Workshops for Couples

Hold Me Tight® and Your Whole Relationship are weekend-long couples retreats in getaway destinations for nurturing, healing, and enriching your connection with our partner.

Dr. Silvina Irwin, together with EFT Resource Center co-founder Dr. Lisa Blum, have been facilitating couples workshops for over 10 years. Currently due to COVID, there are no couples retreats scheduled for 2022.

For more information on specific dates, locations, and registration for an upcoming workshop, visit EFT Resource Center's website. You can also sign up for our mailing list to be the first to know about upcoming workshops and offerings for couples and individuals.

Hold Me Tight®
Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

This educational and experiential workshop teaches you the core concepts of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) for Couples, heralded as one of the most effective couples therapies. This workshop is based on the international best-selling book "Hold Me Tight: 7 Conversations for a Lifetime of Love," by Dr. Sue Johnson. The workshop helps you and your partner to reconnect, repair, and re-energize your relationship to create the long-lasting, loving bond we all want.

In this workshop you experience together how to:

  • Get unstuck from repeating arguments or silent distancing that cause frustration and pain

  • Make sense of the strong emotions and needs that surprise both of you in the relationship

  • Begin the process of healing relationship injuries (even old ones) and understanding how to move forward into repair

  • Change how you communicate so that you can really open up to each other with your true feelings and wishes

  • Increase feelings of trust and intimacy, playfulness and fun

  • Hold onto and deepen the great discoveries and conversations you started this weekend so you can keep them going at home.

Your Whole Relationship
Sex, Intimacy, Desire, and Connection

This is our follow-up workshop that takes couples who have participated in a Hold Me Tight® workshop already, or who have had a course of EFT couples therapy, into an exploration of their sexual relationship to strengthen desire and physical connection.  

This workshop will create a safe space for couples to explore, open deeper dialogue, and find greater understanding about your sexual relationship, to create a way to enhance intimacy and connection through physical touch, sensuality, and sexuality.

  • Explore and understand emotional and physical blocks in your sexual relationship

  • Learn about your own and your partner’s sexuality and desires

  • Create enough safety so you can talk about these difficult things

  • Find ways to be playful and loving in these conversations

  • Learn how to enhance or restart touch and sensuality

  • Discover together how you both want to construct a fulfilling, meaningful, rewarding, pleasurable sexual relationship -- in whatever form that takes for you

The workshop explores multiple ways to connect and communicate in your sensual and sexual connection. You will experience exercises in a variety of forms  -- talking, breathing, safe touch, nonverbal attunement, writing, imagery -- that will allow you to privately and safely open up communication, connection, and playfulness between you.

Customize a workshop for your community

If you would like to host one of these workshops for your church or temple group, parents’ group, an LGBT support group, divorced and remarried group, adoption group, cousins circle, or any other kind of community, my team at the EFT Resource Center is happy to customize any of our available workshops to fit the specific needs of your group or community.

Our team members have expertise in topics such as parenting, blended families, interfaith and intercultural relationships, trauma recovery, spirituality and faith, LGBT relationships, premarital counseling, and sexuality. We work with you to tailor a workshop to address your group’s interests. The weekend retreat can be at your site or one of ours, in almost any suitable location (we are happy to travel). The cost remains much the same for our other retreats, except for some travel and design expenses.

We love being creative and are happy to talk to you about any specific needs or focus you may want in the workshop. Contact us to begin the conversation.