About Rebuilders International

A method that worked, and almost disappeared. This organisation exists because it nearly did.

What happened to the method

Dr. Bruce Fisher spent more than forty years developing the Rebuilding methodology. He ran the original program in Boulder, Colorado, wrote the book that has since sold in the millions, and travelled internationally training others to deliver it. At its height the program ran in communities worldwide.

Then the structure holding it together went away.

By 2018 what remained was a handful of programs operating independently, each doing good work in its own town, none connected to the others. There was no training pipeline, no shared standard, no organisation behind any of it. A method that had helped hundreds of thousands of people was surviving on the persistence of a few individual facilitators.

The method was not lost. The thing that carried it was.

Rebuilders International was founded that year to rebuild it: to unite the programs that were still running, to train new facilitators properly, and to extend the work online so that access no longer depended on living in the right town.

What we are for

Two things sit behind those.

Access should not depend on geography. For most of the method's history it did. If you lived in Boulder you had one of the best divorce recovery programs in the world within driving distance. If you lived anywhere else, you mostly had a book. Local programs and online programs together are how that changes.

The field needs measurement, not conviction. Divorce recovery has no shortage of people certain their approach works. It has almost no published data. We think that is the single biggest weakness in this field, and closing it is a large part of what this organisation does.

What we actually do

Train professionals	Therapists, counsellors and divorce coaches, from a free introductory hour through to full certification in the method. Continuing education credit for licensed clinicians.
License local programs	Certified facilitators deliver the ten-week program in their own communities with exclusive rights to their area, running it as their own practice.
Run programs directly	Online classes, workshops, coaching and retreats for people who do not have a local program, or who prefer not to attend one.
Administer the assessment	We hold responsibility for the Fisher Divorce Adjustment Scale — hosting it, scoring it, and publishing the norms it is scored against.
Publish research	Monthly findings and an annual report drawn from assessments completed by people entering divorce recovery. Free to cite, limitations included.

The method, and what we changed

The underlying work is Dr. Fisher's, and we do not present it as ours. What we changed is how it is taught.

Fisher's system runs to roughly nineteen rebuilding blocks. That depth is a strength inside a structured ten-week program and a barrier everywhere else — no clinician holds nineteen steps in mind during a session, and no client in crisis can locate themselves on a nineteen-point map.

So we reorganised it into four phases, which we call RIFT: Relationships, Identity, Feelings, Thinking. The letters run in the order a relationship comes apart. Recovery works back the other way.

RIFT is a teaching framework rather than an independently validated model, and we say so on every page where it matters. The underlying method has peer-reviewed outcome evidence; the assessment has independent validation; the framework is our own contribution and is presented as such.

How the method works → · What the evidence supports →

Why we publish our own numbers

Every participant takes a validated assessment before and after. That produces outcome data, and we publish it — including the parts that do not favour us.

Our own reports state plainly that our comparison is not a randomised trial, that reassessment is voluntary, and that we cannot rule out selection effects. We have also published a correction describing an error we found in our own analysis and how we fixed it.

See the research →

The organisation

Entity	Rebuilders International, LLC
Founded	2018
Method origin	Dr. Bruce Fisher, 1975
Regions	North America, Australia, the Spanish-speaking Americas
Based	Colorado, United States

Local programs are run by independent certified facilitators as their own practices, under licence. Regional operations are led by people who live in those regions.

Where Rebuilders operates → · Leadership →

Two sites, two audiences

This site is for professionals — training, licensing, the method, the research.

If you are going through a divorce yourself, everything built for you is at rebuilders.net: classes, coaching, the book, and a free self-assessment that will tell you where you actually stand.

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For journalists

Boilerplate, fast facts, logos, spokespeople and press contact are on the media page.

About Rebuilders International

Rebuilders International trains mental health professionals and divorce coaches in the Rebuilding method, developed by Dr. Bruce Fisher over more than forty years. Individuals going through divorce can find programs, classes and a free self-assessment at rebuilders.net.