Relationship Enhancement® Couple/Family Therapy
What started my passion for RE is how it took me by the hand and showed me, step by step, how to deepen my empathy and sharpen my expression:
– Daring to go into the other’s world to see, touch and taste what their experience is like, without ever losing my own…
– Learning to get clear and fully express myself, my perceptions, my thoughts, my feelings, my desires and fears, my experience in a way that the other can and want to hear instead of getting defensive…
– Being able to differentiate and separate when I listen and when I speak, so that both people are fully heard…
– Being able to have deep and meaningful discussions with the people with whom I want to develop more understanding …
– Feeling I can safely address issues and differences, and not only trust but have the tools for us to find or create, together, solutions that address both our sets of needs …
Those are beautiful skills which allow us to deepen our intimacy with the people we choose, and make our interactions with others smoother and more rewarding.
And … I can still choose when and with whom I engage in this process, or not …
The National Institute of Relationship Enhancement® (NIRE), a non-profit educational corporation, was founded by Bernard Guerney, Jr., Ph.D. in 1992 as a branch of its parent organization the Institute for the Development of Emotional and Life Skills (IDEALS), which Dr. Guerney had previously founded in 1972. The mission of NIRE is…
To contribute to the advancement of honesty, compassion, and understanding in relationships by developing, teaching, and disseminating relationship enhancement skills for the benefit of the individual, the family, the community, and the workplace.
Bernard Guerney
Bernard Guerney, Jr., Ph.D., founder of the National Institute of Relationship Enhancement®, is internationally recognized as one of the most prominent and innovative practitioners of marital and family therapy. His methods have been developed and refined in over thirty five years of practicing, teaching and supervising individual, marital, group, and family therapy.
For their work in developing Relationship Enhancement® therapy and enrichment methods, Dr. Guerney and his wife, Dr. Louise Guerney, have won several national awards. Alone or with others he has produced over 80 articles and chapters, four books, and numerous manuals, training tapes, and films in the areas of individual, marital, group, and family therapy. He was one Salvador Minuchin’s co-authors of the family therapy classic Families of the Slums.
Dr. Guerney’s own book, Relationship Enhancement: Skill Training Programs for Therapy, Problem Prevention, and Enrichment has been called, by Dr. Douglas Sprenkle, “a seminal and potentially revolutionary work … perhaps the best … integration of theory, research, and practice in the family intervention field.”
Louise Guerney
Louise Guerney, Ph.D., Director of Play and Filial Family Training at The National Institute of Relationship Enhancement®, is internationally recognized as one of the most prominent and innovative practitioners of child-centered play therapy Dr. Guerney is known, together with her husband, Dr. Bernard Guerney, Jr., as the creator of Filial Family Therapy, a unique family therapy model that teaches parents how to become the primary therapeutic agents for their children through the medium of play therapy.
Independently and collaboratively, she has produced scores of articles and chapters on child and family therapy, two books, and training videotapes for therapists. Active in the professional community, she is one of the creators of PhoneFriend, a nationwide network of “warmlines” serving latchkey children, She has developed a number of parent skills-training programs, including The Foster Parent Training Program in cooperation with the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare.
Dr. Guerney has won several national awards from state and national organizations for her contributions to child/family enrichment and therapy.