We want so much to love and be loved. It seems like it should be so easy. But we often enter relationships with excitement and hope, only to find ourselves at best living with a sense of perpetual longing for something more and at worst harboring feelings of disillusionment, abandonment, and hostility. What goes wrong? What keeps us from getting the love that we want and deserve?
This men’s retreat explores the ways we find, lose, and keep loving relationships. By exploring ourselves and our relationships, we find answers to some difficult questions such as:
- How do we lose ourselves in relationships, eroding both ourselves and the relationship?
- How does our tendency to engage in projective identification – seeing our mothers and fathers in our present partner – color and undermine our relationships?
- How does our socialization as men influence who we choose as partners, what we want from them, and what we do when we don’t get what we want?
- How do we balance the demands of our work in a hyper-economy with the time and attention a relationship needs?
- How do we avoid unloving and uncaring behavior, maintaining respect and empathy for our partners?
- How do we handle the inherent problems associated with a relationship – the developmental stages, conflict, and personality differences – in a way that helps create and sustain a healthy relationship?
Contact the Men’s Resource Center for our fee schedule and more information about this retreat.