For over five decades, we’ve devoted our lives to exploring one simple but powerful question: how can people create happiness and transform their lives? Through our work with The Option Process® and The Son-Rise Program®, our books and programs have reached millions of people around the world—beginning with the journey that started in our own home with our son Raun.

Over the years, Bears has written 12 books on The Option Process® and The Son-Rise Program®, including Happiness Is A Choice, Son-Rise: The Miracle Continues, To Love Is To Be Happy With, and Power Dialogues. There are now more than 3 million copies of our books in print, published in 22 languages and distributed in over 65 countries.

We began teaching The Option Process® in 1972, and 11 years later we established The Option Institute® International Learning and Training Center (a not-for-profit educational organization in Sheffield, Massachusetts). Over time, it grew into a 100-acre campus with a full-time staff, offering programs to thousands of adults and families from around the world.

We are also the originators of The Son-Rise Program®, which we created when our own son, Raun, was diagnosed as severely and incurably autistic. Through our work with him, Raun transformed from a mute, withdrawn child with an I.Q. of less than 30 into a highly verbal, socially interactive boy with a near-genius I.Q. Bearing no traces of his former condition, he later graduated from an Ivy League university and went on to become an author and teacher himself, lecturing at universities, conferences, and symposia around the world.

Son-Rise: The Miracle Continues, the story of our work with our son, became a best-selling book and was adapted into the award-winning NBC television movie, Son-Rise: A Miracle of Love, which has been viewed by millions of people worldwide.

Over the decades, individuals from more than 100 countries on six continents have attended programs at The Option Institute® and the Autism Treatment Center of America®.

Our work and The Option Institute® have been featured in more than 2,000 articles and programs published or broadcast in major media outlets. These include The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, Cosmopolitan, Self, Parenting Magazine, People Magazine, Reader’s Digest, Good Morning America, and interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue, and many others.

Our books and work have also been endorsed by a number of respected figures, including President Jimmy Carter, Deepak Chopra, Dr. Wayne Dyer, Coretta Scott King, Dr. Carl Rogers, Bernie Siegel, Norman Cousins, Lou Holtz, John Bradshaw, Harold S. Kushner, Dr. Carl Simonton, Joanne Woodward, and Paul Winter, among others.