PAIRS Essentials

Fair Fight for Change

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.

Three Hopes, Three Fears

Couples may unknowingly bring secret hopes and fears to their closest relationships. Although we enter love relationships with hopes, fears can follow in the shadows. These fears can come from the part of us whose job it is to look out for danger and protect us from it. It's as if we have an invisible radar that is not fine-tuned. So anything that is similar to what upset or hurt us in the past will be recognized as though the danger is happening again. (Curriculum Guide pages 42-45)

The hopes and fears we bring to our closest relationships don't have to be destructive when we can identify and talk about them together.

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.

Session Three Review

A brief review of PAIRS Essentials Session Three.

Love Knots

Love Knots are hidden negative beliefs and expectations that can make it hard to feel close to our partners. This segment helps participants identify their own Love Knots so that they can do a better job of connecting and confiding with their partners. (Curriculum Guide pages 102-112)

Exploring love knots is an invitation to deeper self awareness into unexamined expectations that may be sabotaging our biggest dreams.

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 Allergies

Similar to physical allergies, individuals can have intense emotional responses unique to their personal life experiences, perceptions and decisions. PAIRS calls these "emotional allergies," and they are often the source of enormous pain in our closest relationships. PAIRS teaches couples to transform upsetting experiences into greater closeness, understanding, and healing. (Curriculum Guide pages 113-129)

Learning to recognize intense feelings and discover the source can help us heal. Too often, we hand the "bill" for those feeling to close ones in the present when the source is from a much earlier time in our lives.

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 33 Minute Excerpt