Mentor Training
Overview
One-day Mentor Training Retreat
Single Evening Mentor Orientation
Comprehensive Mentor Training Skills Course
Skills Course Content
Overview
There are a variety of paths to train Mentor Couples to work with Engaged Couples using Preparing to Live in Love or Beginning to Live in Love. These same paths are available and beneficial to any couple desiring to grow in their own relationship in order to minister in any way to teenagers, engaged, or married couples. The various approaches serve the specific needs of different parishes and dioceses putting fully qualified Mentors in place as quickly as required to meet the demands of local marriage preparation.
The simplest, fastest way to become a Mentor Couple is to experience the four-session Every Day in Love program and then participate in a one-day Mentor Training Retreat. This can produce qualified Mentors in as little as five weeks.
An alternate pathway for training Mentors is a single Evening Mentor Orientation for couples who have already experienced both Every Day in Love and the Living in Love Retreat Workshop.
The best and most comprehensive Mentor Training is an eight-session Mentor Training skills Course. This approach can be speeded up by consolidating sessions into four, three-hour sessions or even presenting the same content in a single day or over a two-day weekend.
One-day Mentor Training Retreat
Every Couple who experiences all four sessions of Every Day in Love is encouraged to consider working with the engaged, but some additional training is required in order to certify them as Mentors. Every Day in Love touches all the key relationship skills taught in Preparing/Beginning to Live in Love. There are, however, several crucial insights into the dynamics of husband/wife relationships that deserve fuller development than is possible in the Every Day in Love format. These topics plus mentor specific training into how to facilitate program experiential exercises for the engaged are addressed during a 12 hour, single-day retreat.
Single Evening Mentor Orientation
Couples who have experienced both Every Day in Love and the Living in Love Retreat Workshop can be certified as Mentors with just a little additional orientation to the Mentoring experience. In a single evening, they will learn how to facilitate key experiences for the engaged and gain confidence in their ability to communicate program content effectively.
Comprehensive Mentor Training Skills Course
Every couple who experiences the Living in Love retreat workshop is invited to participate in a small group, eight session follow-up program that teaches practical life skills, principles, practices, and strategies that help a couple integrate the vision of the weekend into their lives and realistically “live in love” every day. Because it normally begins within one or two weeks of the Living in Love retreat, “Living in Love Every Day” generally consists of couples who experienced Living in Love together and provides an opportunity to continue friendships started on the weekend. Because many of the couples on Living in love are from the same parish, Living in Love Every Day allows parish couples to get to know each other and builds parish community.
Living in Love Every Day doubles as a mentor training course, since it addresses the same topics covered in the Preparing to Live in Love program of pre-marriage mentoring for the engaged. The topics, however, are presented and expanded at a level appropriate for the married.
Living in Love Every Day is presented in two hour blocks, nominally once a week, at a time convenient for the participating couples and is generally facilitated by a couple who has also been specially trained by the Pastoral and Matrimonial Renewal Center. Typically hosted in a living room setting in the home of one of the participants, it is a more informal, interactive, “How to” course that expands on the principles of the Living in Love retreat and offers additional insight, content and specific tools, skills, and strategies not offered on the Living in Love weekend.
The course includes state of the art professionally printed materials, workbooks, and take home reading material for the experiential portion of the program as well as the outlines and resources needed to mentor the engaged using Preparing to Live in Love.
If you have ever experienced Living in Love, you can experience Living in Love Every Day whenever and wherever it is offered. Check dates for Living in Love in your area and presume that Living in Love Every Day will be starting soon after. Register your interest with the PMRC by clicking on the Register Now button below and we will keep you informed of opportunities near you.
Register for Living in Love Every Day
Skills Course Content
A Mission to Love
-An invitation to approach marriage as a pro-active mission to live in love and to pray for the grace of other-centered generosity. Each couple has an opportunity to express their appreciation for the others sexuality and understand the importance of intentional affirmation in providing a solid foundation for growing relationship.
Smart Loving
-A package of fun-filled, helpful exercises designed to free us from any limiting expectations formed in our family of origin while discovering how to love the way the other most wants and needs to be loved. We look at a variety of things we bring into marriage including expectations, values, and our concept of what is normal or right. We also look at how to be more effective at loving the other by understanding their love language and what makes them feel in love.
Communicating for Intimacy (Part 1)
-Practical skills to build intimacy and trust while avoiding misunderstanding through feeling level verbal communication and empathetic listening. This topic is addressed in two sessions for the married. Part 1 focuses on identifying and describing what we are feeling.
Communicating for Intimacy (Part 2)
-Building on the basic skills developed in Part 1, Part 2 focuses on developing the ability to relate to the other’s feeling through empathetic listening in order to experience a deep level of acceptance and establish an emotional connection even in areas of friction or tension.
Sex as Sacred Body Language
-Explores making love as the ultimate language of the body, the language of our wedding vows, rather than just an activity. We talk about specific behaviors to develop the language of the body in our everyday interactions and how to honor both the unitive and procreative dimensions of conjugal love.
Sacrament of Matrimony
-Illuminating the call of the church to live a deeply sexual, passionate, and intimate love as a sign of Christ’s love for the church supported by prayer and the community of the faithful. A simple approach to helping couples share their unique experiences of faith and prayer with each other as they begin or continue their journey of becoming one in the Lord.
Healing and Forgiveness
-Principles, processes, and practices for growing closer through forgiveness and healing along with strategies to combat emotional injuries from outside the relationship. Good strategies and good practices combine to enable a couple to nip disagreements in the bud and avoid hurtful arguments completely.
Becoming a Couple
-Developing couple values, examining individual decision-making styles, and learning strategies for couple decision making based on making what is important to you important to me. Couples learn a constructive way to address issues that have been untouchable for years as well as having an opportunity to plan for a lifetime of intentionally growing in love.
Graduation and Commissioning
-Motivation and inspiration to embrace a vision of sacramental conjugal love lived out for the sake of the church. Couples receive the prayerful blessing of their good intentions and desire to serve others through their lived example of marital love.
