This conference will include keynote sessions, breakout sessions, and a panel discussion. 

Keynote sessions are 60 minutes. Breakout sessions are 45 minutes and should include interactive, skills-based components. Panels and plenary sessions are designed to normalize common struggles, offer grounded insight, and support emotional safety.

Please review the conference tracks and descriptions here before completing the application.

Conference Tracks
Speakers may submit proposals aligned with one or more of the following tracks. Detailed track descriptions are provided below. 

We are especially interested in proposals that go beyond traditional lecture-style presentations. Sessions should include practical skills, guided exercises, or structured activities that couples can participate in during or apply immediately after the conference. Interactive elements—such as reflective exercises, partner discussions, or role-plays (particularly in breakout sessions)—are strongly encouraged. Our goal is for couples to leave with tools they can continue using for months, similar to the skill-building focus of a couples intensive.

Note: We welcome proposals that reflect the experiences of diverse couples and families. This may include sessions that thoughtfully address same-sex partnerships, sexual identity, or related family dynamics, when relevant to the topic and aligned with the conference’s focus on practical, relational skill-building. Sessions may address relationship dynamics across diverse identities, orientations, and family structures.

Track 1: Communication & Connection

This track focuses on how couples communicate why conversations often escalate, shut down, or repeat without resolution. Topics may include interrupting recurring conflict cycles, rebuilding emotional safety after long-standing misattunement, navigating differences in desire for connection or therapy, repairing conflict instead of avoiding it, and learning how stress slowly erodes intimacy—and how couples can actively rebuild it.

Track 2: Parenting When Mental Health Is in the Room

This track explores how anxiety, depression, emotional dysregulation, or behavioral challenges in children impact both parenting and couple relationships. Topics may include parenting through big emotions, supporting a struggling child without losing the partnership, navigating disagreement between parents about mental health needs, helping children regulate when parents feel overwhelmed themselves, and understanding the hidden toll parenting stress takes on connection and communication.

Track 3: Partners Under Chronic Stress

This track addresses the cumulative strain ongoing stressors place on relationships, such as work demands, financial pressure, caregiving responsibilities, faith shifts, or burnout. Topics may include the invisible load and resentment it creates, survival-mode relationships, feeling more like co-managers than partners, staying emotionally connected when life never slows down, and finding ways to lower pressure while strengthening partnership and shared meaning. The track will also explore later-life transitions such as “gray divorce,” long-term relationship dissolution, and the emotional, relational, and identity shifts that can occur when couples separate or renegotiate partnership in midlife or beyond.

Track 4: Trauma-Informed Relationships

This track focuses on how past trauma shows up in everyday relationship dynamics, including conflict, avoidance, control, or emotional reactivity. Topics may include understanding trauma responses in partners, creating safety rather than escalating conflict, why traditional communication strategies often fail in trauma-impacted relationships, supporting a partner with a sensitive nervous system without becoming their therapist, and addressing how the past can continue to shape present-day interactions.

Track 5: Parenting Adult Children

This track centers on the evolving challenges of parenting adult children and the impact those dynamics can have on couple relationships. Topics may include supporting adult children through mental health struggles, addiction, or identity development; setting boundaries without disconnecting; avoiding overfunctioning; navigating blended family dynamics; and redefining parenting roles while staying aligned and connected as partners. 

Track 6: Betrayal, Pornography & Addictions

This track addresses relational repair after trust has been broken through betrayal, pornography use, or addiction. Topics may include understanding betrayal trauma, rebuilding emotional and relational safety, navigating mismatched healing timelines, approaching addiction as a relational issue rather than an individual failure, and identifying what supports repair versus what unintentionally deepens harm—without rushing forgiveness or reconciliation.

Track 7: Emotional Resilience in Families

This track focuses on how couples and families recover, adapt, and grow after stress, conflict, or disruption. Topics may include teaching emotional regulation without perfection, repairing ruptures with partners and children, building resilience rather than avoiding hard experiences, modeling regulation instead of emotional suppression, and navigating co-parenting under ongoing stress, conflict, or court involvement.