Codependency Healing Retreat

Our Codependency Retreat is conducted at The Glass House, with small groups limited to 6 gender-specific clients. The program offers yoga, meditation, healthy meals, and trauma-informed individual and group coaching.

We focus on high-impact solutions to everyday relationship challenges. Whether you’re working through losing a relationship or letting go of unhealthy behaviors, we will help you identify your needs and set healthy boundaries.

Learn more about our retreats here. 

Our retreats are located in Northern California.

We have had the privilege to work with thousands of clients. You can read about some of their experiences here. 

We are focused on helping you strengthen your relationships quickly with our tested, proven PIVOT process, based on developmental and positive psychology. What our clients are always impressed with is how much they get from our program and how quickly they feel like they are progressing.

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Having a helpful disposition is not codependence. A defining trait of codependence is that caring for others supersedes one’s own need to also take care of self physically, mentally or emotionally. In codependent dynamics, that tendency to be helpful outgrows it’s purposefulness and begins causing negative consequences to our own well-being.

Codependency is a learned behavior or an adaptation to circumstances. There is no single specific way it originates. Perhaps a caregiver’s codependent traits were modeled for you. Or it could be that at an early age, assessing and meeting the needs of others created safety. It could be that influential institutions or authority figures told you that you must put others first and to put yourself last. Or perhaps issues like low self-esteem, fear of abandonment, early messages of compliance, or other personality traits kept you prioritizing others and suppressing your own needs. In any case, we are not born codependent – and if we once learned this adaptation, then rest assured, we can learn new patterns and find new choices.

At PIVOT, we believe that the healthiest relationships have mutuality in how wants and needs are attended to – the exception to this is minor children, who should not share the burden of reciprocity in meeting an adult’s needs. It’s perfectly loving and healthy to find opportunities to prioritize the people we care about, and we also want to make sure that we are nurturing relationships where that value is shared.

When codependent people are supporting someone who is truly in crisis (like addiction, mental health crisis or domestic violence) it can feel like an impossible task to shift the focus to ourselves. Often in these kinds of critical situations, the solutions needed are more than one can responsibly provide, and it’s wise to seek professional expertise (like crisis management clinicians or interventionists.) What we do know at PIVOT is that we can’t truly support our at-risk loved ones well when our own battery is constantly in the red. More often than not, modeling self-care, boundaries, and healthy decision making is a way of truly supporting those we love.

One thing is certain – when we change ourselves, the dynamic of our relationship changes. Different partners respond to this growth in different ways, ranging from frustration to relief. When codependent people reach out for support, the story we usually hear is that staying the same is no longer an option. One of the best ways we can support this shift is by recommending couple’s work (like coaching or in-person intensives) to help better delineate what responsibilities in the relationship are yours, what are theirs and what are shared. When we really understand how the codependent dynamic evolved and why it must change, we can help people move out of blame, shame and fear, and into healthier relational patterns.

People can exhibit codependent traits with anyone in their lives, including children. When children are small with little autonomy, it is normal for a parent to prioritize their needs and self-sacrifice appropriately. Codependent parents (of older children and adult children), however, may find themselves:

• Unwilling or unable to have a rewarding adult life outside of their child
• Being in denial or minimizing difficult truths about their child
• Experiencing a driving need to protect their child from natural consequences, or to intervene and prevent discomfort or challenge to their child.
• Unwilling to have normal healthy boundaries with their child
• Allowing their child to “win” in order to avoid conflict or problem-solving.
• Feeling a need to control and micro-manage their child’s decision making, even when they are older or grown.
• Unable to identify their own needs and feelings by defaulting to the needs of their child and taking on their feelings.
• Feeling like a victim or a martyr because of the unappreciated sacrifices made for the child.
• Telling their child what they should feel and think in situations.
• Feeling devastated when the child fails at something and having it affect the parent’s self-esteem directly.

Codependency is not recognized in the DSM-V as a diagnosis. It is not a personality disorder or a mood disorder. Codependency is described as a state of emotional dependence that is defined by a pattern of dysfunctional relational behaviors. These behaviors, or traits, result in one person being prioritized and attended to, while the other, the codependent, engages in choices that are self-sacrificing, self-minimizing, and that remain largely focused on someone else’s well-being.

Dependence is not the same as codependence. Many of us have gone through phases where we have been reliant on someone else for one reason or another. A financially dependent relationship can be healthy if there are common agreements and needs and wants are met mutually.

Codependency can look different for everyone, but some traits are:

• Feeling guilty or fearful about setting boundaries
• Difficulty identifying and expressing your own feelings, needs, and wants
• A belief that you need to protect someone from their own challenges, pain or consequences
• An inability to tolerate the way you feel when someone else is unhappy with you, and a driving need to win back their approval
• Gradually losing your agency and fine tuning your life around someone else’s needs.
• Low self-esteem and chronic negative self-criticism.
• Assuming the responsibility of doing for others what they can do for themselves.
• Being drawn to people who need you more than to people that value and respect you.
• Feeling soothed by sympathy others give you regarding your difficult relationship
• Focusing narrowly on what they need to change and discounting a need for personal change.
• Staying in unhealthy dynamics out of fear of abandonment or rejection.
• A persistent drive to “fix”, rescue or change someone else.
• Over-apologizing and assuming inappropriate blame to avoid conflict
• Enabling, covering up for, or minimizing a partner’s unhealthy choices.
• A willingness to compromise your own values when doing so would win the approval of another person.
• You have experienced the people that care about you express concern about your relational dynamics, but they “just don’t understand.”
• Experiencing guilt and confusion about self-care.
• Feeling disconnected, or in denial about the reality of the relationship – often staying based on a fantasy of what it “could become” or what “might happen.”

Yes, PIVOT offers virtual services in addition to individual and small group retreats. All of our offerings come from the PIVOT curriculum and our clients have success healing their codependency through both ways. It is realistic to learn how to have a different relationship with yourself and others online and in person.