Is Your Marriage in Trouble? Don’t Give Up Yet.
A Private 2–5 Day Marriage Intensive for Couples Who Need More Than Weekly Therapy
If your marriage is breaking down, you may not have months to wait for things to get better.
Perhaps you’re having the same painful arguments over and over. Perhaps one or both of you has withdrawn, or trust has been broken. Perhaps an affair has devastated your relationship. Perhaps you’ve grown distant and stopped feeling like you’re part of a couple. Or maybe one of you is wondering whether it’s time to leave.
Before you decide your marriage/relationship is over, give yourselves the opportunity to find out whether it can be repaired.
Come to Colorado for a completely private 2–5 day marriage intensive with Neil Rosenthal, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. There are no other couples that will be present. For 5–6 hours each day, the focus is exclusively on the two of you and the problems threatening your relationship.
Talk With Neil — Complimentary Consultation
Call (720) 331-5564.
When you call, you won’t speak with an intake person or salesperson. You’ll speak directly with me
There May Still Be a Way Back to Each Other
When couples come to see me, many are not experiencing ordinary relationship problems.
They are in real trouble.
Some are considering separation or divorce. Some have already separated. Others have become so angry, resentful or emotionally distant that they no longer know how to reach each other.
And many tell me:
“We love each other, but we don’t know how to fix this.”
That is precisely what the intensive is designed for.
My goal isn’t simply to help you talk about your problems. We will work intensively to understand what has gone wrong, address the unresolved issues keeping you stuck, and help you develop the skills to create a healthier and more connected relationship.
This retreat may be appropriate for you if:
- You are afraid your marriage may end.
- Separation or divorce has been discussed.
- You keep having the same arguments without resolving anything.
- Anger, criticism, defensiveness or withdrawal have taken over your relationship.
- An affair or other betrayal has destroyed trust.
- One or both of you have emotionally withdrawn.
- You have lost affection, intimacy or sexual closeness.
- You feel more like roommates than lovers.
- You’ve tried couples therapy before but remain stuck.
- One of you isn’t certain whether you want to remain married.
- You still care about each other but don’t know how to repair the damage.
- You feel that this may be your last serious attempt to save the relationship.
If you recognize yourselves here, I encourage you to call me before you give up
Neil Rosenthal with a lemur
Before you give up on your relationship, try this! Call me today at (720) 331-5564 for a complimentary phone consultation.
Why an Intensive Instead of Weekly Marriage Counseling?
When a relationship is seriously distressed, one 50-minute appointment each week may simply not give you enough time.
Just when you begin getting to the heart of an important issue, the session is over. Then another week passes. Life intervenes. Emotions change. New arguments occur. At the next appointment, you may spend much of your time talking about what happened during the week rather than resolving the deeper problems.
A marriage intensive is different.
We have 5–6 hours a day for several consecutive days to stay with the important issues.
That gives us time to:
- Understand the destructive patterns between you.
- Get beneath anger and defensiveness to the real feelings and injuries underneath.
- Work through conflicts that have remained unresolved for months or years.
- Address the impact of a betrayal.
- Learn how to communicate without attacking, blaming or withdrawing.
- Practice resolving disagreements while I am there to guide you.
- Begin rebuilding trust and emotional safety.
- Restore affection, connection and intimacy.
- Create concrete agreements about what needs to change.
And importantly, I teach you what we are doing so you can continue using these skills after the retreat is over.
The objective is to give the two of you the ability to handle your relationship differently yourselves.
What does it cost?
You get your choice of either 2, 3, 4 or 5 days. If you are wanting to renew your love or strengthen your relationship, come for 2 or 3 days. If you’re in crisis, or your relationship is in trouble, choose 3, 4 or 5 days—as many as you can afford—because you don’t want our retreat to end until we’ve repaired everything we can.
- Two 6-hour days: $4,800
- Three 5-hour days: $6,000
- Three 6-hour days: $7,200
- Four 5-hour days: $8,000
- Four 6-hour days: $9,600
- Five 5-hour days: $10,000
- Five 6-hour days: $12,000
If you’re unsure how many days and/or hours you need, I will be happy to offer you a recommendation once I learn a little bit about your relationship.
It’s never too late to fall back in love.
Call me today at (720) 331-5564 for a complimentary phone consultation.
What Will We Actually Do During Our Retreat?
Every couple is different, so your intensive will be designed around the particular problems in your relationship.
But our work generally follows a progression.
First, we figure out what has happened to the two of you.
How did two people who once loved and chose each other wind up angry, hurt, mistrustful, lonely or disconnected?
We identify the patterns that repeatedly derail your relationship—and the unresolved injuries underneath them.
Then we change the way you communicate.
You will learn and practice ways of talking about difficult subjects without escalating into attack, defensiveness, blame or withdrawal.
The goal is not simply to “communicate better.”
It is to help each of you feel heard, understood and emotionally safe enough to talk openly.
We might work on conflict resolution, trust, learning more effective ways of expressing anger or hurt, affection and romance—to name a few. But a marriage retreat or marriage intensive will offer you assistance with specific problems or emotions unique to your relationship. The goal is to eliminate or reduce the power of those issues, and to forge agreements between the two of you so that those issues are reduced or eliminated entirely. Click here for a more detailed schedule for activities that are often included in the retreat.
Then we go after the unresolved issues.
We don’t merely identify your problems.
We work on them.
That may mean addressing resentment, anger, sexual disconnection, family conflicts, emotional withdrawal, recurring disagreements, broken promises, or a serious breach of trust.
Then we begin rebuilding.
Once the destructive cycle between you begins to change, we work on restoring what has been lost:
friendship, affection, trust, tenderness, romance, intimacy and the feeling that the two of you are on the same team again.
Finally, I want you to leave Colorado knowing not only what changed during the retreat, but how to continue that change when you go home.
Can a Marriage This Troubled Really Recover?
Many of the couples who come to me are already in serious distress.
When I have followed up with couples after their retreat, more than 90% of those distressed couples were still together two years later.*
That doesn’t mean I can guarantee that your marriage will survive. No ethical therapist can promise that.
What it does tell you is that being in serious trouble does not necessarily mean your relationship is beyond repair.
What If One of Us Isn’t Sure About Staying Married?
This is more common than you might imagine.
You do not have to arrive in Colorado certain that you want to remain married.
Sometimes one person desperately wants to save the relationship while the other is exhausted, discouraged or no longer sure.
If that’s where you are, I am not going to pressure either of you to stay married.
Instead, I want to help the two of you understand what happened to your relationship, determine what might still be repairable, and experience what the relationship feels like when you begin interacting differently.
Then you can make important decisions from a clearer place.
You don’t have to promise that you will stay married.
You only need enough willingness to seriously explore whether the relationship can be repaired before making a decision that may affect the rest of your lives.
Why Work With Neil Rosenthal?
Choosing someone to help you with a marriage in crisis is an enormously important decision.
Neil Rosenthal is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist who has been helping couples since 1980.
His relationship advice has appeared in newspapers around the world, and he is the author of the nationwide #1 bestselling relationship book Love, Sex and Staying Warm: Creating a Vital Relationship.
But perhaps the most important difference is this:
When you come here, you work with me.
You are not assigned to whichever therapist happens to be available.
You are not placed in a group with other couples.
You do not tell your painful story to an intake person and then have to repeat it to someone else.
From our first conversation through the end of your retreat, I work directly with the two of you.
Your retreat is private, confidential and designed specifically around your relationship.
More than half of the couples who come for my marriage retreats travel to Colorado from outside the Denver area.
Each person will also receive a complimentary copy of my nationwide #1 bestselling book that has become the definitive marriage do-it-yourself manual on improving your relationship: Love, Sex and Staying Warm: Creating A Vital Relationship. This book has become like a bible for people interested in improving their relationship skills, or who seek couples intensives, relationship assistance or advice.
What If This Is Our Last Chance?
Some couples come to me because they want to make a good marriage better. Others come because they’re afraid their marriage is ending.
You may be separated. Divorce may already have been discussed. One of you may have emotionally checked out. Or an affair may have left you wondering whether trust can ever be restored.
I cannot promise that every marriage can or should be saved. But if there is still enough willingness on both sides to seriously explore whether your relationship can be repaired, an intensive gives us something weekly therapy often doesn’t: time.
Time to understand what happened. Time to work through what’s unresolved. Time to practice doing things differently. And time to discover whether the two of you can find your way back to each other.
Why not go to regular Marriage Counseling?
1. You need more intensive counseling in order to help stabilize your relationship.
There may be several reasons for this. It may be that you’re trying to recover from an affair or any other betrayal of trust. It may be that you’re caught in repetitive arguing or conflict that you can’t get out of. It may be that there is so much anger in your relationship that you can’t talk about and resolve issues anymore. It may feel that you are headed toward a divorce/break-up if you don’t do something fast, effective and in-depth.
2. You don’t live in the Denver area and repeated sessions over time would be too difficult or expensive.
More than 50% of the couples who do my marriage counseling retreat come from out of town, and most typically stay at one of the nearby hotels.
3. One (or both) of you are not sure you want to remain together, but you need to co-parent or work together.
In this case, you must learn how to talk, negotiate and deal effectively with each other.
4. Trust has been ruptured and you need it repaired quickly.
You may not have the luxury of going to couples counseling for months on end to fix what’s wrong. You may need a more intensive marriage therapy retreat in order to more quickly repair what’s broken.
How is this different from a Marriage Workshop or Marriage Conference?
Private, personalized attention
In a marriage workshop or couples workshop, you have 5, 10 or more couples attending at the same time. Everyone gets the same approach and the same exercises, regardless of what issues brought you in there, and it could be very embarrassing to talk openly about the issues in your relationship in a large group of people. In a Colorado Marriage Retreat, it will only be the two of you—there will not be any other couples present—and you will receive my personal, undivided attention the entire time. All the skill-building activities will be hand-tailored to you. This will be your own private retreat, exclusively for the two of you. This kind of couples retreat will enable you to repair major issues or conflicts quickly, effectively and privately.
Master instruction in effective relationship skills and/or how to repair your relationship. Learn more about my experience and qualifications →
Research shows the techniques are effective
The techniques I use from Imago Therapy have been scientifically shown to be effective. You don’t want to leave your relationship to chance.
What if we’re getting along well—or not married?
A couples retreat is not always centered around conflicts or disagreements. Frequently couples come because they want to deepen the connection and intimacy in their relationship, and an intensive couples therapy retreat offers the opportunity for closeness far more quickly than weekly couples counseling appointments can.
A couples retreat also makes a perfect gift for pre-marital couples, for newlyweds, or for long-married couples desiring to strengthen the connection, closeness and intimacy in their relationship. For non-married couples, a couples counseling retreat offers the same benefits as it does for married couples—if not more—since the best time to prevent any issue is before it starts.
This is equally effective for non-married couples or same sex couples.
Can I expect lasting positive change from Colorado Marriage Retreats?
That’s my intent. One way the two of you can help yourselves achieve that end is to create a list of goals you would like me to assist you in fixing, changing or resolving. Bring these goals into the first session, so that I can address your intentions throughout the entire marriage retreat. I may also guide the two of you to create a shared vision for the future of your relationship.
Not sure if a marriage retreat is right for you?
Call me for a complimentary consultation:
(720) 331-5564