Want to strengthen and enrich your relationship?
Whether you are thinking about engagement, already engaged or wanting to enrich your marriage, our therapists are certified facilitators for the evidence-based and highly researched Prepare and Enrich Curriculum, created to increase your likelihood of marital success and satisfaction.
Prepare and Enrich is widely known as the leading relationship inventory. PREPARE/ENRICH is called a “program” because it contains both a couple’s assessment and a semi-structured feedback process. As part of the feedback process, the program teaches the couple relevant relationship skills like communication and conflict resolution. The goal of the program is to help premarital couples prepare for marriage (PREPARE) and married couples enrich their marriage (ENRICH) by increasing their awareness of relationship strengths and growth areas meanwhile providing them with skills to improve their relationship. The customized assessment is completed online and is designed for dating, engaged, and married couples. It is called “customized” because the technology tailors and designs the assessment for each unique couple based on personal background information they provide.
PREPARE/ENRICH was scientifically developed and has high reliability, high validity, and large national norms with couples from various ethnic groups. Numerous studies demonstrate the rigor of the assessment and its relevance to couples from a variety of ethnic groups (Olson, 1998; Asai & Olson, 2004; Allen & Olson, 2001). Larson, Holman, Klein, Stahmann, and Peterson evaluated premarital assessment questionnaires and found PREPARE to be “most psychometrically sound” and rated it as “the best instrument for premarital counseling” (1995, p. 251). The program has been adopted by professional counselors from various fields (marital and family therapists, social workers, and psychologists) and clergy from many diverse religious groups.
We find the best time to do Pre-Marital Therapy is actually BEFORE you get engaged. Pre-Engagement therapy allows you to work through the hard stuff before the celebration of an engagement begins and wedding plans are made. If you are already engaged, don’t put off pre-marital counseling as it can drastically reduce stress leading into and at the start of a marriage. And if you are already married, it is never too late to explore what you do well as a couple and what areas in your marriage you have room to grow.