Dr. John Schinnerer and Joree Rose, LMFT are emotional health experts, coaches, authors, podcast hosts, mindfulness teachers — and a real married couple actively practicing the same tools they teach. Proximity was built from both their professional expertise and their lived relational experience.
The people behind the work
Dr. John Schinnerer is a psychologist, executive coach, speaker, author, and media host with 30+ years of experience in emotional intelligence, positive psychology, and men's emotional development. His work is grounded in the science of the mind but delivered in language people can actually use.
He is known for making complex psychological science accessible, practical, and immediate — and for building coaching tools that meet men where they are, not where he wishes they were.
Joree Rose is a licensed marriage and family therapist, mindfulness and meditation teacher, author, and retreat leader who has spent decades helping people build greater self-awareness, emotional resilience, and compassion.
Her work is warm, grounded, and deeply practical — built for people who are doing the work in the real complexity of their lives, not in a vacuum.
"They did not set out to build an AI company. They set out to solve a growing human problem."
After decades working in psychology, therapy, coaching, mindfulness, men's emotional health, relationships, and human development, Dr. John and Joree saw the same painful patterns repeating over and over again:
People are overwhelmed, emotionally disconnected, reactive, anxious, lonely, burned out, and struggling in their relationships. Yet quality emotional support remains difficult to access consistently. Therapy and coaching can be life-changing, but they are often expensive, difficult to maintain, hard to access quickly, or unavailable altogether.
Many people wait until they are overwhelmed, emotionally reactive, or in full crisis before reaching out. And even when they do begin therapy or coaching, many struggle to continue long enough for deeper integration and lasting change.
What people often need most is not another meditation app telling them to breathe. They need practical support for what to actually say and do during conflict, anxiety, parenting stress, emotional shutdown, relationship struggles, or overwhelm in real time.
The deeper foundation of Proximity Coaching came not only from professional expertise — it came from their own lived relational experience together.
Both Dr. John and Joree were previously married to their high school sweethearts, and both experienced divorces that became pivotal turning points in their own healing journeys — though from very different relational dynamics and endings.
When they met in 2015 after matching on Tinder, the connection was immediate. A lunch the day after they matched became the beginning of a deeply aligned relationship grounded in growth, emotional curiosity, self-awareness, and shared purpose. Love came easily. Emotional safety did not.
Like many couples, they eventually found themselves repeating painful relational patterns rooted in attachment wounds, nervous system protection strategies, fear, reactivity, avoidance, and emotional conditioning formed long before they met each other.
Even after years together, an engagement, and decades of combined training and self-development, they reached a heartbreaking breaking point that led to a temporary separation.
That breakdown ultimately became the breakthrough.
It forced both of them to confront a deeper truth: awareness alone does not heal relational patterns. Together, they committed to doing the deeper work necessary to create true emotional safety, accountability, vulnerability, repair, nervous system regulation, and secure attachment — not simply intellectually, but through daily relational practice with each other.
That lived experience became the heartbeat of their work. And eventually, the heartbeat of Proximity.
Today, Dr. John and Joree openly share their own humanity, struggles, growth, repair processes, and continued self-reflection throughout their coaching, teaching, podcasts, and relationship work — because they believe authenticity creates safety.
Dr. John often tells clients: "May you have the courage to look at your own sh*t."
Both believe that if they are asking others to courageously examine themselves, heal patterns, and take accountability, they must be willing to model that same honesty and humility themselves. That integrity is not incidental to Proximity Coaching. It is foundational to it.
People don't need perfect experts pretending to have life figured out. They need grounded guides willing to practice the same tools they teach. That philosophy shaped every design decision, every framework, every coaching interaction, and every live session inside Proximity.
Why AI? Why now?
"We kept asking a different question: What if AI could become a bridge back to healthier human relationships — instead of a replacement for them?"
As artificial intelligence became rapidly integrated into daily life, most people viewed it as a threat to human connection. Dr. John and Joree saw a different possibility.
Rather than building a generic chatbot or self-help app, they created a human-centered emotional support ecosystem rooted in decades of their own original work — lived experience, emotional frameworks, courses, podcasts, relationship teachings, mindfulness tools, communication practices, and coaching methodologies developed over a combined 30+ years.
The result is Proximity Coaching: a hybrid platform that uses AI as the vehicle — while keeping human healing, growth, accountability, and connection as the destination.
The goal is helping people reconnect to themselves, to each other, and to the emotional skills many were never taught growing up.
Proximity was intentionally designed to feel relational rather than transactional — in a world increasingly full of impersonal AI tools.
John and Joree share their own struggles and repair processes publicly because they believe people need grounded guides willing to model the work, not perfect experts.
Therapy is weekly. Emotional life is hourly. Proximity closes the gap between scheduled support and the moments when support matters most.
Choose the coach that meets you where you are. All memberships include 24/7 AI coaching and live biweekly sessions with Dr. John and Joree.