Get Better Together (GBT) - a unique couples curriculum.
Curriculum at a Glance
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Discover a powerful curriculum designed by the PREP Team in collaboration with the Uniformed Services University. GBT empowers military couples to navigate stress collaboratively, foster resilience, and enhance their journey as a committed team.
While rooted in PREP's proven concepts (Communication Danger Signs, The Three Keys, and Speaker Listener Technique), GBT introduces fresh perspectives using novel content, such as Identifying Thinking Traps, Partner Nudges for seamless transition during challenges, reframing strategies, and more.
What is different about Get Better Together compared to our flagship couples curriculum, PREP 8.0 v2? GBT is designed to be a primary prevention for couples to support their ability to cope with major stressors.
Because we know that effective coping is primarily a product of maintaining a strong, committed relationship and because we know that a struggling relationship is the single largest stressor that affects every part of our lives, the core PREP principles and strategies make up a big part of the foundation of GBT. However, there’s more to effective and productive coping strategies!
We’ve partnered with Dr. Sarah Carter and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU) to teach specific evidence-informed skills and strategies for productive coping in the face of major and minor stressors.
What’s new to GBT is that it’s designed specifically for military couples and the unique stressors they face. The skills and strategies presented here introduce couples to several new strategies meant to help them weather the storm that military life inevitably throws their way, but to do so as a team, relying on one another.
About the Unique Design of GBT:
This curriculum reflects the input of several military stakeholders– from veterans, spouses, and current service members from every branch–to be sure participants’ needs are met and that the workshop reflects authentic military experiences. Further, Get Better Together went through a lengthy piloting phase with Navy couples, and has consequently been refined and redesigned in response to their feedback, assuring the most interactive and engaging experience.
New Strategies include:
- Greater emotional awareness
- Our own emotional tells or verbal/non-verbal cues that communicate how we’re really doing in a particular moment.
- Our partner’s emotional tells that communicate when they need support or help.
- Using emotions as data to tell us when something really matters
- Communicating our emotions with one another respectfully and productively.
- Emotional regulation strategies
- Increased vocabulary for emotions–the good and the challenging ones
- XYZ Statements for naming and communicating emotions
- Understanding the stages of stress : the stressor, the impact, and the action taken in response
- STRESSOR: Identifying our stressors
- IMPACT: Understanding our instinctive reactions to a stressor
- ACTION: Recognize unproductive actions, like thinking traps (in ourselves and our partner)
- Practicing productive actions, like calming the body and mind (for ourselves and our partner)
- Three forms of effective coping skills: Acceptance, Reframing, & Problem Solving
- Handling stress as a team: Nudging your partner to adopt a more productive strategy to respond to a stressor
- Recognizing the personality-based strengths we each bring to the team.
New pedagogical tools:
New military-specific couple and content videos
Lots of new activities to make sure couples are practicing the strategies in the workshop.
Designed to be delivered in a typical CREDO workshop format, though flexible enough to be taught in other formats.
New personality inventory/assessment
Same great PREP Inc. material:
Speaker Listener Technique, Expectations, Three Keys, Danger Signs, Time Out, etc…
How to choose which curricula to use:
Who do you serve? Must be Navy/Marines through End of 2024
What do they need? Perhaps couples have expressed a need for ways to better handle stress or you see them struggling with the stressors of military life as a team.
What experience do couples have? Perhaps couples have already attended a PREP 8.0 workshop and are looking for more.
Units:
Each unit is roughly 1 hour long (Equaling out to 10 full content hours) GBT is designed to fill a CREDO weekend retreat format.