The program, start to finish

How the program is structured

The program is not a single event. It runs for seven weeks. The weekend retreat is the intensive: Friday evening to Sunday afternoon. Six weekly follow-up sessions come after, in the weeks right behind it. The shape gives couples enough time to learn the tools and enough time to put them to use. If you want background first, read about an overview of the program before diving into the structure.

The weekend intensive (Friday to Sunday)

The weekend is the foundation. Couples arrive Friday evening and spend the next two and a half days in a private, anonymous setting. No group sharing. No therapy circle. No public disclosure.

Instead, presenting couples, peer couples who have come through the program and rebuilt their own marriages, talk honestly about what they went through. After each session, you and your spouse get time alone to reflect on a question they provide. Just the two of you.

The weekend runs 14 sessions across three days:

Friday evening

• Introduction: The opening of the weekend. You hear more detail about what the program will cover. You do not necessarily speak with anyone.
• Understanding feelings and emotions: The difference between feelings and emotions, and how to name them in a way your spouse can hear.

Saturday morning

• Understanding yourself: How the family you grew up in and your own personality show up in your marriage today.
• Modern marriage challenges: What a fast, distracted culture does to a marriage. How emotional distance creeps in.
• Stages of marriage: Every marriage has them. Knowing which one you're in helps you stop blaming each other for the weather.

Saturday afternoon

• Communication techniques: Practical methods that help couples actually say what they mean and hear what was said.
• Building lasting relationships: The everyday ingredients of strong marriages: managing expectations, meeting emotional needs, handling conflict without setting fires.
• Marriage patterns and unity: How the cultural picture of marriage stacks up against the practice of unity and commitment, and what tends to strengthen the foundation.

Saturday evening

• Building trust: Concrete steps for rebuilding trust through consistent actions and honest words. Trust is built slowly. There aren't shortcuts.
• Forgiveness and healing: What real forgiveness looks like, and what it doesn't. How to set down hurts that have been with you for a long time.

Sunday morning

• Rediscovery: Techniques that help you see your spouse with fresh eyes again, and remember what drew you in the first place.
• Community support: Why couples who stay connected to other couples tend to hold the changes they made. Community meetings are open to anyone who completed a weekend, and they're how couples stay connected after they go home.

Sunday afternoon

• Overcoming obstacles: What gets in the way once you're back at home, and how to keep new patterns from collapsing under old pressure.
• Transition to follow-up: How the weekend connects to the six follow-up sessions, and what to expect from the next several weeks.

From the weekend to the week

Where the tools become a habit

The weekend opens the door. The follow-up sessions are where the change becomes durable, applied to harder material a week at a time with the same couples who walked through Friday to Sunday with you.

Post-weekend follow-up sessions

Six weekly sessions of about four hours each, in the weeks right after the weekend. They reinforce the tools and let you practice the dialogue. See what you'll learn across the full program, or read about program benefits to understand the outcomes.

• Week 1, The Five D's: Desire, Dialogue, Discussion, Decisions, Doing. The first session reviews the weekend and pushes the listening skills further.
• Week 2, Personal exploration: The family you grew up in, the expectations you carry, and how personal growth connects to your shared direction as a couple.
• Week 3, Making decisions: Commitment, love, forgiveness, and trust are decisions, renewed daily by what you do and what you don't.
• Week 4, Conflict management: Healthy conflict looks different from what most couples grew up watching. This week is the practice.
• Week 5, Intimate connection: Intimacy is emotional, spiritual, and physical, and the three feed each other when trust and communication are intact.
• Week 6, Marriage as vocation: Your marriage in a wider frame: family, faith if you have one, and the community around you. How to keep the changes from fading after week six.

Seven weeks, in your marriage

The weekend retreat plus six follow-up sessions. That's the program. Thousands of couples have walked this path. The tools work, if you use them. See what it costs and how the program is funded, read about how we're different from counseling and other retreats. Or check whether the program fits your situation before registering. For an hour-by-hour walk through the intensive, what happens on a Marriage Rediscovery weekend covers the full schedule. To find a date, see upcoming programs across our network of communities.