips provides a structured skill for confiding that helps identify and reflect on key dimensions of a specific behavioral concern and unambiguous change request without blaming, judging, or criticizing. (Curriculum Guide pages 66-71)

Differences are a natural part of every close relationship. The challenge is being able to confide about those differences on behalf of the relationship with a partner who can listen with empathy.

Emotional Stages

An Adult’s emotional behavior in varied circumstances will often have as much, and often even greater impact, on what happens in a relationship than core issues. Emotional stages is an opportunity to distinguish attitudes that can interfere with constructive problem solving from those that promote mutual respect. (Curriculum Guide pages 78-83)

When we can focus on our biggest dreams and aspirations for life, we are better able to find our way through the challenges along the way. That takes emotional maturity, particularly when dealing with conflict and differences.

Emotional Jug

Understanding emotions and how they work is vital to intimacy. Understanding the "emotional jug" is an opportunity to strengthen the likelihood of responding with compassion and empathy instead of reactiveness to expressions of anger, fear, pain, sadness, and similar emotions. (Curriculum Guide pages 84-89)

There are a lot of rules that tell us not to feel what we feel. No matter how much we may try, following those rules can cause a lot of suffering. Typically, the price for that suffering is paid by the people we love the most.

Fair Fight for Change

Structured tool to talk about difficult problems in relationships so that both partners can express their needs and wants in a way that is safe and helps people listen to each other. (Curriculum Guide pages 90-101)

In relationships between people who count on each other for bonding, how we deal with conflict and differences can be even more important than outcome, agreement or resolution.

PAIRS Essentials Tool Kit

PAIRS Essentials Tool Kit brings together the many practical, usable skills participants discover in PAIRS training. (Curriculum Guide pages 129-137)

Watch 8 Minute Excerpt"A must attend to explore personal issues prior to approaching change in veteran issues."

Carrie M. Holley McCormack
Army Warrior Transition Unit
San Diego, CA