What Is the Rebuilding Divorce Recovery Program?

The Rebuilding divorce recovery program is a structured, in-person group program for people going through separation and divorce. It was created by Dr. Bruce Fisher and later co-authored with Robert Alberti, and it’s built around their book, Rebuilding: When Your Relationship Ends. The idea is simple and specific: ending a relationship isn’t one undifferentiated blur of pain, it moves through recognizable emotional stages, and a person recovers by working through those stages in order rather than getting stuck in one.

Bob Manthy facilitates a Rebuilding Seminar in Boulder, Colorado. He’s led it for 15 years. It’s worth being clear up front: Bob didn’t create Rebuilding. He facilitates the program that Fisher and Alberti built. The credit for the model belongs to them.

Where Rebuilding Came From

Dr. Bruce Fisher was a therapist who spent his career studying one specific question: how do people actually recover after a relationship ends? Out of that work came a model of divorce recovery organized around a series of building blocks, each one a stage a person moves through on the way from the initial shock to genuine freedom on the other side.

Fisher’s approach was later carried forward with Robert Alberti in Rebuilding: When Your Relationship Ends, which has been a trusted resource on divorce recovery for decades and is now in its fourth edition. You can read more about the model and the wider Rebuilding approach at the official site, rebuilding.org. Everything Bob does in the Boulder seminar rests on that foundation.

The Rebuilding Blocks

The heart of the program is Fisher’s idea of the rebuilding blocks. Rather than treating the end of a relationship as one overwhelming event, the model breaks recovery into stages a person climbs one at a time.

The early blocks deal with the immediate aftermath: denial, fear, and the loneliness that comes when a shared life suddenly isn’t shared anymore. The middle blocks move into harder and more honest territory, including grief for what was lost, anger, and the work of understanding what actually happened in the relationship. The later blocks are about rebuilding a sense of self: self-worth, openness, and eventually a kind of freedom that isn’t just the absence of the old relationship but a genuinely steadier footing for whatever comes next.

The value of the sequence is that it gives people a map. When you’re in the middle of a divorce, it can feel like you’re failing because the pain won’t resolve on your schedule. Seeing that grief has a place, that anger has a place, and that they come in a recognizable order takes some of the self-judgment out of the process. You’re not broken. You’re on a block.

Why the Group Format Matters

Rebuilding is a group program on purpose. Divorce is isolating in a particular way. Friends mean well but often don’t know what to say, and the people closest to the marriage are sometimes the hardest to talk to about it. Sitting in a room with others who are going through the same thing does something that reading a book alone can’t.

The group isn’t there to trade advice or assign blame. It’s there so that people working through the same blocks can do it alongside each other, with facilitators guiding the process. For a lot of people, that shared experience is the part that finally makes them feel less alone in it.

Who Rebuilding Helps

Rebuilding tends to help people who are in the middle of a separation or divorce and want a process rather than just sympathy. If you’re the kind of person who does better with structure, who wants to understand what comes first and what comes next, the building-block model gives you that.

It also helps people who can meet in person in Boulder and who do well in a group setting. The seminar is an in-person program, and showing up in a room is part of how it works. If in-person isn’t possible for you, or if what you need is one-on-one clinical work tailored to your own history, Bob’s online relationship counseling is a separate option worth a conversation. Some people do both, or move from one to the other.

A Note on What Rebuilding Is and Isn’t

Rebuilding is a structured, educational, and supportive group program. It’s not the same thing as individual therapy. It follows a set curriculum for a shared audience rather than treating one person’s specific clinical situation, and a group program isn’t a substitute for individual clinical care when that’s what someone needs.

That distinction is worth taking seriously. If you’re dealing with something that rises to the level of clinical concern, or you simply want private, one-on-one support, individual counseling is a different and appropriate path. The honest answer to “which one is right for me” usually comes out of a short conversation, not a website. A free consultation is where Bob helps you figure out whether the in-person group, individual counseling, or some combination is the better fit for where you are.

If you’re going through a separation or divorce and want to do the work in an honest, supported way, schedule a confidential free consultation.