Is your relationship in crisis or reaching a breaking point?
Do you need immediate results to keep your family together?
Are you ready to invest emotionally and financially in a private, customized, therapeutic process to build the foundation for more connection, understanding, romance, intimacy, and long-lasting relationship?
There are times when stepping away from your everyday stresses into the privacy of a intensive couples retreat setting is the most effective way to work things out as a couple. Personalized time together for a private relationship retreat can catalyze your relationship and deepen your emotional connection. Instead of months of therapy or coaching sessions, you can utilize this opportunity and take your relationship into places where more common one-hour sessions simply cannot take you.
You may remember times when a deep connection was possible. When your intimacy was guaranteed, and even when you faced conflicts, it was easy to find your way back to romance, sex, deep connection, and friendship. You may be asking yourselves, “What happened?”
Sometimes, what pulls us apart is a trauma in the relationship, a breach of trust, a betrayal, or an abandonment. Other times, it may simply be the “wear and tear” of years of raising children, career focus, financial hardship, medical issues, family issues, in-laws, etc. Either way, you’ve lost the connection you had.
Others still, want to find out “if this relationship can be saved”. You may want to make sure that if you walk away from each other, you have tried everything possible. And coming out of this retreat, you may find a desire to be together but separate, in an amicable and respectful new way.
Why Couples Enroll
When you fell in love, you dreamed of what it would be like to live in loving connection with your partner. You may never have expected that maintaining that relationship and connection could be so difficult.
Often we find ourselves lost and broken down without a map to repairing the connection with our partner. But in fact, the earlier in our relationship that we come to this realization, the faster we can start building the foundation for that sacred dream of long-lasting loving relationship.
Couples come to us for many reasons.
Repair
• Recovery from Infidelity.
• Feeling lonely in the relationship, a lack of passion, or living as roommates.
• Patterns of negative escalation, endless fighting, and not knowing how to reconnect.
• Not able to attend weekly therapy or in crisis for which weekly therapy is not helping.
• Read the books, still lost, wanting change sooner than later.
• Trying to decide whether to stay together; Separation or divorce being considered.
Deepen Relationship
• Gain immediate traction through treatment that is typically done over months.
• Rebuild connection, romance, and intimacy; Reset the relationship.
• Gain understanding and the ability to model a loving relationship for their children.
• Gain awareness of the body’s natural stress response how to use it to build connection.
• Experience an emotionally safe space to work and deepen the relationship.
Working with Us
In this Intensive Private Couples Retreat you and your partner will benefit from over two decades of Dalia’s work as a couples therapist utilizing Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) to understand the patterns of attachment in the dance of relationship. You will also benefit from Owen Marcus’ decades of working with men’s emotional intelligence, as well as his understanding and shaping the men’s work lens which he details in his book Grow UP: A Mans Guide to Masculine Emotional Intelligence and utilizes in his work as co-founder of MELD.
We invite you to experience two days of focused EFT (Emotionally Focus Therapy) couples therapy where you will learn your relationship patterns that pull you towards isolation and cultivate new patterns that foster safety, trust, intimacy, communication, and connection.
With the help of Dalia and Owen in the privacy of our retreat space, you and your partner can feel held and understood while having access to the tools and insights needed to build the foundation for the lasting relationship you desire.
If you feel this offering is a fit for you, we will send you some resources to prepare you to receive the most from your Couples Intensive Retreat.
Throughout your retreat, we do not push; we support. We know healing old patterns and what underlies them can be exhausting. We customize the power of Sue Johnson’s Emotionally Focused Therapy, and her Hold Me Tight workshops to your specific situation. We utilize physiological and emotional core processes and needs to create deep shifts for you and your partner. When your body and emotions work together, shifting a relationship becomes much easier. How each individual and couple responds to this approach is unique, and we work with you where you are at.
What is Included
In this Intensive Private Couples Retreat, you will benefit from the unique merging of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy with Owen Marcus’ innovative men’s work approach.
Pre-Intensive
So that you receive the most benefit from your intensive, we will share resources with you and give you a simple questionnaire to complete. This is your warmup exercise!
Day One
We start with a one-hour joint session in the morning. Then we break into individual sessions with each partner for 30-45 minutes. By then, you are ready for lunch. After lunch, we spend the afternoon in more sessions with breaks as you need them.
Day Two
Like the afternoon of Day One, we work in a series of sessions with breaks. By the end of Day Two, you will have much more than a better understanding of your relationship; our goal is that you acquire behavioral changes you want to keep and natural ways to do that.
Post-Intensive
Much can happen in two days, and our goal is for you to more than sustain your results; we want you to nurture the changes made into even connection. To do that, we will have a follow-up session after the weekend and provide you with guidance for future work. If you are out of our area, as many clients are, we will assist you in finding a local EFT therapist.
As with physical fitness, once in shape, some form of exercise is still required. For you, it may mean doing activities that foster connection.
Location
We have found that a natural setting helps with relaxation and renewal. We offer the Couples Intensive Retreat in the beautiful setting of Nevada City, CA. We can recommend comfortable accommodations, or we are available to travel to you for an additional fee.
Investment
$5200 for a couple (Does not include lodging, food, or transportation).
While we spend fortunes on weddings and divorce, often the best investment we can make is in the health of our relationship right now. This unique blend of skill-based and scientifically-driven interventions can succeed where other traditional therapy models may have failed. While there are no panaceas, there is more than hope when we are able to address what drives our survival responses and consequential disconnection.
We know how much you want your relationship to succeed. There is nothing more precious than a loving relationship. We want you to have that. We hope you allow us to help you.
More About Your Guides
Benefit from the opportunity of having the experienced team of Dalia and Owen championing you and your relationship.
Dalia Anderman, LMFT
Dalia Anderman is a Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice in Northern California with offices in Nevada City and Sacramento.
Dalia has over 20 years of experience working with individuals, couples, and families on a wide range of issues.
Over the past 15 years, Dalia’s primary clinical modality has been Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). She has advanced experience in EFT including attending many trainings by Sue Johnson, the creator of EFT.
Dalia’s passion lies in the map and tools that this attachment-based system has given us to help couples discover that the secret to their relationship is not in the solving of the ‘argument of the day’ but in understanding the longing and desperation when our connection to our loved ones is severed. She has helped numerous couples find their way back to connection, intimacy, vulnerability, and sexual desire.
Dalia has been leading, teaching, and facilitating the Hold Me Tight® couples workshop program nationally and internationally for over 5 years including in Israel, South Africa, and around the United States.
Though working with couples is her main passion and focus, Dalia is also fully trained and specializes in EMDR, CBT, Family Systems, trauma, addiction, parenting, sexual and intimacy issues, and life’s transitions. She is also on the Mental Health medical team at Burning Man.
Owen Marcus, MA
After healing the challenges of his dyslexia and Asperger’s, Owen Marcus realized his relationship skills were lacking. Once he Identified his resistance to working with men as his next challenge, Owen dove into creating his first men’s group at his integrative medical clinic in Scottsdale, AZ.
For more than 40 years, he has explored and developed programs that bring together mindfulness, somatic psychotherapy, and the science of emotional physiology – first for himself then for his clients and students.
Unsatisfied with the status quo, Owen began expanding a new model of men’s groups, incorporating what he saw working in his corporate trainings and clinic. Men embraced this new model, a model tailored to the natural way men experience and express emotions. Men in his practice and group saw results as their relationships began to transform. The 10,000+ hours working with men when other approaches were not helping gave Owen a unique aptitude for connecting with men in a way that feels emotionally safe and respectful. He appreciates how hard it can be for men to connect from their own experiences.
Owen’s group and this new model were the focus of the documentary About Men. His book, Grow Up: A Man’s Guide to Masculine Emotional Intelligence lays out how to complete the nine stages of emotional maturation for boys and men. His executive relational coaching develops relationship skills for men; the ones they were never taught. Applying these skills at home and work lowers stress and increases connection.
An original founder and Director of Education for EVRYMAN, Owen has moved his team and himself to his new company, MELD. Owen continues to develop ways to use emotions and physiology as tools to create fulfilling relationships and purposeful lives. Through the power of releasing our survival physiology and giving men simple skills they were never taught – men learn to connect to themselves and thereby to their partners. This model is used by men and organizations around the world. Owen and MELD also train therapists and psychiatrists in these somatic-oriented approaches. MELD’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Today Show, Men’s Health, and other international media.
Owen’s Regenerative Relationship approach to connection weaves his 40-years of study and practice into a system that fosters our natural abilities to connect. In co-leading Hold Me Tight® couple’s workshops and couples intensive retreats, he helps both men and women use vulnerability to develop connections that feel safe and secure.
Inquiry Form
If you have any trouble registering via this form, call 530-692-0680.
Hold Me Tight® is a registered trademark of Sue Johnson.