Retrouvaille, meaning rediscovery in French, is an organization with support from the Catholic church that holds weekend retreats around the world to help people heal their broken marriages. They have a website, http://www.retrouvaille.org. The program works by example. Couples who have experienced misery in their marriages present their stories. They sit in front of you, with occasional tears in their eyes, holding hands and giving each other support, telling you openly and honestly about their lives, what went wrong, and how they fixed it. Then they teach you a communication technique called Dialoguing and you practice doing dialogues with your spouse, in private. They give you questions to dialogue about. These questions help you and your spouse understand each other at a deeper level than you ever could by simply talking.
The initial program takes a weekend. You can do it in your home city or go somewhere else and make it a mini-vacation. There are follow-up sessions locally. These help you to continue the openness and understanding with each other. They teach concepts like, love is a decision. Or, marriage is like a building supported by four posts: love, commitment, trust, and forgiveness. If you break one of the posts, like trust, and forgiveness is weak, then the building comes crashing down. To rebuild the marriage, you must rebuild the four posts. The more I thought about it, the more I understood. To rebuild my marriage I had to forgive, and trust. I couldn't rebuild the marriage first and have those fill in later.
While it is sponsored by the Church, it is open to all. My husband and I are not Catholics, and we benefited tremendously from the experience. We did not find the presentations by the priest to be too slanted to Catholic doctrine. He was there to be of service to the Catholics in the room who wanted his services. We were told not to confess new things to each other -- the priest was there to take confessions. I found that interesting. They do not focus on the past, they focus on building a new future together.
