This is an article by David Abrams who attended the Orlando 2001 Smart Marriages
Conference with his wife, Jean.  Click to read another of his delightful articles, "How a Refrigerator
Magnet Saved My Marriage"  which is about their experience
attending  the Prep course.

In Orlando, they took the Prep training for trainers and
will now be able to teach the PREP program to other couples at their base.  - diane

David Abrams

Marriage conference renews vows of USARAK officials
By SFC David Abrams
USARAK Public Affairs Office

ORLANDO - Diane Sollee steps to the podium, looks out at the audience of 1,500
attending the annual Smart Marriages conference, and immediately gets choked
up.

    She takes a moment to compose herself, then tells the crowd of
psychologists, researchers, clergy and marriage educators (including
personnel from U.S. Army Alaska's Family Advocacy Program and the Chaplain's
Office), "When we were planning the first conference, we thought that was it
- a one-shot deal.  We had 400 people attend that one - now look at us.
We're not just growing, we're having an impact beyond our wildest dreams."

    Sollee  - who would barely clear 5 feet, 6 inches if she stood on her
tiptoes  - is one of the giants in the marriage education industry.  She's
been called by her peers "a force of nature" and "the leader of a merry band
of marriage makers."

Founder and sole employee of the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples
Education, she has brought together relationship experts at the conference
for the past five years.

    "We could sit here and wring our hands and say marriage is about to go
the way of the dinosaurs, but we're optimistic," Sollee said.  "We want to
bring solutions to the problem."

    Finding solutions is just one of the reasons USARAK's Pascal Lambert
attends the conference each year.

    "This conference sends the message that the family is valuable and
important," said Lambert, Family Advocacy Program manager at Fort
Richardson.  "If there's any way to fight abuse, it's to get healthy
marriages."

    The Smart Marriages conference, held June 21-24 this year, gathers
together professionals fighting for the health of marriages every day.  This
year's speakers included John Gray, author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are
From Venus; Dr. Judith Wallerstein, author of The Unexpected Legacy of
Divorce; and dozens of other marital experts, researchers and legislators.

    The words "marriage" and "divorce" buzzed through the air in equal
measures at the conference.  While many of the workshops focused on making a
good thing better, other experts said it's time to confront how hard it is
to break up.

    "Divorce doesn't make people happy," said Wallerstein, whose book
chronicles a 25-year study of children from broken homes and finds that
getting divorced is not always the best answer, even for troubled marriages.
"On the average, we found that unhappy marriages become happy within five
years.  Marriages wax and wane.  They get worse, then they mostly get
better."

    Military marriages have their own set of unique pressures, said Chaplain
(Capt.) Tim Rietkerk, 1st Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment.
"The military requires families to be physically torn apart in order to
support the mission," he said.  "It's tough on couples.  We sometimes
short-change relationship development with OPTEMPO."

    Many of the Army couples he sees are young and just starting out on the
marital road.  "Then they hit some sort of emotional turmoil and they want
to bail out," he said.  "I tell them they1ve got to put up with some amount
of pain for a little while and work through some of the problems.  Research
(like Wallerstein's) has shown that marriage pays off better in the long run
than does divorce.

    "We've got to combat this view that divorce doesn1t hurt anyone or has
no ramifications," he added.

    Part of Rietkerk's "divorce combat" includes a four-hour course he's
developed for couples in his unit.  He presented "Seven Principles for
Making a Military Family Work" in the spring and hopes to offer it again at
the end of September.

    The Smart Marriages conference provided him with plenty of fodder for
the cannon.  With sessions like "How Bad Marriages Go Good" and "Love and
Parenting in Stepfamilies," Rietkerk and others from Alaska said the trip
was like the icing on the wedding cake of the work they do every day.

    "The number of workshop choices at this conference is overwhelming,"
Lambert said.  "I come here to nurture myself and see how I can get
energized and then, in turn, how I can energize the command."

    One workshop presenter was Chaplain (Lt. Col.) Glen Bloomstrom, Family
Ministry Officer with the Department of the Army1s Chief of Chaplains
Office.  He briefed on the Building Strong and Ready Families, a new
unit-based prevention program of marital-skills training and health
promotion.

    Fort Richardson is one of 12 installations selected to test the program
which is scheduled to start in Alaska this month.

"Alaska is a real test bed for us because it involves the whole community,
not just a brigade," Bloomstrom said.  "Your commander (Maj. Gen. James
Lovelace) approached us early on and said he wants to do everything he can
to build strong families within the command.

"Our goal is to reduce the isolation of couples before there is a crisis,"
Bloomstrom added.  "We're going to change the culture of the Army through
marriage education programs."

"Isolation is one of the biggest, most pervasive problems in the military,"
Lambert added.

To combat that, he said he plans to organize community potlucks,
neighborhood meetings and winter ski trips to get Fort Richardson couples
socializing with each other.

Bloomstrom said Building Strong and Ready Families will be funded for 24
brigades by Fiscal Year 2003.  At a cost of $30,000 per brigade, he said the
savings are substantial when taking into consideration the total cost to
treat just one case of domestic violence can be as much as $20,000.  This
doesn1t even include other factors like Early Return of Dependants or
TRICARE-funded family counseling sessions, he said.

USARAK already has regularly-scheduled Prevention and Relationship
Enhancement Program classes offered to military families, which will soon be
wrapped into the Building Strong and Ready Families program.

The developers of PREP - Drs. Scott Stanley, Howard Markman and Susan
Blumberg - gave several presentations at the Orlando conference, in addition
to conducting a three-day pre-conference PREP training session.
PREP helps improve relationships by using the Speaker-Listener technique
where couples take turns speaking while the partner actively listens to what
the other person has to say.

"We ban solutions and focus on listening and understanding," Markman told
the trainees (which included four USARAK personnel).  "We find this
increases success by decreasing anxiety.  Neither partner tries to solve
issues - just talk about them."

Since 1997, dozens of USARAK couples have joined Lambert and other FAP
leaders and chaplains on PREP weekend retreats to Seward Resort where they
learn about Stanley, Markman and Blumberg's communication techniques.
"We have a Geneva convention for warfare, but not for marriage," Markman
said.  "So here, we're giving couples a Geneva convention by having them use
ground rules.  We're trying to give structure to the way couples
communicate."

By using "best practices" like those in PREP and Building Strong and Ready
Families, Sollee said couples can reverse the negative trend of marriages in
the U.S.

"We used to think marriage was a crapshoot - you either got lucky by picking
the right partner, or you didn't get so lucky.  We also thought that, with
enough sessions, therapy could fix our marriages.  But marriage is not a
crapshoot.  You can improve your odds.  It just takes hard work and
commitment."

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