Frequently Asked Questions

Yes — please do, if you're already there. About half of every Rebuilding cohort is in individual therapy at the same time as the 10-week class, and the two work beautifully in tandem. Therapy gives you a one-on-one room to do the deep, private excavation. Rebuilding gives you a community of people climbing the same blocks beside you. Many of our participants are referred to Rebuilding by their own therapist precisely because therapy can't supply that peer-resonance piece. You won't be doubling up. You'll be using two different muscles to climb the same mountain — and you'll get to the top sooner.

From the room

Life happens and missing a week is fine. The 10-week class meets Sunday nights for three hours, and almost nobody makes every single one. What I ask is simple: come 30 minutes early to the next class. We sit down together, I walk you through what the cohort covered, you ask whatever you need to ask, and you're caught up before the room fills. The thing that matters more than perfect attendance is showing up the following week. The cohort moves together — and you belong in that circle, even on the weeks you couldn't be in the chair.

From the room

That's okay — and you'll still get a tremendous amount out of the class. Here's the truth most facilitators won't say out loud: the magic of Rebuilding isn't the homework. The magic is the community. It's what happens when ten people sit in a circle on a Sunday night and tell each other the truth about what they're carrying. That's the engine of healing — not the worksheet. Read the chapters when you can. Skip them when you can't. Just show up, masks off, imperfectly enough. The lifelong friendships and the real climb both happen in the room, not at the kitchen table.

From the room

Yes. You can pay tuition in full, or split it into 3 equal interest-free payments: that's 3 x $366.33 at the early-bird rate, or 3 x $400 at the regular price, no interest and no fees. And if even that is a stretch, please ask. We don't want money to keep you from the healing you need. Divorce is already expensive in twelve directions, and the last thing I want is for the cost of a workshop to be the reason somebody walks past the door. Email me at [email protected] and we'll work out something that fits your reality, whether that's a longer plan or a reduced rate. The form it takes matters less than the principle: nobody in front of me has been turned away from rebuilding work because of money alone, and nobody will be.

From the room

Each Sunday night a cohort of around 40 people splits into small groups of five to ten, with two volunteer co-leaders per group. You rotate to a different small group each week — by week ten you've sat with most of the room. I work hard to prevent cliquishness; we treat each other like family, and family means no favorites. We hold a no-dating rule for the full ten weeks so the trust stays clean. If you land in a group with someone you adore or someone you don't quite click with, that's okay — you'll be with a different mix next week. Lifelong friendships form here. The groups are how.

From the room

DivorceCare is a wonderful 13-week faith-based program hosted at thousands of churches. It's free, widely available, and genuinely helpful for people who want a Christ-centered room. Rebuilding is a different shape. We're a non-religious, structured 10-week cohort built on Dr. Bruce Fisher's 19 Rebuilding Blocks — a developmental framework, not a doctrinal one. Our groups are facilitated rather than peer-led, capped to a single cohort that begins and ends together so trust can build, and open to people of every faith and none. Many of our participants do both — DivorceCare for the spiritual community, Rebuilding for the structured climb. They're not competitors. They're cousins.

Yes, with one honest caveat. The 19 Rebuilding Blocks were originally mapped for divorce, but most of them — denial, fear, loneliness, grief, anger, identity, friendship, purpose — describe widowhood with painful accuracy. We've had widows and widowers in nearly every cohort, and they tell me the framework gave them language they couldn't find in grief-only groups. The caveat: if your loss is recent and raw — within the first three to six months — you may want a dedicated grief group first, then come to Rebuilding when you're ready for the developmental climb. Email me. We'll figure out together whether now is your moment or whether soon is.

Yes — absolutely. The 19 Rebuilding Blocks weren't built only for divorce; they map the end of any significant attachment relationship. Long-term partnerships, engagements, and serious relationships of two or more years all carry the same identity-collapse, the same grief, the same rebuilding work. We've had cohort members coming out of an eight-year relationship who told me they belonged in the room from the first night. The legal paperwork looks different. The interior climb doesn't. If you've shared a life with someone and that life has ended, you're a Rebuilder. Come climb with us — masks off, imperfectly enough, just like everyone else.

There's no calendar that tells you when. In one of our recent intro workshops there was a woman five weeks separated, a man divorced three years, and another woman about fourteen months out — initiators and blindsided, all in the same circle. Nobody apologized for being too soon or too late. The room doesn't work that way. The readiness signal isn't a timeline, it's whether you can sit and hear other people's pain without it shattering you. Five weeks brings raw grief. Three years brings perspective. The mix is the medicine. Just show up — whatever week you're in is the right week to start climbing.

You won't have to share a single thing you're not ready to share. Rebuilding isn't a confessional and it isn't group therapy — it's a structured workshop where you climb the 19 blocks alongside other people climbing them too. Some weeks you'll sit and listen. Other weeks you'll find yourself volunteering more than you expected, because the room makes that safe. The people you're sitting with aren't strangers for long; by week three this group of five-to-ten will feel like the people who've known your story longest. Just show up. Listen. Speak when you mean it. The vulnerability finds its own pace.

Right now our cohorts meet in-person on Sunday nights for three hours — same room, same circle, same group of forty people across the ten weeks. There's something about being in a body next to other bodies that the internet hasn't replicated yet, especially for the experiential exercises in the middle weeks. We're considering live online cohorts down the road for people too far from our location to drive in. If online is the only way you'd be able to attend, email me — [email protected] — and tell me where you're located. Demand shapes the next cohort schedule.

There's no calendar that tells you when. There's a block sequence that tells you whether. Bruce Fisher mapped dating as one of the late blocks for a reason: if you start dating before you've worked through grief, identity, friendship, and aloneness, you tend to recreate the relationship you just left — the patterns travel with you. Most people I've watched come through Rebuilding find that finishing a 10-week cohort changes who they're attracted to and how they show up at the dinner table. If you're three to six months out and starting to think about dating, come do the inside work first. The right partner work is much easier when you've climbed the early blocks. Becoming before coupling — every time.

The first step is a 15-minute video consult — Zoom or Google Meet, your choice. No cost, no commitment. We have a real conversation about where you are, what's been hard, and what you're hoping for. I'll explain how the program works and you can ask anything. Most people who do the consult come to the next monthly intro workshop in Niwot — a 2-hour evening that lets you see the program in action with no pressure. From there, you decide if you want to join the next 10-week class. The whole front end is designed so nobody walks into a room cold.

Start with one truth: kids handle divorce better when they see a parent rebuilding than when they see a parent pretending to be fine. Tell them age-appropriately — short sentences for the little ones, more nuance for teens — and tell them more than once. They'll have follow-up questions weeks later. The line you're walking is between informing the kids and venting to the kids — share what's true without making them carry the adult grief. Don't suppress your own sadness around them; let them see grief and recovery in the same person. That's the gift. Modeling rebuilding is itself an act of parenting.

Name the fear out loud — that's already the start of the work. Almost everyone in our cohort has stared at that question at 2 a.m.: who's going to take care of me when I'm old? It's a real question and it deserves a real answer, not a platitude. The answer is rarely one new partner. It's more often a constellation: chosen family, sibling networks, lifelong friendships, a vocation that keeps you connected, professional care relationships built over years. Some of the lifelong friendships I've watched form started in a Rebuilding cohort. Alone and lonely aren't the same word. We work on both, separately.

No. The two-hour intro workshop is yours. Whether you sign up for the next 10-week class is your decision, and there's no pressure to make it that night — or ever, if it turns out the program isn't a fit. I'd rather you know what you're getting into and choose freely than enroll because I pressured you. Most people who join the cohort do so a few weeks after the intro, after they've had time to think about it. Some people come to a workshop and decide it's not right for them, and that's fine too. The room is built to inform, not to convert.

You're not alone, and you're not wrong to feel that. Most people in our intro workshops carry shame about something — that they didn't see it coming, that they were the one who left, that their friends don't seem to understand, that something their ex said in the worst moment lodged in their head and won't leave. Shame derives its power from being unspeakable. The way out is bringing it into the light with people who won't shame you back. That's what we do in this room. We're not here to judge you for what you carry. We're here to help you set it down.