Word: preps
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Grimm Lewis and his wife Victoria paid $400 to attend a two-day PREP seminar in Los Angeles in a final attempt to save their 28-year-old marriage. "I think this will help," says Victoria, the more eager of the two. "I think of it as chemotherapy." Rod figures he's being a good sport. "I came because she asked me to," he says. "I'm about 5% of the problem, and she's 95%." Marc Sadoff, the workshop leader, says, "It's good to hear that you can acknowledge you're 5%. So many people...
Positive communication, like Sadoff's comment, is the backbone of PREP, developed in the 1980s by psychologists Howard Markman and Scott Stanley, co-directors of the Center for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver. In developing it, Markham spent years taping couples having arguments and devising ways to break bad habits. The method, which relies partly on videos of other couples using the technique, is continually tweaked in light of new research, says Stanley. "The idea was to build a program for couples that was based on sound research," he says, "rather than armchair clinical speculation...
Sadoff, a clinical social worker trained in PREP, explains the method to the Lewises and a younger couple sharing the session. They are to agree to set aside a time each week to talk over their problems. These discussions must follow certain rules, which can be posted on the refrigerator door. "The word I is allowed," Sadoff says. "You is not." The partners take turns talking, without interruption. The speaker makes brief statements, which the listener must paraphrase to show he understands what was said. There are also time-outs, which allow one partner to leave the room...
...many evaluators award PREP high marks. While two studies did not find it more effective than other methods, two others, involving a total of 210 couples, found that those who take PREP, either before marriage or after, have lower rates of breakup and divorce than couples who took a different training class or did nothing. Also, seven studies involving about 500 couples concluded that PREP participants had less negative communication for up to five years after the course. Men are particularly partial to the method...
Such results have made PREP popular around the world and in a wide range of settings, including U.S. military bases and churches. Oklahoma has embraced it as part of a $10 million government initiative to reduce divorce. That's how Shelitha and John Coleman Jr. came to PREP in November, in a Christianized version offered free at their church, G.A.P. [God's Apostolic Prophetic] Restoration Tabernacle in Oklahoma City. The Colemans' marriage of nearly two years was doing fine, but John's parents didn't seem to think so and were interfering. "They wanted me to have the same kind...