Couple Intensive Retreat for Couples Contemplating Divorce
Some couples who arrive at a couple intensive retreat are contemplating divorce. A few have already spoken to a lawyer. If that's where you are, wondering whether you've exhausted every option before making it final, you're not alone, and you're not too far gone to try this.
Research on divorce regret is sobering. Roughly a third of people who go through with it later wish they hadn't, and that number climbs sharply among people who feel, afterward, that they didn't try hard enough first.
Why weekly counselling often isn't enough at this stage
By the time a couple is contemplating divorce, the pattern between them has usually been running for years. Sixty to ninety minutes once a week was never built to interrupt something that entrenched. If you're already talking to a lawyer, that slow pace can feel like confirmation that nothing's going to work. Often it isn't confirmation of that at all. It's a format mismatch.
What a private intensive retreat offers instead
Several uninterrupted days instead of an hour a week, private work with me, away from daily life. Using Relational Life Therapy, developed by Terry Real, we work through three phases.
First, waking up. Seeing clearly, often for the first time, the part each of you plays in the pattern, not just what your partner does under stress, but what you do.
Second, treating the trauma driving the pattern. Going beneath the reaction itself to where it actually comes from, often long before this relationship existed.
Third, learning skills. The minute-to-minute tools for actually living differently, how to ask, how to apologize, how to speak up before resentment builds, practiced in the room.
What this is, and what it isn't
This isn't a guarantee the marriage will be saved. Some couples leave an intensive with real clarity that the relationship isn't right for either of them anymore, and that's a legitimate outcome too. What an intensive does guarantee is that you'll have actually done the work, together, at the depth it needed, before deciding anything final.
Before you arrive, each of you completes a private workbook separately. A few weeks after, we check in.
Whether this happens online or as a retreat in Bali, the structure is the same.