Desperate to fit in, the young Mike Staver took one of the first steps to burnout: he tried to conform to values and behaviors he did not share. “I obsessed on wearing the right Levis and the right Earth Shoes,” he recalled. Then he took the second step to burnout: he lashed out. “I refused to get a haircut, I refused to do Sunday school lessons,” he said. “I acted like the typical angry teenager.”

And still, he did not try to control his own life. He had always been fascinated by airplanes; he even took flying lessons when he was 16. So he applied to what is now the Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology, which specialized in aviation, in Tulsa, Okla. He was accepted; his father balked at letting him go. So Mr. Staver went instead to California Baptist University, 50 miles east of his home, where he majored in business and minored in psychology. He still planned to become a pilot when he graduated in 1983, but his father scuttled that one in an unusual way. ”He persuaded me that Staver men have terrible vision and thus can’t fly,” Mr. Staver recalled. “I had 20-20 eyesight, and still do. Yet I believed him.”

So Mr. Staver married a girl whom he had met at church, and went to work analyzing the books at the car dealership where his father worked. That job lasted a year. His marriage lasted five. “I was a caged animal, an internal cauldron of hostility, and I pretty much killed that marriage,” he said.

Mr. Staver pumped all his energy into his career, and rose through a series of corporate jobs he did not enjoy, ending up as chief operating officer for a burglar-alarm company. But then, with the help of a psychotherapist and a book — “The Road Less Traveled,” by M. Scott Peck — he traded in his passive rage for active change. He enrolled in a night program at National University in San Diego and graduated with a master’s degree in counseling psychology in 1990.

He began running general-interest seminars for local hospitals, first on how to recover from broken relationships, then on how to build healthy ones. Finally, he was doing something he loved. So, perhaps inevitably, in 1992 he formed the Staver Group.

Mr. Staver remarried in 2000, but that marriage ended in divorce in 2005. His wife was the one who wanted out, he said, and he acquiesced.

“We’re still good friends, but I had learned not to invest energy in situations that just can’t work,” he said.