Emotional Healing Retreat

Specialized For Your Needs

Our workshops allow participants to learn and receive support from people facing similar issues. These transformative programs help individuals to identify negative patterns, and break the cycle of negative behaviors that holding them back from living the life they desire.

Committed To Seeing Our Participants Succeed

Workshops at the Rio Retreat Center are designed to help you understand your own needs, desires, emotions, habits, and everything else that makes you who you are. The more you know about yourself, the better equipped you are to engage in healthy relationships and have an improved sense of self. To learn more about the Rio Retreat Center or to sign up for one of our groundbreaking workshops, call us at 866-441-0368 866-441-0368 or fill out the form below and a representative will be happy to provide you more information.

Healing The Family

Content Source : Family Healing/Therapy Retreats

The Family Matters workshop is designed to assist members of a family with establishing a supportive and healthy recovery environment by encouraging them to be authentic, communicate productively, utilize boundaries, and function in a healthy fashion. During this workshop, family members learn how co-dependent behaviors, trauma, mood disorders, and/or addictions can impact a family system. Family members develop tools to successfully enhance recovery and a relational family system. The primary goal of the Family Matters Workshop is to help members bridge the gaps that have plagued the family system.

The Family Dynamic

The Family Matters Workshop is important because it can:

• Teach family members about how families function in general and, in particular, how their own functions. 
   
• Help the family focus less on the member(s) who has/have been identified as ill and focus more on the family as a whole.
  
  
• Help to identify conflicts and anxieties and helps the family develop strategies to resolve them.
  
  
• Strengthen all family members so they can work on their problems together.
  
  
• Teach ways to handle conflicts and changes within the family differently. Sometimes the way family members handle problems makes them more likely to develop symptoms.
  
  
  

Psychodrama Workshop – Rio Retreat Center

THRIVE is an experiential intensive that takes you to the next level of recovery.


Hanging onto old pain keeps us preoccupied with our past and anxious about our future, rather than living in the present. Releasing dysfunctional roles and embracing new ones empowers us to experience our full potential. But before we’re able to release worn out roles, we need to give voice and shape to them. This action oriented process will provide a unique opportunity to engage in an exploration that will lead you to a greater sense of aliveness and purpose: a life changing new experience carved out of time to energize and revitalize —to live your actualized life!

The workshop will emphasize:

• Forgiveness
• Resilience Training
• Post Traumatic Growth
• Consolidating Recovery Gains
  
  

To THRIVE is to……

Engage: More fully and mindfully in your relationships and day-to-day life.
Embrace: A deepened and more purposeful sense of self.
Expand: And revitalize your life roles.
Energize: Forgive the past to live more fully in the present.
Empower: Take ownership of your own healing and attitude towards life.
Workshops run 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., unless otherwise noted. The schedule is flexible, accommodating the group process.

Content Source : Workshops For Self Improvement

Mutual Respect and The Power of Intimacy

Power is a very interesting phenomenon. I remember having numerous conversations about the complex intersection of power and relationships in graduate school. There was a lot of confusion as to what exactly power even is.
One of the most common misunderstandings about power is that it is a linear phenomenon. In fact, power comes at us from numerous sources all of the time.

The second most common misunderstanding is that power is a zero-sum game— either you have it or I have it. And whatever you have, I can’t have, and vice-versa. This fundamentally flawed way of thinking about power greatly impacts our experiences in relationships.

There are two main ways we experience power in our relationships: power with and power over (you have power over someone else or some else has power over you). The Man Rules say that real men have power and are never weak or powerless. Therefore, from a very early age, young boys are encouraged to find power over – power over others, power over their feelings, and power over themselves.

The Woman Rules say that women should be cooperative, passive, nurturing, selfless, and not too strong. Therefore, from a very early age, young girls are encouraged to find power with. Women are expected to share power with others even if it puts them at a disadvantage; even when it means they have to give up their own power.

And that is the rub in so many heterosexual relationships.

Making Peace with Power

You cannot have a relationship that doesn’t involve a complex interaction with power. What some people don’t often consider is that power can be healthy. In fact, it is an essential part of the day-to-day human experience.

To help us explore the complexity of power in relationships, we can look to the classic Karpman drama triangle which illustrates the shifting, and sometimes destructive, roles of persecutor, rescuer, and victim that people play in relational conflicts. In this “drama triangle” each person involved in a conflict experiences and acts out all of these roles at different times. The role we take on can determine how we perceive our partners, interpret their behavior, and interact with them.

The reason these triangles arise, and often endure, is that each person, regardless of their role, finds that they get their unspoken, and often unconscious, psychological needs met by playing these roles—roles which they most likely originally “perfected” through the power dynamic that played out within their family as a child.

Whether they play the victim or persecutor, or some combination of all three roles, in the end, each person feels justified in acting upon their needs. Feeling satisfied, they often conveniently fail to acknowledge the dysfunctional ways they tend to go about getting their needs met, or the harm that is being done as a result to themselves, their partners, or any third parties (like children) who may be directly or indirectly involved in their conflict.

When there are times of disconnection in the relationship and even if, for whatever reason, there is a loss of respect between partners, intimacy can only be restored in the space of mutuality. We have to move away from the desire to have power over our partners toward the experience of having power with them. When we are able to uncover how our emotional needs arise from our childhood trauma, and release some of that pain, we have the ability to break free from the drama triangle and build an intimate and nurturing environment of mutual respect. Is it easier to let our relationships fall into a series of power plays or to maintain a space of mutual respect? I would suggest the former.

We have to build up our emotional and spiritual muscle in order to truly listen to our partners and maintain respect, especially when they are being their very human and imperfect selves and not doing what we want them to do or being who we want them to be.

Source Link : Mutual Respect

Motivate Ourselves – Set Some Boundaries

We often try to motivate ourselves through should statements:
“I should have done better.” “I shouldn’t have said that.” “I should only have one cookie.”

But really, the only thing that is guaranteed from should-ing on ourselves is the emotional consequence of guilt.

This is also the case, in my experience at least, when other people should me. I’m not talking about constructive feedback or when we are learning a new skill, but the type of should-ing that occurs from people struggling with their own codependence.


Individuals who should us, are likely coming from their adapted ego state of needing to be in control. To test this, think of a time you told someone what they should have done instead of what they actually did; did you think you knew better?  Did you want to control the situation because you knew how it should be handled?  Did you believe a certain situation could have been avoided had someone just listened to your advice?

In my experience, there are days that I struggle to remain in my functional adult state and cross over to a state of being too vulnerable. This often occurs with particular individuals (parents, eh?) with whom I still grapple with damaged or fractured boundaries. On these days, or with these people, when I am should-ed upon, I have a shame attack and feelings of guilt that are difficult for me to shake off.

Protecting Yourself from Carried Guilt

Having experienced this very thing today, I would like to share some ways to overcome these feelings of guilt and shame and move back to our functional adult self.

Visualize your Boundaries
 
Remind yourself where you begin and end, and where they do. Sometimes it is helpful to reinforce this boundary through visualization. Some people picture a hula-hoop around them and gauge that space around them as theirs and protected. I tend to visualize building a small pony wall, and each brick has a needed word/affirmation on it. (e.g. trust, love, safe. ).

Reframe Your Thoughts

We feel guilt because we believe have erred in some way. Our own guilt lets us know that we have done something outside of our value system. Carried guilt, on the other hand, is induced into us from childhood trauma and strikes us even when something is not outside of our values. We may even blame ourselves for things that are not within our control. If you make the determination that you are feeling carried guilt instead of your own guilt, recognize that this particular should-ing experience is resulting in a cognitive distortion and work to reframe 

your thinking. For example:
“I am human and fallible.”
“This is not about me but it is about them and their cognitive distortions/codependence.

Talk About Your Boundaries

Having reframed your thoughts in order to work through the feelings of guilt, communicate with the individual in order to be heard and not to manipulate a particular response or reaction. This can be done through using Pia Mellody’s talking boundary:

“When I heard you say…
What I make up about that/What I think about that is…
And about that, I feel…”
Or even a simple I-statement:

“I feel..… when… because…”

Hopefully, through these three steps, you can move away from the feelings of guilt and the damaging effects of should-ing and back into your functional adult self. It worked for me today!

SOURCE LINK : Rio Retreat Center at the Meadows

Tending the Garden of Our Souls

The girl was anxious, wanting to get back to the rose bush and save it from being ravaged by the beetle that was just doing what a beetle does. Already the pattern of codependence was set up. There I was at such a young age trying to stop the destruction that seemed an inevitable pattern of my family. As though the hunger of my fearful unhappy parents were just doing what they did to survive and the child was the rose. The analogy was daunting.

Tending to the garden of our soul is not something we think about often. But Spirit, in it's divine wisdom, set up a situation for me to heal the foundation of my roots as well as protect how I bloom.

A few months ago I was getting ready to set course with a production company on a project when Spirit told me, "We want you to heal some of your history." Hum, well, of course I wondered how that would happen, but our agendas or what we think about how such a thing can transpire is often contrary to what we WANT to have happen. I like to have things be loving and copacetic so that communication can be resolved in a harmonious way. But this time I could not make that happen because Spirit had a different idea.

Source Link : Relationship Therapy Workshop

Living in Abundance: Balancing Work, Money, and Relationships is a five-day didactic, experiential, and psychodynamic intensive that will help you develop insights into your relationship to money and work.

Understand The Issues

Living in Abundance is a five-day intensive that will help you develop insights into your relationship to money and work.

Living in Abundance is a didactic, experiential and psychodynamic intensive lead by a facilitator trained in the area of financial and work disorders.

During the workshop, you will address a myriad of disorders including money obsession, work addiction, under earning, spending addiction, gambling, hoarding, deprivation, and codependence related to work and finances. The goals of this workshop are to help participants:

• Discover how your behavior related to money and work developed
• Recognize the rewards and costs of your behavior to one’s self and others
• Obtain a treatment plan which intervenes on existing behavior and fosters a healthy relationship with money and work that will also enhance your relationship with yourself and others, more about

How’s Your Inner Child Today?

By Nancy Minister, Therapist, Rio Retreat Center at The Meadows
If you have ever done any work at The Meadows—either in an inpatient program or in our Survivors I workshop — you likely have had some experience getting in touch with your inner child.

So, how is that young part of yourself right now?

Go ahead: close your eyes and take a deep breath.
Feel that child’s energy.
Are they content? Restless? Sad? Scared?

Experience the warmth and love that you have for him or her in your body. Take a moment to provide for their needs, which could include anything from reassurance to a promise to go for a walk later.

Your child may need for you to go ahead and feel any feelings of fear, pain, or shame so that you can get in touch of where those feelings are coming from and address them.

Reconnecting In the Survivors II Workshop

One of my favorite things about facilitating the Survivors II Workshop at the Rio Retreat Center at The Meadows is helping folks to revisit their relationships with their inner children. The child part of themselves that they rescued in Survivors I probably feels happy, safe, and loved; but, it may be helpful for that person to also connect with an inner child from a different time. Having gained a greater sense of themselves, they are often ready for more trauma work.

Sometimes people return to The Meadows for Survivors II to address adult issues such as ongoing or past relationship problems, traumatic experiences, or addictions. Often, they need another layer of healing from childhood abuse or relational trauma.

Because of my passion for inner child work, any way you slice it, the Survivors II workshop is going to include some connection with that inner child. Yours could be a fearful, sad, and wounded child or an adapted child that is rebellious, angry, or shut down.

By checking in with your inner child in a deeper way, you can learn more about the wounding—the feeling energy and the messages that you still hold inside. Often, the connection people make with their inner children is very sweet.

We use various modalities to get in touch with the underlying source of the issues that people come to address. For example, your homework at the end of the day might be an inventory, a letter, a collage or other art project. The aim of the homework is usually to get in touch with your underlying feelings and the age at which your trauma issue underneath those feelings was set up. Rescuing the child and releasing the feeling energy tends to bring much-welcomed relief. It’s fun for me to be creative and match the homework with the person’s goal for the week.

I have had this blog post in my mind for a few months now, but my own inner girl has not been happy with the idea of me writing a blog. She is scared, having had some social trauma as a teen. Even as those fears come up, I breathe and allow my functional adult to affirm that I have boundaries and I can protect myself (and her). What do I need protection from? It turns out it is my own thoughts that “make-up” all kinds of crazy things about betrayal, judgment, and shame.

Change Your Reality, Change Your Brain

What is truly exciting about this work is that it is validated by neuroscience. We hold relational and survival experiences in our limbic brain in the form of implicit, procedural memories. When we go back in time and access the feelings and experiences of hurting, neediness, abandonment, rejection, fear, or worthlessness, we are retrieving them from that part of our brain.

As we heal by letting go of the feeling energy and then re-parenting that child part, we literally change the neuropathways in our brain. Focused attention on loving that child part of yourself creates new neuropathways. This means creating a felt experience of warmth, love, protection, even physical nurturing by—yes—hugging a pillow.

So, check in again… How is your inner kiddo right now? If you’re finding that he or she could use a little extra nurturing, it might be time to join me for the Survivors II workshop. For more details, call 800-244-4949 or contact us through the Rio Retreat Center website.

 Source Link