Dedicate a weekend to healing

A mental health retreat could help you find yourself and thrive

A trauma-intensive wellness retreat is for folks craving more of a transformational experience outside of what weekly therapy can offer. My Minneapolis, MN-based therapy practice offers weekend retreats in Minnesota. These retreats focus on processing unresolved trauma, providing participants with significant results in a short period of time.

Imagine years of therapy being replaced with a long weekend of deep care, containment, and community.

Most importantly, imagine being able to reclaim your life.

As a trauma therapist, I believe that trauma has a profound impact on a person’s ability to feel better and get well. Unresolved trauma can take over in an extreme and detrimental way impacting an individual’s ability to experience joy, feel a sense of safety and security, and develop deep and meaningful relationships. Often, the unresolved trauma I’m speaking about can look like—-

Negative core beliefs about oneself and the world
Feeling as though the intimate relationships in one's life are in trouble
Feeling constantly on-guard and waiting for the other shoe to drop
Difficulties remaining present and in one’s body (ie dissociating)
Having the same types of fights with people consistently (ie continuous interpersonal conflict)
Ruminating thoughts

This list is not exhaustive by any means! But, just a snippet of what someone could be experiencing.

A weekend retreat could just be the type of care that a person who is making some strides in their therapy— but seeking more guidance, structure and a transformation— could benefit from.

Our wellness retreat can be helpful for those struggling with anxiety, depression, PTSD, developmental trauma, low sense of self-worth and individuals with abuse histories (ie physical, sexual, emotional and spiritual abuse).

If you, dear reader, are someone interested in attending a weekend-long retreat, it’s important that you find one that is explicitly inclusive and affirming of historically marginalized groups. For me, that means that I’m only interested in wellness retreats that are explicitly anti-racist and queer and trans-affirming.

All of the practitioners on our wellness retreat team are queer-identified or are active allies for the queer community. Each of them practices using social justice and anti-oppression frameworks. The lived-experiences that they hold are central to how they practice their healing modalities.

What does this mean and why does it matter?

Practicing from a social justice and anti-oppression framework can look like being explicitly inclusive of all groups of people by having representation of these groups in a retreat staff and working against inherent power dynamics that perpetuate harm. This can also look like acknowledging therapeutic and healing practices that have benefited from white supremacy and communicating around how we can uplift voices that have been historically marginalized.

It’s important to find a wellness retreat that can explore and troubleshoot ways to give back to communities that have been harmed by white supremacy. Finding a space that centers marginalized voices can provide relief and a sense of safety and security when doing very vulnerable therapeutic work. One wants to feel safe doing trauma work, otherwise the probability of getting activated and triggered goes up immensely.

What could you expect at a trauma-intensive wellness retreat?

All sorts of things! It’s really dependent on the focus of the retreat. At the retreat we host in Minnesota, it’s a 3 day retreat that incorporates group therapy and complementary holistic care. It’s important that a retreat provides a comprehensive array of healing practices for a participant. The beauty of having a wide array of healing opportunities for retreat participants is that it can help achieve a transformational effect. When signing up for a wellness retreat, the expectation is for receiving a transformative experience. Just like you wouldn’t want to sit in a classroom for 8 hours a day without movement and a variety of ways to learn, you wouldn’t want a trauma retreat to be one type of therapy all day. That would fry your central nervous system and you’d probably lose focus and interest.

Our retreat staff of therapists and holistic practitioners have extensive experience and expertise in their modalities. Our practitioners have skills ranging from---

psychotherapy
reiki
Tarot
Astrology
bodywork (ie massage and cupping)
ritual co-creation (ie experiential rituals that can help decompress and ground individuals)

What is a helpful breakdown of necessary components when deciding on a retreat?

I think it’s important to find a retreat that has a combination of scheduled time along with down-time for individual reflection. At our wellness retreat, we want folks to have some alone time to reflect. Reflection is just as important as scheduled healing practices. It’s especially helpful if the retreat takes place in a spot with a lot of spaciousness, natural scenery and privacy. Our wellness retreat provides participants with their own bedroom and is located in a secluded area with greenery.

It’s important that a retreat can spend a portion of time working on psychoeducation with participants. At our wellness retreat, we provide coping skills or tools for helping a participant regulate negative emotions and tolerate stressful moments. We teach folks about their window of tolerance and how to discern when they are in a state that is out of their window (i.e. an agitated or shut-down state) so that they can better assess when to ground and self-soothe their body.

We desire for our retreat participants to walk away with skills for coping with unforeseen events in the future and understanding around how to eliminate patterns that are not helpful for the participant. This can also look like spending time learning how to communicate ways to recognize, assert and maintain boundaries with others.

Processing trauma memories is also a natural component of trauma-intensive retreats. It’s important that participants work with licensed mental health professionals who are trained and ideally certified in the modalities that they are practicing. At our wellness retreat, there are ample ways to process trauma with our team of therapists and wellness practitioners. Each staff member was hand-picked due to their accomplishments in the field of trauma therapy. It can be helpful to do one’s own research on the practitioners that they are working with.

Conclusion

Retreats continue to operate across the globe because they work! Retreats provide transformative experiences for participants and can be truly life-changing. If you’re on the fence today about participating in a wellness retreat, I’m hoping you were able to take away some of the benefits that a wellness retreat can offer.

If you’d like more information about our wellness retreat, be sure to check out our retreats page! As well, if you’re ready to take the next step and are interested in participating in the retreat hosted by Temperance Therapies, please contact me and we can set up a free 30 minute consultation. Consultations are a place to ask about any questions or concerns you may have and to determine fit for the retreat. April 2022 is just around the corner and I am so looking forward to a weekend filled with care, community and intention.

What counts as sex therapy and what’s off-limits?