Therapist Weekend Retreat 2027 – 10 CE

A powerful framework for understanding the deeper motivations, fears, and protective patterns that shape how clients experience themselves and their relationships.

Why do some clients withdraw when they feel criticized, while others become defensive, seek reassurance, take control, or avoid difficult emotions altogether? Why do certain patterns persist even when clients recognize that those patterns are hurting them?

The Enneagram offers a framework for understanding the underlying motivations and emotional strategies that shape personality. Rather than focusing only on what clients do, it helps therapists explore why they do it—and what they may be trying to protect.

This training introduces the nine Enneagram types and explores how personality patterns influence emotional reactions, self-perception, relationships, and the therapeutic process. No prior Enneagram knowledge is required.

🧠 What You’ll Learn

🟢 Core Foundations

• Understanding the Enneagram and its nine personality types
• Core motivations, fears, desires, and emotional needs
• How personality patterns develop as strategies for navigating life
• The difference between observable behaviors and underlying motivations
• Understanding personality patterns without reducing clients to labels

🟢 Pattern Recognition

• How each type directs attention and interprets experiences
• Common defenses, blind spots, and emotional sensitivities
• How different types respond to criticism, uncertainty, conflict, and vulnerability
• Why similar behaviors can arise from very different motivations
• Recognizing habitual patterns that interfere with personal growth and relationships

🟢 Clinical Tools

• Using Enneagram-informed questions to deepen self-awareness
• Helping clients recognize their automatic emotional and behavioral patterns
• Exploring the underlying fears and needs driving recurring reactions
• Identifying your own Enneagram patterns and potential countertransference
• Supporting greater flexibility, self-understanding, and intentional choice

🟢 When to Use

• When clients struggle to understand why they keep repeating the same patterns
• When insight alone isn’t producing meaningful change
• When clients experience recurring interpersonal difficulties
• When therapists want a deeper understanding of clients’ internal motivations
• When exploring how the therapist’s own personality may influence the therapeutic relationship

🟢 Outcome

A foundational understanding of the nine Enneagram types and a practical framework for recognizing the deeper personality patterns shaping clients’ emotional lives, relationships, and capacity for change.

Practical interventions for helping clients recognize, regulate, and transform the painful emotional experiences that keep them stuck.

Shame often operates beneath the surface of the very behaviors that bring clients into therapy. A client becomes defensive when receiving feedback. Another withdraws after conflict. Someone else struggles with relentless self-criticism, perfectionism, or the belief that they are fundamentally inadequate.

While guilt can motivate accountability and repair, shame can leave clients feeling exposed, defective, or unworthy of connection. Without recognizing these underlying experiences, therapists may find themselves repeatedly addressing behaviors without reaching the emotional wounds driving them.

This training explores how shame and guilt develop, how they appear in individual and couples therapy, and how to help clients move from self-protection toward self-compassion, accountability, and meaningful change.

🧠 What You’ll Learn

🟢 Core Foundations

• Understanding the differences between shame and guilt
• How shame develops and becomes internalized
• The relationship between shame, identity, self-worth, and belonging
• Healthy guilt versus chronic or disproportionate guilt
• Why shame can interfere with vulnerability, accountability, and connection

🟢 Pattern Recognition

• Shame expressed through anger, defensiveness, withdrawal, or emotional collapse
• Self-criticism, perfectionism, and overcompensation as shame-related strategies
• How shame influences the ability to receive feedback or acknowledge mistakes
• Shame cycles between partners, including criticism, defensiveness, and withdrawal
• Recognizing shame when clients don’t explicitly identify or name it

🟢 Clinical Tools

• Helping clients identify shame triggers and underlying beliefs
• Differentiating behavior from identity
• Strategies for regulating overwhelming shame responses
• Working with the inner critic and internalized negative messages
• Helping clients move toward self-compassion without avoiding responsibility
• Facilitating accountability and repair without intensifying shame

🟢 When to Use

• When clients experience chronic self-criticism or feelings of inadequacy
• When feedback triggers defensiveness, anger, or withdrawal
• When clients struggle to acknowledge mistakes without collapsing into shame
• When couples become trapped in blame-and-defense cycles
• When shame interferes with emotional intimacy, authenticity, or change

🟢 Outcome

A practical framework for identifying shame and guilt beneath presenting problems and helping individuals and couples move toward greater emotional resilience, accountability, self-acceptance, and relational repair.

A clear, structured roadmap for confidently beginning couples therapy, identifying underlying relationship patterns, and establishing a productive therapeutic process.

Working with couples presents challenges that differ significantly from individual therapy. Two people arrive with different perspectives, competing needs, and often conflicting accounts of what is wrong. One partner may dominate the conversation while the other withdraws. Both may look to the therapist to determine who is right.

Without a clear framework, therapists can find themselves mediating arguments, offering communication advice, or responding to the latest crisis without establishing a meaningful direction for treatment.

This training teaches therapists how to structure the early stages of couples therapy, build a working alliance with both partners, assess relational dynamics, and move beyond presenting complaints to identify the patterns that need to change.

🧠 What You’ll Learn

🟢 Core Foundations

• How couples therapy differs from individual therapy
• Structuring the first several sessions
• Establishing a therapeutic alliance with both partners
• Clarifying expectations, goals, and the therapist’s role
• Assessing relationship history, strengths, vulnerabilities, and motivation
• Recognizing safety concerns and determining when conjoint therapy may be inappropriate

🟢 Pattern Recognition

• Identifying recurring negative interaction cycles
• Distinguishing presenting complaints from underlying relational dynamics
• Recognizing pursue-withdraw, blame-defense, and other repetitive patterns
• Understanding how each partner contributes to and experiences the cycle
• Recognizing imbalances in motivation, participation, and emotional engagement

🟢 Clinical Tools

• Essential assessment questions for early couples sessions
• Strategies for managing partners who interrupt, dominate, or withdraw
• Helping partners shift from blaming one another to recognizing the relational pattern
• Establishing meaningful and realistic treatment goals
• Developing an initial clinical formulation and treatment direction
• Redirecting sessions when couples become caught in repetitive arguments

🟢 When to Use

• When therapists are new to couples therapy or want greater confidence
• When couples arrive with competing narratives about the problem
• When one partner is reluctant, disengaged, or more motivated than the other
• When early sessions become dominated by conflict or storytelling
• When the therapist struggles to identify what to focus on or where to begin

🟢 Outcome

A structured, practical approach for beginning couples therapy with greater confidence—helping therapists assess relational dynamics, establish a strong therapeutic foundation, and develop a clear direction for meaningful change.

Practical, in-session interventions for helping couples interrupt destructive interactions, communicate more effectively, and develop greater emotional connection.

Many couples can describe their problems in remarkable detail. They know what they argue about, recognize their communication difficulties, and may even understand the patterns keeping them stuck. Yet week after week, they return to the same arguments, defensiveness, withdrawal, and emotional disconnection.

Insight alone doesn’t necessarily change a relationship.

Therapists need more than an understanding of relational patterns—they need practical ways to intervene while those patterns are unfolding, helping partners move from automatic reactions toward new emotional and relational experiences.

This training focuses on what therapists can actually do in the room to interrupt unproductive cycles, facilitate vulnerability, strengthen differentiation, and help couples practice more constructive ways of relating.

🧠 What You’ll Learn

🟢 Core Foundations

• Why insight and communication advice alone often fail to create lasting change
• Understanding the emotional processes beneath recurring conflict
• How defensiveness, reactivity, and withdrawal interfere with connection
• The role of differentiation and emotional regulation in productive communication
• Why experiential interventions can be more powerful than discussing problems

🟢 Pattern Recognition

• Recognizing the moment a productive conversation becomes a familiar conflict cycle
• Identifying criticism, defensiveness, escalation, shutdown, and emotional avoidance
• Distinguishing surface-level arguments from underlying vulnerability
• Recognizing when partners are reacting to perceived threats rather than hearing one another
• Identifying when the therapist inadvertently becomes a referee, rescuer, or mediator

🟢 Clinical Tools

• Interrupting escalating interactions without taking sides
• Helping partners slow down and recognize their automatic reactions
• Guiding clients beneath anger and defensiveness toward underlying feelings and needs
• Using structured communication exercises, including Initiator–Inquirer
• Helping partners listen, reflect, and respond without immediately defending
• Facilitating new interactions in session through demonstrations and experiential practice
• Helping couples translate in-session breakthroughs into everyday relational change

🟢 When to Use

• When couples repeatedly argue about the same issues
• When sessions become dominated by blame, defensiveness, or withdrawal
• When partners understand their patterns but cannot change them
• When emotional vulnerability feels difficult or unsafe
• When communication techniques aren’t translating into meaningful connection
• When therapists feel stuck repeating the same interventions without progress

🟢 Outcome

A practical repertoire of experiential interventions therapists can use to move couples beyond repetitive conflict—helping partners develop greater emotional awareness, communicate more authentically, and create new patterns of connection.