Your retreat will be tailored to your specific needs and interests. Couples often choose to work on one or more of the following areas:

Communication

Communication is at the heart of your relationship. Step one will be bringing awareness to your relationship dynamics and patterns of communication. Step two is to deepen your understanding of how the important relationships in your individual upbringings set the stage for your patterns and response styles. This will cultivate a foundation of compassion and acceptance that will enable you to create alternative responses to one another, designed to help you strengthen and treasure the everyday patterns of your shared activities and cultivate a more generous approach style. 

Outside of session time, the activities you do together will provide us with experiential data about how you understand and react to one another, work together toward shared goals, and make space for tolerating your differences.

Compassion Building and Acceptance

When you disagree with your partner, being able to understand the history that helped shape their personality style and points of view, eases the challenge of accepting one another’s differences. We will work on backing off from the need to be right and moving toward the priority of getting along.

We will take the time to get a thorough understanding of both of your histories in each others’ presence as a compassion-building exercise that will deepen your awareness of one another’s vulnerabilities. As a result, when these patterns emerge, you’ll have new tools to manage your reactivity and respond with care.

Mindfulness

While Mindfulness is infused in all of my therapeutic work, we will practice cultivating compassion for yourself and your partner, active listening, improving executive functioning, mindful touch (where one receives and another offers the experience of being touched slowly), using your breath (Jack Kornfield Lifespan Meditation, Back to Back Breathing), Urge Surfing, Tantra, etc. Slowing down your reactions to one another and taking the time to understand the historical contributions to your reactivity is a mindfulness exercise in itself. Couples Mindfulness activities involve building up your skills to decrease this reactivity, taking a moment to reflect, and then choosing the response that is most productive for your relationship.

Sexual Intimacy

Looking for a renewal of sexual connection and intimacy with your partner? Experience relaxation techniques, mindfulness practices for couples, identification and communication of healthy boundaries, and developing a Fantasy Menu. Couples often get into sexual routines and struggle to explore whether and how it would help to expand their repertoire. The intimacy of sexual communication is frequently embarrassing to discuss for many people. However, sexuality enhances intimacy in a way that is vital to your feelings of safety, connection, and mutual pleasure - aspects of your relationship that deserve to be prioritized and nurtured.

Media

Modern life and its trappings can emphasize the struggles of many couples.  Would you like to try living life as a couple for a weekend with no internet, news, cell phones, or emails? Find out how media use is affecting your relationship and work toward establishing mutually agreed upon ground rules about future usage of devices.

Money and Fear

Money can be a source of considerable tension.  Couples often avoid talking about their assets, debt, and spending and saving patterns because our financial value can feel like a reflection of our self-worth. Deep vulnerability and shame are inherently attached to these conversations. Speaking in a manner that first reveals and acknowledges each other’s vulnerabilities is a step out from underneath that pattern of shame and avoidance. For instance, is there a financial inequity in your partnership, where one partner earns significantly more than the other?  Do you share an account or manage your money separately?  How do you decide how your money get spent? Are you a saver and your partner a spender? What is your tolerance level for financial risk?  When couples begin to face having these dialogues about money, it creates a sense of stability and grounding. Even if there are differences in the way you approach finances, being able to appreciate and converse about these differences is crucial to enjoying a true partnership.

Premarital Counseling

Are you and your partner considering marriage? The Premarital Counseling Weekend is an opportunity for you to open and explore topics that are challenging to address. Common areas that couples often avoid and need a platform for open discussion include finances and sexual intimacy, having children and/or how to raise them, religion, and envisioning your shared future. These and other important topics are often avoided out of shame or fear of conflict. During the Premarital Counseling weekend you will develop a language and structure for having these conversations safely, with room and guidelines for managing the inevitable range of reactivity that occurs once such hard topics are broached. As a couple, you will develop skills for recognizing the ways in which you are in agreement as well as tolerating your differences. This is a fundamental building block for successful long term togetherness. 

Substance Use Exploration

Substances and addiction can profoundly affect the stability of a relationship. When one or both partner’s substance use begins to negatively effect the relationship, there are inevitably conflicting feelings that emerge. If you and / or your partner is using substances to cope with unhappy or overwhelmed feelings either in or out of the relationship, this is your opportunity to open up the conversation around understanding the substance use and misuse in a judgement - free environment. We will practice Urge Surfing (riding the waves of craving with acceptance and self-care) and other relaxation techniques and develop strategies for communication around managing usage that are mutually acceptable to each partner.

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