Torn Asunder & Close Calls: Mending & Preventing Infidelity
Dave Carder, MA

"I wanted to call this Drunk With Love: Infatuation, Emotional Affairs, and Sleeping Around but I was told me it wouldn't fit in the conference brochure. But you get the idea. Most adulterers do not deliberately decide to violate their marriage. Rather, they slide into trouble, unaware and not acknowledging how infatuated they are until blindsided with an irresistible infatuation. Initially embarrassed, most put up a doomed resistance until they wear out and give in. Later, exhausted from the euphoria - and the explosion of the affair and facing divorce, the couple requires specialized treatment. Using the Close Calls program, we'll focus on recognizing the sources of infatuation, the power and trigger of its influence, friendship practices that encourage infatuation, and the best researched based protections for marriage and monogamy. Through Torn Asunder we'll focus on recovery from both emotional and/or sexual infidelity. This highly-structured, brief-therapy program, designed to stabilize the marriage in crisis, uses Family Systems, Attachment Theory, Skill Training in Conflict Management and Communication, and Cognitive Behavioral interventions helping couples to do the work that is necessary whether or not the marriage survives." - Dave Carder 

   Spend 15 hours over two days with program founder, Dave Carder, and qualify as an instructor in two programs that will help you work to heal and prevent adultery in your clinical practice, church, community, or in your own relationships. The programs are based on Carder's 30+ years of work and research with adulterers and on his incredible passion and conviction that we can do better than we're doing in helping couples deal with fidelity, one of the real challenges to modern marriage. The primary tool of Torn Asunder is a 90-day structure that enables couples to stabilize so that they can make the difficult decisions and then to begin the healing process - no matter the direction of their decision. Close Calls, a prevention program, provides a framework to teach people about the high risk situations that can sink even the most committed; helps individuals understand the concept of the “Dangerous Partner Profile” and recognize their own vulnerabilities; and to help couples turn these to their advantage to enrich emotional intimacy and protect their marriage. Close Calls is great course for singles or couples at any stage – from engaged to long married – and is ideal for community, military, clinical, academic, and congregational settings.

Torn Asunder
Though written with a faith-based foundation, the Torn Asunder approach has been
successfully used with more than 100,000 couples, both religious and non-religious, in the process of trying to save their marriages after infidelity. The primary focus is not to restore the marriage, but to stabilize it in the midst of the crises so that the couple can make prudent decisions for the family’s future.

Regardless of which direction the marriage takes, several relationship components need
to be restored, such as forgiveness, respect and trust between the spouses. These spouses
are usually parents and this work between them is so exhausting that it has to be time
limited (90 days), highly structured, and emotionally helpful for the couple to stay in the
process. The work won’t be completed in 90 days, but the couple will be responding to
each other in more humane ways that lowers the tension in the family environment.

The program, based on the Torn Assunder Book and Workbook, can be used by therapists,
clergy, marriage educators and well-supervised peer counselors or mentor couples. The
latter is especially true if they have experienced infidelity first-hand and have worked through
the material with their spouse of that marriage.

Participants will receive:
•    A DVD of Conflict Resolution Training, done with a client-couple in a first-session
•    A Torn Asunder Certificate of Completion
•    A DVD of an abbreviated (3 hr) version of a Dave Carder Torn Asunder presentation for review as needed
•    A set of handouts for each segment of Torn Asunder
•    A set (one book, one workbook) of the 2008 revised edition of Torn Asunder: Helping Couples Recover from Infidelity.
•   Licensed therapists or counselors who complete the training will be listed at www.TornAsunder.org

Topics will include:
•    Marital prognoses based on the Marital Satisfaction Time Line
•    Review of the communication exercises utilized in the stabilization process; monologues,
        spousal-selected monologues, dialogues, prayer exercises and sensate-focus practices
•    Summary of marital styles prone to infidelity
•    Clarification of infidelity type based on eight distinguishing characteristics
•    Criteria for establishing affair onset and recovery direction
•    Verification of the four stages of affair development
•    Rationale and benefits of disclosure to spouse
•    Interventions to contain anger, impulsivity, and obsessiveness in both spouses
•    Procedures to help couple work through identified couple-specific issues
•    Organization of the structured forgiveness exercise
•    Overview of weekly homework exercises for each spouse
•    Utilization of the final project in the after care and launch process of the couple
•    Final review of common “couple stuck points” with multiple suggestions for restarting the process

Close Calls
Close Calls: What Adulterers Want You to Know About Protecting Your Marriage emerges out of 30 plus years of working with couples attempting to recover from adultery, research from 4,000 pastors during the 90’s, and clinical experience over the last ten years. When 800 pastors acknowledged that they had been sexually indiscrete while in ministry and married, and 90% of that number chose words like “blindsided”, “shocked”, “never saw it coming”, to describe their experience, a question began to emerge: “Is it possible for a person to be ignorantly and innocently prepared for adultery to the point that they cannot resist the infatuation?” The answer is “Yes” and the set-up, the sources, and the sequence are what make up the content of this Close Call’s training.

What's surprising is how many have gone down this path, unaware and unprepared. Emotional infidelity is rampant and will only increase given current lifestyle stress, the financial crisis, and the gender mix -- more men and women working and ministering, together. But, there is no need to dispair – Close Calls offers specific research-based tools and techniques to help couples find what every affair inititally offers: excitement, closeness, genuine intimacy, and passion.
 
Participants Will Receive:
• A Close Calls Certificate of Completion
• A copy of the book Close Calls: What Adulterers Want You to Know About Protecting Your Marriage
• A set of handouts of each segment of Close Calls 

Topics Will Include:
• 19 characteristics of Close Call friendships
• 8 arenas of your Dangerous Partner Profile
• 3 most likely sources of affair partners
• The development of the Infatuation Trigger
• Your High Risk Factors: In personal history, Marital Status, and Family of Origin
• How to identify affair components that can be extrapolated for the benefit of the marriage

Dave Carder: http://www.TornAsunder.org or 714-529-5544 or  Dave.Carder@evfreefullerton.com

This institute is part of the week-long Smart Marriages conference.

Register for the Institute and the Conference: Click for Information on Conference Details, to download a conference brochure, REGISTER ONLINE, hotel & travel information & discounts, etc.