About Relationship Enhancement (RE)

Relationship Enhancement (RE) was pioneered by Bernard G. Guerney in the 1960s and has been proven effective for over forty years.

Relationship Enhancement:

• Trains people in the specific skills they need to create satisfying, close and stable relationships.
• Helps people identify and resolve causes of family stress and discord.

It is:

• Both an intervention and a prevention program
• Based on an educational rather than a treatment model
• Highly structured
• Time-limited
  • Six to ten weeks for couple, parent-child/adolescent and family therapy/enrichment
  • Half day and full day group skill-training workshops for couples and families
  • Two hour educational workshops for groups and organizations
• Compatible with today's managed care environment

RE emphasizes the importance of learning certain skills that help people:

• Improve their coping skills
• Enhance their relationships
• Improve their self-concept
• Achieve personal and interpersonal satisfaction
• Find more intimacy

How Relationship Enhancement Helps:
Clients are taught skills that improve their understanding of themselves and others and ways to convey this understanding to each other. As a result, they create a shared context in which constructive change is more likely to occur. Once this relationship context is established, clients become more autonomous and differentiated, and ultimately, more intimate with significant people in their lives. Having learned these skills, and trusting that they can solve their own problems, clients are in a better position to find more satisfaction and create more stability in their lives. As a result, they are able to deal with life's crises on their own. RE Therapy/Enrichment is not value free; in fact, it is based on important values - such as mutual respect and compassion for each other - which we believe are essential to optimal human development.