Open to Women and Men of All Backgrounds and Experiences

April 4th to April 6th, 2025

We will be starting with no assumptions about what types of emotional injuries participants are seeking healing from.

Co-counseling is a powerful approach to emotional healing. It involves developing an important set of skills and insights, and then working together with another person who has also had the training. Co-counseling sessions are free for life, since they involve exchanging counseling rather than exchanging money. You can find a detailed description of co-counseling at the bottom of this email.

The retreat will involve class time to learn the skills and concepts, practice co-counseling sessions of various lengths, and demonstrations of co-counseling approaches. There will also be games, singing, other kinds of fun, and free time to walk or rest.

The retreat will go from 5:30 pm on Friday until 2:45 pm on Sunday. Meals will be provided from Friday dinner through Sunday lunch. People are welcome to arrive starting mid-afternoon on Friday. We’ll need to be out by 4:00 pm on Sunday. (There will not be an option to use separate lodging or meals outside of the retreat center.)

The four nearest airports are all roughly the same distance from the retreat center. They are JFK, LaGuardia, Albany, and Westchester. We’re happy to help people coordinate shared car rentals so that you can save money.

Lundy will be volunteering his time for the weekend. Any extra income from the retreat goes to defray PLN expenses.

Co-Counseling is a powerful but demanding approach to healing. Participants in the retreat need to be at a place in life where they can listen well to others, lay their own distresses aside for extended periods of time (up to an hour), and be able to be a voice of hope and positivity to others. This weekend is therefore not a good fit for people who are battling substance abuse, depression, or a current safety crisis. (However, people with past histories of these kinds of challenges are entirely welcome; we can safely say that most of us have such histories in one form or another.) The retreat is also not appropriate for men who have a history of abusing women.

If you would like to attend the retreat, please send an email to [email protected]. We will send you an application.

WE HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE!!!

WHAT IS CO-COUNSELING ALL ABOUT?

Co-counseling is a sixty year-old approach to healing from emotional injury and promoting personal growth. It primarily involves working in pairs ,but sometimes can also be practiced in small groups, to support each person’s healing work. Co-counseling sessions follow a set structure and use an established collection of techniques. There is no charge for participating in co-counseling sessions; therefore, co-counseling is available as a free and powerful resource for anyone who can listen well to others.

Co-counseling is most effective when all participants strive to develop a high degree of skill. Therefore we encourage new people to take an extensive training. There is a charge for the training through the Peak Living Network but it is very low. Co-counseling trainings can also be found through other organizations., though they will typically be more expensive than a PLN training.

Co-Counseling Is Uniquely Effective Because:

1) Both people in a co-counseling pair act as the helper and as the one receiving the help. In a session, one person is the counselor for the first hour and then the pair switches roles, so that the other person is counselor for the second hour. Playing both roles turns out to accelerate healing for both participants.

2) Unlike many other healing approaches, co-counseling doesn’t focus on pursuing insight and analysis, which are quite limited (though definitely useful) in their ability to bring about recovery. The centerpiece of co-counseling is emotional discharge, We learn techniques to heal through using our inherent body-based healing processes, particularly laughter, crying, trembling, and storming (“tantrums”). These are healing channels that we are all born with, and that turn out to be more effective paths to recovery from emotional injury than any of the paths that have been invented by human beings. We simply need to return to the natural way in which our bodies are built to heal from psychological wounds.

3) Co-counseling is free, so economic resources do not have to be an obstacle to our recovery.

4) Co-counseling has a much better understanding than most other approaches do of how deeply our wounds are rooted in experiences of systemic oppression, such as adultism (the oppression of children), racism, the oppression of women, homophobia, and class oppression. Co-counseling offers specific understandings and techniques that make it possible to do deep healing work in sessions on these experiences.

5) Trained co-counselors typically use a wider variety of techniques than most professional therapists do, believe it or not. They are also able to draw upon positive experiences from their own sessions as client to help them know how to assist other people more effectively when in the counseling role.

6) Learning and practicing co-counseling makes it possible for you to connect to co-counselors all over the world. Feeling part of this broad network contributes to our individual healing, as we feel this community of support and encouragement behind us.

In a Co-Counseling Training, and Through Our Manual and Videos, Participants Learn:

1) The nuts and bolts of how to do a co-counseling session in a supportive, safe, and respectful way, thereby increasing the chances that both people will be able to do productive healing work

2) Strategies for opening up our own healing channels, including our access to deeply healing emotional discharge

3) Techniques to use while in the counseling role that will help the client gain access to deep feelings in ways that allow those feelings to be cathartically released and healed rather than simply endured

4) Approaches to opening up our ability to love ourselves and to expressing our love for other people

5) Approaches for more confidently and forcefully standing up for ourselves and for the people we love

6) Ways to dramatically improve the quality of our listening and of the questions we ask

You Can Learn Co-Counseling By:

1) Sending an email to [email protected] to get on the list to be notified when the next online class opens for registration.

2) Writing to that same address to explore possibilities for putting together a co-counseling training in your geographical area (if you have multiple people who are interested in learning).

3) Using the free video resources at YouTube.com/@PeakLivingNetwork, which include some twenty videos on learning co-counseling, and using and the free co-counseling manual The Healing Partnership available at PeakLivingNetwork.org under “Materials.”

4) Performing an internet search to find other organizations that may offer co-counseling trainings in your area (please note, though, that we’re not currently endorsing any other co-counseling trainers, so you’ll need to make your own assessment of the quality of the teachers and the dynamics of their organizations)

The Right Time to Learn Co-Counseling Is:

1) When your life feels reasonably stable and solid, so that you’re not in the middle of a crisis or facing serious problems that urgently need to be solved

2) When sharing the responsibility for other people’s healing will not be an undue burden on you, and when you feel hopeful enough about life to be able to share that hope with others

PeakLivingNetwork.org
[email protected]
YouTube.com/@PeakLivingNetwork