Couples Retreat in Birmingham, AL

A couple’s retreat is a time to work directly with a trained, experienced professional and let them in your relationship. This focused time is spent educating you about the tried and tested skills you need to build a successful relationship. The magic happens when you really start practicing these skills with each other. You have the luxury of time to build on this skill set.  You build momentum over several hours for hope to begin to emerge.

You can find your way back to each other and fall in love again…only this time your skill set has the maturity and depth to create more intimacy with each other.

Our Couples Counseling retreats offer various levels, catering to your specific needs, such as mini intensives (4-5 hours), 1-day intensives, and 2-day intensives. We work together to find dates that suit your schedule. Before the intensive, both partners complete detailed questionnaires to help us understand your relationship better, ensuring the intensive is tailored to your unique needs. This helps me prepare so that when we sit down together, we can fit months of therapy into 2 days.

Because I implement all your learning styles- visual, auditory, kinesthetic, reading, and writing. As a former high school teacher, I know you have to engage all of these learning styles to really understand the material. And then…we practice. We tweak. We discover. We encourage. We inspire!

First, you will be surprised how quickly the time will go!  I always am!  While we do spend some time talking, I engage you by using lots of different strategies to help you learn and practice this material- videos, role-playing, writing, and reading all lead to each other.

Yes, of course!  I am so excited about this part for my couples. I love the proven methods I have put together and the binder of resources you will use during the intensive. Afterward, you will find yourself referring to it over and over again as time goes on.  These resources will help you to continue to practice outside of my office. By doing so, both of you will become better at communicating with each other and more intimate with each other.

No. But you will need to travel to Birmingham, Alabama to do your couples counseling intensive because I only do intensives in person.  I encourage my couples to get a hotel room (even if they live in AL) so they can really get away and feel this time as a break from their normal schedule, routines, and distractions.  

Your Time Matters - if you have a hard time scheduling and regularly coming to therapy to help your communication skills and intimacy grow you will have a very hard time building momentum. Couples therapy ends up talking about the fight of the week.  In an intensive, we have the luxury of time!  This allows us to go much deeper than we can in 55 minutes week-to-week and the ability to build on the momentum we create.  It also allows us time to practice these skills so you understand better what you can work on when you go home.

Your Money Matters- Couples counseling intensives are not cheap. They are an investment in each of you, your relationship, and your family. When you know that you have both agreed to spend money on an intensive, both of you are much more likely to show up ready to work and to take the work seriously.

Intensives are a significant investment but so worth it! Prices can vary based on the needs of the couple in that mini intensives or 1-day intensives are also available. A mini-intensive (4 hours) is $1500. A 1-day intensive (7-8 hours) is $3000. For 2-day couples intensives, the investment is $6000.

Yes and No. Yes, I believe the skills and education I provide you have been proven through research to help couples with communication and intimacy.  No, I cannot give a guarantee, because I am unsure how hard you and your partner are committed to working on yourselves.  If you both work on yourselves (like A LOT!) and where you individually get tripped up in your relationship then you will change the dysfunctional patterns you created. Remember there is no magic pill I can give you both to change your relationship.  It will require a lot of hard work and practice from both of you.

Yes! We like to schedule a 2-hour follow-up session 4-6 weeks after the retreat. This is a check-in to see how you are doing, which brings some accountability as well as an opportunity to ask questions and give feedback about what is working and what isn’t working. After this follow-up session, we will decide together what kind of support you need to help keep the momentum going from all you learned during your intensive. This is not included in the price of the intensive and is $275/hour.

Absolutely!  If you change how you interact within any dysfunctional pattern, it changes the system you have created.  And you grow and learn more about yourself!

A good couples therapist knows how to be a leader in the room, so time together does not turn into a “bitch session”. The couples therapist should be able to redirect and help slow down what is being said for both of you to get a deeper understanding of any resentment or pain underneath the anger and blame.

I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a Licensed Professional Counselor. I opened my private practice in 2016 and worked with couples and families since I opened.  I am also trained in the Developmental couple's model.  Using the Developmental model in my couples therapy has changed how I intervene with couples.  This model is a tried and true model that helps the couple learn more about their individual dynamics and how they influence the relational patterns they create as individuals.  By understanding and learning this, you can grow and mature and change your relational dynamics.

I do!  If you choose to only sign up for a 1 day intensive that day is mostly educational with very little time to practice the skills I taught in Day 1.  This is why I usually recommend couples do 2 days as I believe it will bring the best, long-lasting results.

A lot!

• Clarifying and understanding any unresolved disillusionment in your relationship.  This can often operate underneath the surfaces of the relationship and cause both of you to keep hurting each other without any idea of how to truly repair it.

• Clarify and listen to your partner's thoughts, feelings, and desires

• Unlock how to begin to not only tolerate your differences and tensions but also how to celebrate them- this skill can create sustained intimacy and maturity in your relationship

• Explore your own individual contributions and understand how you both individually impact your relationship in healthy and unhealthy ways

• Determine anything that has been a betrayal in the relationship and begin to build trust again

• Understand how we have developed as a couple in healthy and unhealthy ways

• Exploring how to create more of a vision and mission for our relationship