About Us
Love Thinks is all about relationships. Our mission is to develop engaging, entertaining, and informative resources for personal growth and the development and maintenance of healthy relationships.
All of our programs are based around the Relationship Attachment Model (RAM; click here for research on the RAM), which is a picture of a relationship and the five dynamic bonds that make up a relationship. We believe that in order to be able to take charge of your relationships and make meaningful and lasting changes, you must be able to (1) remember what our programs teach and (2) be able to visualize and define confusing constructs and emotional experiences in relationships (i.e. “falling out of love” “falling in love” “losing trust” and so on). The unique feature of all of the Love Thinks programs is the RAM which provides a simple picture of the program content that can the be unpacked in deeper and more meaningful ways.
Love Thinks offers five programs. The PICK Program for singles teaches how to choose a healthy partner and develop a relationship in a safe way. Couple LINKS teaches couples how to rebalance the natural fluctuations in closeness in their relationship and how to deepen intimacy. Our Home Runs is a family program and provides a framework for building closeness and openness between parents and their kids. Ultimate Spiritual R&R teaches how to build resiliency through exploring and deepening spirituality. And Counseling with the RAM provides professionals a theoretical framework for developing the therapeutic alliance, as well as developing a treatment and follow-up plan.
Love Thinks Team
John Van Epp, Ph.D.
President & Founder
John Van Epp, PhD in Counseling/Psychology, is the author of How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk, published by McGraw-Hill, which blends in-depth research with humorous stories to provide a map for making healthy relationship choices.
Dr. Van Epp’s evidence-based relationship programs were developed from the combination of his twenty-five years of clinical counseling in his private practice, of his previous position as founding pastor of a nondenominational church, and of his extensive reviews of research in premarital, marital and family relations from teaching graduate marriage and family coursework as an adjunct professor. These relationship programs include: PICK (How to Avoid Falling for a Jerk—for singles of all ages), Couple LINKS (for committed couples), and Our Home Runs (for entire families and designed to facilitate family bonding); Home Run Dads; Home Run Parents; Ultimate Spiritual Resilience & Relationships (R&R—for individuals and couples to build core spiritual values and the skills to integrate those values into major domains of life); and Relationship Counseling with the RAM (a professional course that provides a model for assessing and counseling relationship concerns).
Dr. Van Epp has trained and certified more than 10,000 instructors from all fifty states and ten countries who have taught these programs to more than a million from settings including the military, social agencies, healthy relationship coalitions, jails and prisons, intimate-partner violence shelters, singles organizations, high schools, universities and colleges, churches and faith-based organizations. These programs come in three formats: teach-out-of-the-box certification courses, plug-n-play discussion group courses, and online courses—all having both Christian and community (or non-faith) versions.
Dr. Van Epp and his relationship programs based around his innovative Relationship Attachment Model were awarded the Smart Marriage Impact Award in 2008 and have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Psychology Today, Magazine, and Cosmopolitan; and he has appeared on the CBS Early Show, Good Morning America, Fox News, and Focus on the Family.
Education
He has presented his programs internationally in seminars and conferences, including the Smart Marriages Conference of the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education from 1998-2010, Singapore’s National Conference on Truth and Relationships, the Eastern Educational Research Association, International and Chapter Conferences for the North American Association for Separated and Divorced Catholics, the Annual Conference of the Ohio Association for Family and Consumer Sciences, the National and International Conferences for Beginning Experience, and the Ohio Christian Education Association, to name a few. Both the PICK and LINKS courses are “teach-out-of-the-box” with an instructor course on DVD and are being taught internationally by over 6,000 instructors in counseling and agency settings, public and private junior and senior high schools, colleges and universities, prisons, military installations, extension classes, coalition and community programs.
He has an M.A. in Pastoral Counseling and Psychology, and a second M.A. in Church History from Ashland Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. in Counseling and Psychology from the University of Akron.
He has been happily married for over thirty-five years and is the proud father of two daughters. You can contact John at info@lovethinks.com or his websites www.LoveThinks.com and www.MyLoveThinks.com.
You can contact John at info@lovethinks.com.
Morgan Van Epp Cutlip, PhD
Research & Development
Morgan Van Epp Cutlip joined the Love Thinks team officially in 2008, although she developed an interest in romantic relationship health at a young age, and traveled with her father when he first started teaching the How to Avoid Falling for Jerk program over 20 years ago.
Since, Morgan has completed her Bachelor’s degree in psychology at Miami University, her Master’s in Human Development and Family Science at the Ohio State University, and earned her Doctorate in Counseling Psychology from the University of Akron. While at Ohio State, Morgan worked on a research project that evaluated the effectiveness of the No Jerk program with single Army soldiers. She was lead author on the research article published about the study, which was awarded the 2008 Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal article of the year. Her dissertation was a qualitative study on the Relationship Attachment Model with married couples and can be downloaded here.
She is happily married to her husband, Chad, and is the proud mother to Effie and Roy.
