In the News

The Dallas Seminars were featured in November 1998 on NBC Nightly News, February 1999 on Positively Texas Channel 11 (CBS) and March 1999 on Fox 4 Nightly News.

Kelly Simpson has written articles for the 1999 February, April, and June issues, along with 2000 January issue of Today's Dallas Woman on Intimacy, Infidelity, and Physical Health & Intimacy.

THE DALLAS OBSERVER

Just Get Married! May 29, 2003

Bells will be ringing as a new pro-marriage, anti-poverty plan takes root in Texas

BY MARK DONALD

Mark Graham

Dallas marriage therapist Kelly Simpson hopes to spearhead the "Texas initiative," a broad-based Dallas effort to promote marriage and strengthen relationships by offering classes such as those she developed for the Army.

"Then there was the guy who loved his wife so much, he almost told her." --Anonymous

It seems a bit bizarre and a lot ironic that the Army, part of the mightiest military machine in history, is offering its troops a touchy-feely weekend workshop in romance. Yet eight soldiers and their spouses in various stages of connubial bliss are registered at a San Antonio Holiday Inn for a three-day course in the pleasurable arts. All hope--or so they say this May evening--to command a better understanding of the emotional needs of their companions by building the communication and intimacy needed to enhance their marriages. Hopefully, the sex will get better, too.

There was a time when the Army's attitude about marriage was different. "We used to say, if the Army wanted you to have a wife, we would have issued you one," says a company commander who attended the workshop. But now the Army, like much of the federal government, is in the business of promoting and strengthening marriage.

The Army got it right when it hired Dallas marriage therapist Kelly Simpson to teach romance skills to its fighting men and women. Simpson is attractive but unthreatening, girlish but gracious, farm fresh in her candor but Park Cities in her pinstripes. As she offers an overview of the weekend's activities, a playful smile deepens her dimples. Topics will include differing intimacy styles, the biology of love and ministering to each other's sexual needs. Several couples have previously attended her communication skills workshop, but it can't be easy for soldiers to talk about surrender--sexual, emotional or otherwise.

Simpson gets everybody on their feet, playing a game she calls "suck it up, blow it out." Each couple stands face to face--a drivers license pressed to the lips of one partner. The goal is to pass the license between partners, by blowing or sucking, and thereby mimicking the give-and-take implicit in a cooperative relationship. The spirit of the game is playful, but the sucking, blowing sounds have an undulating, erotic quality. Small wonder it's the last exercise of the evening before the couples retreat to their rooms.

"Each couple will receive a little brown goody bag," says Simpson, who has filled them with baby oil, string, candles and other trinkets in hope they might get creative with the menu of sexual options that will be discussed. "Research shows that the best sex happens in long-term married relationships."

I begin to wish I had taken my editor up on her offer and invited my wife to come along for the ride. Throughout the weekend, it becomes obvious the couples are growing more intimate, staring into each other's eyes during the exercises, listening without interrupting, passing out government-issued Kleenex as they openly recommit themselves to their marriage vows.

"This is not traditional marriage therapy," Simpson later says. "This is marriage education." No attempts are made to heal the inner child, to diagnose dysfunction, to blame Mom for neurotic behaviors. "There is lecturing and group discussions, which create the opportunity to take in information in a less defensive mode."

Marriage education is the centerpiece of the Bush administration's Healthy Marriage Initiative, a controversial social experiment that seeks to use federal welfare funds from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program to promote marriage and reduce divorce, particularly among the poor, whose children are five times as likely to live in poverty if raised in mother-only households. But family disintegration knows no economic boundaries, and states such as Oklahoma, which has become a national pro-marriage model, are already preaching a get-married, stay-married agenda to couples of every stripe. Simpson hopes to be at the forefront of a broad-based "marriage promotion program" in the Dallas area, using much of the same material she developed for the Army.

Though at first blush, the pro-marriage movement seems the agenda of the family-values crowd--religious conservatives locked in a cultural war with single moms, cohabitants and Hillary Clinton--a body of research from respected social scientists has given renewed zeal to those whose primary weapon had been a few selected verses of scripture. This research suggests that marriage confers undeniable benefits on children, couples and country. It has also drawn together an odd confluence of conservatives, sociologists, marriage educators, fathers' rights activists and divorce-law reformers who have found enough common ground to consider themselves a movement.

But weaving research into sound public policy is another matter. With the election of President Bush, marriage promotion found its champion and is now being touted as a palliative for poverty, a way for unwed mothers to wean themselves off welfare and for distant dads to reconnect with their kids--and a damn attractive family value for the rest of us.

Cynics might call the Bush agenda brilliant politics, the marriage of liberal social science with a conservative pro-family (anti-gay) agenda. Even less jaundiced critics claim the research results are overstated and filtered through an ideological lens that is unrealistic, simplistic and narrow-minded. Several women's groups fear that promoting marriage will coerce some women into abusive marriages and discourage others from leaving them. Advocates for the poor think the failure to marry is more a consequence of poverty than a cause. Liberals believe that valuing marriage over other family structures denies the reality of millions of children who are being raised by single parents, extended families, gay and lesbian couples or movie stars. Libertarians wonder what the hell the government is doing in the marriage business anyway.

As yet, there is little evidence of the pro-marriage movement in Texas, but our turn is coming. "We are getting pressure from the White House that we really need to do something in Texas," says Larry Brendel, regional program director for the Administration of Children and Families within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Texas conservatives are pushing bills this legislative session supporting marriage promotion as well as covenant marriage--a kind of über-marriage that eliminates simple no-fault divorces. A small but zealous group of family law attorneys claim they defend marriage in the courtroom on behalf of clients who are contesting their divorces. But when Brendel thinks about "doing something in Texas," he thinks about supporting, among others, Kelly Simpson, who hopes by the end of the year to launch what she calls the "Texas initiative," a nonprofit community-wide marital coalition of the willing.

That the federal government might fund relationship skills courses such as Simpson's that seek to educate couples in a variety of sexual styles--"gourmet sex, adventuresome sex, a quickie, self-care"--would seem to at least give the religious right pause. Only somehow, it doesn't.

"It's just not a liberal-conservative issue," Simpson says. "I see it as a necessity to help our culture raise healthy, happy, well-fed children. What's so controversial about that?"

"I never knew what real happiness was until I got married; and then it was too late." --Anonymous

I am happily remarried and have been able to achieve what marriage educators and social conservatives claim is a myth: a good divorce. Although I was no monument to matrimony when my ex-wife threw me out, I remember standing on the front porch and peering through the living room window at my son Adam, who was only 2 and staring back at me, crying. As a lawyer, I had done some divorce work and had represented too many dads who out of irresponsibility (theirs) or vindictiveness (theirs and/or their wives) had no relationship with their kids after the divorce was final. Staring at my son, I promised myself I would never be one of those dads. Anger subsided, civility returned and my former wife filed for divorce alleging no-fault grounds, which enabled us to share custody of our son for 16 years. Through remarriages, career changes and the birth of my second son and first daughter, we have attempted to keep Adam, now a college sophomore, at the center of our concerns. So when I look at the research, which states that on average children and parents in married families are happier, healthier, wealthier and generally less pissed off than those who live in single-parent homes, I think about Adam and wonder if the marriage movement is overstating its case.

Diane Sollee, the director of the Washington, D.C.-based Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education and head cheerleader for the marriage movement, does her best to convince me otherwise. She coined the term "marriage education" in 1996, the year she first organized her Smart Marriages Conference, which trains marriage educators in a dizzying assortment of relationship skills courses. She sees the movement more as a "marriage renaissance" and paints herself as a liberal feminist, which is disarming, coming from a woman who regularly lunches with Republicans.

For more of this article visit:http://www.dallasobserver.com/issues/2003-05-29/feature.html/1/index.html

11/02/02 Saturday

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS

Section:TEXAS LIVING Page:1C

THE EX FILES Why do serial spouses - from Liz to Billy Bob - have so much trouble getting it right, marriage after marriage?

By JOYCE SÁENZ HARRIS Staff Writer

The phrase itself only made it into the Oxford English Dictionary last year. But "serial monogamy" is not really all that new. The phenomenon has been around since way before Henry VIII, the 16th-century king of England who married six times in his obsessive quest for male heirs. Even citizens of the Roman Empire, as far back as the first century B.C., practiced serial marriage.

Before the 20th century, the combination of mortality in childbirth and primitive medical practices often resulted in shorter life spans, meaning many people were unfortunate enough to be widowed more than once. This was the case of some unlikely candidates for serial monogamy, such as Mary Baker Eddy, the thrice-wed founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist.

But today we have a different breed of serial monogamists: people who divorce repeatedly, going from one marriage to another in search of the "perfect" partner.

In some cases, real life may be not too different from the byzantine soap-opera travails of All My Children heroine Erica Kane (played by actress Susan Lucci). Erica has been married nine times to six men. She married three of her husbands twice each, and (oops!) had two illegal marriages to yet another swain.

On the soap, it's all fiction. But it's not all that far from fact, considering that actress Elizabeth Taylor has been married eight times, including twice to Richard Burton - and that she managed to acquire four husbands in the 1950s alone.

"I imagine Elizabeth Taylor choosing a dress in which to marry Richard Burton. Did she believe that this time everything would be different? That this time she would be true until death did them part? I marvel at such hopefulness." - novelist Ann Patchett, in The New York Times.

If we define "serial monogamy" as three or more marriages on one's personal résumé, the best-known serial monogamists are celebrities such as Miss Taylor, CNN talk-show host Larry King and actor Mickey Rooney, all with eight marriages each; and Hollywood's reigning champion, Zsa Zsa Gabor, with nine. Moving up as a contender is our serial bridegroom of the year, actor Billy Bob Thornton. He recently dispensed with Wife No. 5, actress Angelina Jolie - and he is only 47.

Many of us know someone who has shed his or her second or third spouse and plans another trip to the altar. The mom next door may have more than she imagined in common with model Christie Brinkley and actress Melanie Griffith, each of whom has been married four times and has three children, each child by a different husband.

This inherently creates difficulties. "The blending of children is one of the biggest problems," says Dr. Joan Robertson Cross, a psychologist whose Far North Dallas practice sees many couples working on third or fourth marriages. By the time a parent enters a third marriage, he or she is hauling the considerable baggage of children who resent the revolving door of stepparents and stepsiblings.

"Such children also grow up with a distorted idea of marriage," says Kelly Simpson, a marriage and family therapist at the Active Relationships Center in Dallas (www.activerelationships.com).

"Repeatedly changing partners produces a generation of kids who have never seen a marriage work," Ms. Simpson says. These children are likely to regard the opposite sex as untrustworthy, spouses as easily replaceable. The chances are poor that they will avoid the example set by their parents and achieve a stable marriage of their own.

Serial monogamists "most definitely come out of similarly fractured households," Ms. Simpson says. Dr. Cross agrees: "There is a correlation in divorce. If one of the partners in a marriage has been married three times, 9 times out of 10, that one is from a divorced home."

"Same old slippers, Same old rice, Same old glimpse of Paradise." - poet William James Lampton, "June Weddings"

Why do people repeatedly fail at marriage? It's not a matter of socio-political philosophy, for sure: Those who have had three spouses include staunch conservatives such as Newt Gingrich and die-hard liberals such as Jane Fonda. A couple's level of marital commitment is far more likely to be shaped by parents and siblings, other married friends and religious beliefs.

First marriages usually falter when the heat of romance cools unexpectedly. This coincides with the waning of a potent "chemical cocktail" that, when released in the human body, makes one feel sexually attracted to - "in love" with - another person. After a few months, perhaps up to two years, that initial thrill is mostly gone. Unless romance has ripened and matured into a committed, selfless relationship, the partners are likely to feel vaguely dissatisfied. Sexual relations may diminish drastically, especially after childbirth. But another attractive person can make that chemical cocktail kick in again. Eventually it's the same song, third verse.

If you fit this pattern, you're merely in love with love. Like any addiction, the "love drug" requires more frequent doses to maintain its kick. That's why serial marriages or other monogamous relationships may get successively shorter in duration.

Couples who work to save a marriage and succeed are likely to be influenced by "subliminal pressures from their families, their friends and their faith," Ms. Simpson says. Those partners tend to have more intact extended families, with parents and siblings in stable marriages.

Couples may have a better support network if they have a religious reason For marital commitment. A social group of happily married friends also can exert a subtle force, "because friends don't like to see their friends get divorced," Ms. Simpson says.

"It was the triumph of hope over experience." - Dr. Samuel Johnson on the subject of remarriage, 1770

Can serial monogamists ever find true happiness? Yes - but not unless the serial bride and groom learn some hard lessons. Otherwise, "you can marry five times and never learn anything," Ms. Simpson says.

Key points:
No serial spouse is an innocent party to marital disaster.

All serial spouses have repeated poor choices and negative behavioral patterns.

They are destined to fail unless they change themselves.

They must team up with their spouse to break the destructive patterns.

Dr. Cross and Ms. Simpson agree that the serial spouses who seem to try hardest are working to save a third marriage. "I see a lot of good marriages coming out of No. 3," Dr. Cross says.

So, if what was learned in No. 3 had been learned in No. 1, more first marriages presumably would survive.

Elizabeth Taylor, now 70, once said of her eight marriages, 'What do you expect me to do? Sleep alone?' And Zsa Zsa Gabor, 13 years older and wed nine times, said, 'Personally I know nothing about sex because I've always been married." - columnist Susan Ager, the Detroit Free Press .

Is serial monogamy the symptom of a society that now treats marriage vows as disposable?

"No question about it," says Ms. Simpson. "People cut the line a lot faster than they used to."

They also hedge their bets more. Modern couples often live together for years, believing that a "test drive" will avert divorce, says Carina Chocano, a writer for the online magazine Salon.com. But the National Marriage Project, affiliated with Rutgers University, found that cohabitation before marriage actually increases the likelihood of divorce by 46 percent.

"There's a reason a 'test drive' lasts 10 minutes instead of three years," Ms. Chocano wisecracks. "Because at the end of three years, you want a new car." Ms. Chocano is the author of Do You Love Me or Am I Just Paranoid? A Serial Monogamist's Guide to Love (Villard Books; $9.95), which will be published in January. She describes it as a comic takeoff on earnest self-help books and "girl guides" to male- female relationships. But the writer also has real-life experience to share: She says a pattern of serial monogamy is quite usual among today's singles, be they gay or straight. Careerist types especially tend to date well into their 20s and 30s.

At 34, Ms. Chocano is thinking of marrying her live-in boyfriend, who is her third lengthy post-college relationship. "When you live together, you're 'committed,' but ambivalent," she says. Getting married requires a leap of faith for her generation, the first to grow up with parents who were likely to be divorced.

"People are understandably gun-shy about getting married, because who wants to go through three divorces?" Ms. Chocano says. "Three break-ups are bad enough." She cites a male friend who emerged in his early 30s from a short-lived "starter marriage."

The divorce, he said, "was just like breaking up - only with paperwork."

HARP Article

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HARP Ribbon Cutting Article

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Feb. 22, 2007
Contact Information:
Dr. Kim Kotrla, School of Social Work
Baylor University
254-710-4434

Baylor Social Work Professors Evaluate Program to Strengthen Marriages of Hispanic Couples

Hispanic couples and families are the focus of a new $2.5 million grant aimed at creating healthy relationships. Two Baylor School of Social Work professors, Dr. Preston Dyer and Dr. Kim Kotrla, will be evaluating the new five-year Hispanic Active Relationship Project (HARP), which was created by the Active Relationship Center (ARC) in Dallas, which received the grant.

The Hispanic population is growing faster than all other ethnic or racial groups, according to U.S. Census data. Hispanics face a 34 percent chance that their first marriages will end in separation or divorce within 10 years, according to data from the National Survey of Family Growth. For all women, the likelihood of divorce is increased by factors such as marrying at a younger age, having a lower level of education or having a child prior to getting married, according to National Center for Health Statistics data.

ARC created a program specifically designed to provide skills in building healthy stable, relationships in Hispanic couples then pilot-tested the program at eight sites throughout Texas in 2006.

The pilot study was unique in several ways, Kotrla said. “As far as we know, this is the first study on marriage education with participants who are primarily Hispanic,” she said. “At least half of them were first-generation immigrants.” Recruiting was done largely through churches. The pilot program began with 177 individuals who were surveyed before, immediately following and three months after completing the program.

Dyer and Kotrla were asked by the ARC to evaluate the program and what they found is encouraging, Dyer said. Evaluation of the pilot revealed that participants had increased marital satisfaction, improved communication and conflict resolution skills, and decreased negative interactions.

At the completion of the workshop, 93 percent of the participants had more confidence that they would be with their partner in years to come, while three months later, 97 percent of the participants felt this way. Just following the workshop, 97 percent reported they were spending more time having fun and enjoying friends with their partner/spouse, while three months later, 99 percent reported this.

Of those completing the program, 97 percent at the conclusion and the three-month follow-up agreed that they possessed the tools to discuss issues with their partners without fighting. After the workshop, 98 percent of the attendees said they would invest more time in their relationship; 99 percent said they would do this three months later.

Dyer, who is a certified marriage enrichment leader and trainer and has led marriage enrichment events across the United States, is excited to see the skills learned in the workshops being used by couples months after the sessions ended.

“It’s not just comprehension of the content,” Dyer said of the results. “We looked at how couples changed their behaviors into the future.”

After evaluating the 10-month pilot project, Dyer and Kotrla were asked by the Active Relationship Center to submit a program evaluation plan to accompany a grant application to the Administration for Children and Families, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Of the more than 1,500 applications that were received, the ARC was one of 150 that received funding. The $2.5 million grant will be used to implement the HARP program in Cameron County, Texas, which lies at the southernmost tip of the state.

Cameron County is 86 percent Hispanic. Significant proportions of the adult populations do not have a high school degree, and one-third of families, and more than half of children, live in poverty; almost one-fifth of the families live on less than $10,000 per year.

The center chose to focus its efforts in a community where there are high rates of poverty, out-of-wedlock births, and low levels of educations and incomes, all of which can be significant stressors on relationships, according to Kotrla.

Dyer and Kotrla will continue to work with the ARC in implementing the HARP- Cameron County project and currently are in the process of developing evaluation instruments, which they will use to track the progress and effectiveness of the program. The first workshops are scheduled to begin in March.

“The ultimate goal of the project is to strengthen relationships,” Kotrla said, “which in turn, will hopefully strengthen families, create better outcomes for children, and eventually strengthen communities.”

Dyer agreed, adding that when adults and children feel safe in a marriage or relationship, everyone benefits.

For more information , contact Dyer (254-710-6230) or Kotrla (254-710-4434) at the Baylor School of Social Work.

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Cameron County Receives $2.5 Million Grant to Strengthen Marriages: Funds are part of federal government’s “Healthy Marriage Initiative”

Media Contact:
Suzi Prokell suzi@prokell.com
(817) 598-1556

DALLAS – December 11, 2006 – Active Relationships, a proactive family wellness organization, announced today that Cameron County will be the beneficiary a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services grant. The sum of $2.5 million, across a five-year grant, is part of a national “Healthy Marriage Initiative”. Cameron County’s Hispanic Active Relationships Project (H.A.R.P.) was one of 124 grantees to receive an award - out of more than 1,600 applicants across the nation.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, married Americans became a minority for the first time in 2005. Passed in January 2006, the “Healthy Marriage Initiative” will provide more than $100 million per year in federal funding to stem the tide of nationwide family dissolution, through programs that promote skills for healthy marriage. The national initiative will utilize existing evidence-based skills education programs, such as Active Relationships, that have proven effective across communities. This is the first time that Congress has authorized spending on marriage education.

“We are thrilled that our efforts in Texas have resulted in an opportunity for Cameron County to build great marriages and therefore strengthen families,” said Kelly Simpson, founder of the H.A.R.P. project and director of Active Relationships, the organization that piloted the H.A.R.P. program. “There is so much to know about creating a successful marriage and unfortunately most of us never had education in these skills and neither did our parents, or their parents. We are just expected to know how.”

“Counselors, doctors, teachers... anyone can be better at marriage and it is so important for our culture and well-being,” added Simpson. “Healthy, loving marriages are the cornerstone of strong families and strong, happy families are the cornerstone of the community. If marriages cease to exist because people do not believe they can work, our families are at extreme risk, and our community and ultimately the infrastructure of our nation are at risk.”

Statistics indicate that children of single parents are far more likely to grow up in poverty and become victims of abuse and neglect than children in households led by both parents, assuming those parents know and practice the skills for healthy relationships.

Simpson, H.A.R.P.’s project director, and Gloria Miranda-Cavazos, H.A.R.P. Cameron County program director, will bring trainings for key community leaders to Cameron County. Once trained, these community leaders will implement seminars for couples and youth within their own communities.

“H.A.R.P. is a very unique resource to our community. There are existing resources for couples in crisis, like domestic violence services or couples needing counseling, but there has been a lack of resources for middle of the road couples, until now,” said Miranda-Cavazos. “H.A.R.P., through marriage education, is going to help couples in our community build stronger marriages for healthier families.”

H.A.R.P.’s goal is to reach 400 Cameron County couples per year to strengthen existing marriages, prepare those considering marriage, or help those who are not married and who have children together establish stable co-parenting relationships for their children. Additionally, the program plans to educate 240 Cameron County youth on important conflict resolution, emotion management and vital communication skills for healthy relationships.

For more information, visit www.HARPCC.com on the Internet, send e-mail to HARPCC@harpcc.com, or call (956) 544-7165.

Upcoming H.A.R.P. offerings include:

Active Communication - January 5-6 (a 16 hour “Train the Trainer” seminar to become certified to teach seminars for couples)

Active Relationships for Young Adults - January 25-27 (to become certified to teach seminars for youth)

ABOUT ACTIVE RELATIONSHIPS
Active Relationships (AR) is a Texas-based proactive family wellness organization that provides educational seminars around the world for individuals, couples, families, churches, businesses, military personnel, government agencies and non-profit organizations. AR programs have been successful and internationally used across the U.S. including in (but not limited to) the Air Force, U.S. Air Force Europe, Army, National Guard and Head Start.

Utilizing more than a decade of experience educating couples and training professionals, including military personnel in the U.S., Asia and Europe, Active Relationships’ founder Kelly Simpson, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, is an internationally known author and speaker. Simpson trains community leaders to teach couples, singles and youth seminars that include proven skills and effective exercises to make successful relationships possible. For more information please visit www.activerelationships.com on the Internet or call 877.724.7789.

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Extension trains to help military families cope
By Amanda Karr akarr@coxnc.com

The Daily Reflector

Published May 26, 2006
Couples dealing with military deployment have a new place to seek support and advice.

During a two-day workshop ending today, state cooperative extension agents are undergoing training on how to help couples and families through what can be a stressful time, particularly for National Guardsmen and those in the reserves.

"Military families on a base would have available a whole array of life skills available to them. For those that don't, we want to supplement those services, and to do that we really need to touch the local community," Karen Smith Rotabi, support programs coordinator for Citizen Soldier Project, said.

The Citizen Soldier Project is a civilian group based in Chapel Hill that promotes outreach to military personnel and their families. The group helped organize the training with faculty in East Carolina University's College of Human Ecology.

Although family counseling seems an atypical job for cooperative extension agents, who are perhaps better know for working with farmers, strengthening families is part of the organization's mission.

In Pitt County, Susan Reece is the family-consumer science agent. She runs programs in stress management, nutrition and finances, among other topics. She said she hopes the training will expand her outreach.

"I'm hoping to take the information out to citizen soldiers, those that just came back from being deployed or about to go to help create a more harmonious family and help them feel better about leaving," she said.

Reece was one of more than 50 cooperative extension agents across the state who attended the training run by Kelly Simpson, a Texas marriage therapist and author of "Active Military Life Skills."

While Reece joined more than a dozen others at ECU's global classroom building, other agents across the state watched and interacted via a video feed on college campuses from Appalachian State University to Elizabeth City State University.

Attendees discussed general relationship skills, such as the importance of communication, as well as issues more specific to couples separated by deployment, such as making the most of short phone calls home and what to discuss during that time.

"With deployment in the civilian world, not only do they worry about the businesses they leave behind, but also finances, insurance, kids. There are so many facets of it. In addition to the stresses of a regular relationship, they have to deal with stress above and beyond," Simpson said.

Peggie Garner, Onslow County extension director, already has some experience dealing with military personnel through the military bases located in her area.

"We want to try to empower (couples) by giving them information so they can make the calls they need to make," she said. "It's a great opportunity for those not in the military community to provide support and preparation for reservists who may have thought they might not go anywhere," she said.

With cooperative extension offices located across the state, just like the more than 20,000 reserve and guard members in North Carolina, those involved in the program hope the message reaches the families who need the advice.

Amanda Karr can be contacted at akarr@coxnc.com and 329-9574.
Author Kelly Simpson speaks to a group from the N.C. Cooperative Extension Service on Thursday at the Science and Technology Building at ECU in Greenville. Simpson was training the agents on how to help military families and couples deal with seperation issues after deployment. Greg Eans/The Daily Reflector
(c) 2006 Cox Newspapers, Inc. - The Daily Reflector

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contact@activerelationships.com
Active Relationships Center
Kelly Simpson M.A. Psyc., LMFT, CSC
25 Highland Park Village, Suite 100-734
Dallas, Texas 75205

Office: 214.369.5717
Toll Free: (877) 724.7789
Fax: 214.369.4914