naturetherapy
Private retreats: understanding who we are and one another
Click her for Part I & Part II
The arrival in Scuol, Engadin for the private retreat
Before Martina´s clients arrive in Scuol, they have previously booked the days they wanted for their counselling retreat. Separately, they have booked their hotel, hostel or apartment. Although the stay and the travel are not part of my counselling package, she is always happy to give them recommendations, On the day of arrival she waits for them outside of their lodging, ready to take them for a walk and talk.
By the time they meet in person, Martina already knows what the clients need from her and what they want to achieve through their sessions. Prior to coming, she has sent them questions that help them have clarity about their goals and to have reflected on their struggles.
Understanding who we are
The client is the expert of his or her own life and knows him or herself the best. But knowing is not equal to understanding. Martina makes them understand so that they become self-competent to make new choices leading to the results they desire.
We all desire to be loved, to live in peace, to be accepted the way we are, to have harmony inside and outside ourselves. We are social beings and want to belong and to have our place.
Rationally, we should not put our right of belonging into question, since our mere existence makes us belong to humanity and the world as a whole.
However, from a very young age though, we interpret that our belonging is based on conditions and that our significance is related to our actions. That makes us adopt patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting that can create difficulties in love relationships, at work, or/and in communities of friends and acquaintances.
Some of her clients’ goals are to improve their communication in order to understand each other better, to stop fighting and to feel respected. This requires an understanding of their own thinking, feeling, and acting, and of the partner too.
Understanding one another
Image par Gerd Altmann de Pixabay
Here is a fictive example:
If Joane is a soft-spoken, friendly type of person, who’s sensitive to the needs of others, and willing to make an effort to make others feel good, but her husband Carl is a goal-oriented, busy, and a fast doer-type of person, she can often feel that he is not respecting her needs or even her as a person. That is of course not the case, it’s just that Carl has his own logic. With the years she might give up on standing up for herself as it takes her too much energy to always push for her wants.
What Joane can learn is that Carl needs clear words to understand what she means. A “I’m not sure if I want to go out tonight” is a sentence Carl understands as that she is open for options and even expects to receive better ideas of what to do. That’s his logic. Joane’s logic is that one should not be selfish and push for their own desires. With that belief, she hasn’t developed a strong connection with her own needs. As a consequence, she is and also sounds hesitant when she speaks about her wants.
Carl understands her better if he hears: “I will stay home today”. This means Carl can learn to understand Joane’s way of expressing her needs so that Joane doesn’t have to be the only one adjusting her communication. As a result, both make a step toward each other.
They both learn things that also help them in other relationships. For instance, Carl has become less fast and more relaxed and has put down his idea that he is responsible to make things move forward. He has also improved his social skills by developing a better sense of other ways of being. Joane has learned to be more clear of what her needs are and that she is not in this world to meet the expectations of others.
What can be learned in a two-day retreat?
Here is another fictive example.
The complexity of struggles becomes larger with time if Joane and Carl live with their misunderstandings for too long, and have missed opportunities of creating boundaries and enhancing clarity between them They could be at a state where they lost respect and appreciation for each other. Being in a relationship where one does not understand the other, can lead to minimalizing the joint interactions, and as a consequence, the couple loses common goals and the relationship becomes more draining than fulfilling.
When hurts, sorrows, and resentment reach a level of despair and hopelessness, there is more baggage to unpack in their marriage counselling and past events need healing.
Photo by Tom Pumford on Unsplash
As she mentioned before, we are social beings, which means we have many diverse relationships, and the most complex relationship is the one we have with ourselves.
Whether clients come to retreat for marriage counselling or to retreat to have individual counselling, the understanding of one’s personality is in all cases crucial for changing the direction in life or the dynamics in relationships.
We are not victims of our past
Interpretations we adopted throughout childhood and past experiences have a strong influence on the way we subconsciously think. Our thinking drives our interactions and if the interactions are negative, there is always the possibility to make corrections in our way of thinking, feeling, and acting.
We are not victims of our past and we all have the right to be happy. This is what Martina deeply wishes for every human being in this world.
Image par Send $5 for cancer treatment PLEASE. PLEASE. PLEASE 🙏 de Pixabay
“The science of the mind can only have for its proper goal the understanding of human nature by every human being, and through its use, brings peace to every human soul.” Alfred Adler.
Featured Image par CANDICE CANDICE de Pixabay
About the author:
Martina Famos is a Swiss counsellor. She is goal-oriented counsellor and creates solutions to motivate people to take counselling and to help her clients achieve their goals.
​For over ten years she had her event production company and for several years co-owned and managed the production for an international action sports publishing company with employees from 11 different countries. Over the course of her life she has been studying, fair-trading, working on humanitarian projects, or traveling for sports events in the countries of Canada, USA, Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba, Ecuador, Argentina, Switzerland, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Thailand, China, Japan and New Zealand. At forty, she changed her career to become a private counsellor in the Engadin Valley.
