The Irony of “Therapeutic Retreats” and why?
I still remember the strange quiet of arriving at my first therapeutic intensive. A strange ambivalence of wanting to be there and not wanting to be there at the same time. I quickly questioned my judgement of signing up until I recognized…No one asked me what was for dinner. No one needed me to know what came next on the schedule, or who was doing what, or where anyone was supposed to be. For the first time in longer than I could name, none of that was mine to hold.
It should have felt like relief. Mostly, it did. But underneath the relief was something more unsettling, a kind of nervous anticipation I hadn't expected. If I wasn't the one holding the schedule, the space, the needs of everyone around me, then what was left? What was I supposed to do with all that time?
I had assumed, walking in, that the work would come from what the facilitator brought me. A teaching. An exercise. Something handed to me across a table. What I found instead was that the real work was internal, and it had been waiting for me the whole time, quietly, underneath all the holding I usually do. Without meals to plan or an agenda to track, I could finally let whatever wanted to surface, surface. I could go somewhere inside myself that I have never been able to reach alone, not in fifty minutes, not in five years of Tuesdays.
I often think of this same unsettling, unfolding thing when I watch it happen in the women I sit with in Panama, or in a story group, or across a long weekend intensive. Something happens in days that I have never once seen happen in a single session. I have watched a woman arrive holding her story so tightly, so privately, that she has never told it to her closest friend, let alone a room of near strangers. And I have watched that same woman, by the second or third day, be held. Not because anyone fixed her. Because she was finally known, in relationship, by people who loved her simply because she was a human being walking this earth alongside them.
We were never meant to do this work in isolation. Most of us try to anyway, because the shame underneath our stories can feel too enormous to bring into the light with anyone, even people who love us. But shame loosens its grip in relationship, not in solitude. When a room full of women begin to witness each other's stories, something in each of them expands, their own capacity for compassion, their own sense of what is possible when they stop carrying it alone. I have heard it described, only half joking, as two years of therapy in five days. I understand exactly why.
There is something almost funny about the word retreat, sitting right up against the word therapeutic. Retreat sounds like reclining, like a hammock, like yoga on a dock at sunrise, a schedule with nothing on it but sun and stillness. Therapeutic sounds like work, the kind that asks something of you rather than releasing you from asking anything of yourself. I notice the contradiction, and I don't actually think it's a contradiction at all. We do rest here. We do retreat from the noise of our regular lives. But what we retreat into is not less than our stories, it's further into them.
So why would anyone choose this over another glorious vacation, a week at the beach where nothing at all is required of you? I ask myself that too, and here is what I have come to notice:
A vacation rests the body. It rarely touches the parts of us that are still quietly holding something.
There is a difference between getting away and being witnessed. A retreat held by a trained clinician offers both.
Some stories and bodies need a container held by someone who knows how to hold it, gently and skillfully, without flinching away from what surfaces.
Healing tends to move faster in relationship than in isolation, and a week held by people trained to hold space can compress what might otherwise take years.
Sometimes we need someone else's steady presence to finally stop performing okay and get curious about what is actually there, behind the masks.
And I have a reason of my own, one I don't often say out loud. Holding a container for someone else's deep work is where I come alive. It is almost like play, gentle, beautiful play, where we get to notice and be curious about things the rest of life so easily clouds over. I don't create the transformation. I just get to hold the space where it becomes possible, and I love it the way an artist loves the canvas.
I want to be honest with you here, because I don't ever want to promise you an outcome. I cannot tell you that a retreat or an intensive will make you more free, more yourself, more whole. There is no formula, and anyone who offers you one is selling you something smaller than what this actually is. Going this deep this fast is disorienting. It can stir up more than a person expects, and it should. That disruption is not a flaw in the process, it is the process, but it deserves to be named honestly rather than glossed over with a pretty picture of transformation.
What I notice most, actually, isn't the retreat itself. It's what happens after. A woman goes home to her regular Tuesday, her regular dinner to plan, her regular agenda, and something in her has shifted in a way she cannot unknow. It might be subtle. It might take weeks to notice. But she carries it home anyway, into the ordinary places, long after the container of the retreat has closed behind her.
Have you ever done the hardest parts of your healing alone, because the shame felt too big to bring to anyone else? What would it be like to let someone else hold the space, just once, so you could finally stop holding it for everyone around you?
There is an invitation here, not a promise. An invitation to be curious about what might open in you given enough time, enough relationship, and enough gentleness toward yourself to let it. If that invitation is stirring something in you, check out my offerings. Not because it fixes anything, but because none of us were meant to carry our stories alone.
A note on the research: a 2021 study published in the journal Psychological Trauma followed 110 women survivors of interpersonal trauma through a five-day intensive retreat. Compared to traditional outpatient therapy spread over three to six months, the retreat produced faster and longer-lasting relief from depression, PTSD symptoms, and stress, with benefits still holding seven months later. Read the study