Intensive Couples Workshop: Courage for Truth

Courage for truth is an intensive encounter with lost integrity and truth. It is a way of meeting oneself through partnership, developing the courage to express needs and positioning oneself clearly. Courage to the Truth is a journey to an honest relationship, free from concepts, tacit contracts and the everyday self-deception.

Clarity, presence and openness are the prerequisites for genuine contact. Everyone should be able to be themselves, to show themselves – with all their strengths and injuries. In hard times, each should carry the other and confront them when they stall in their comfort zone.

The reality is different: At the beginning, when falling in love, we show ourselves from our supposed best side – we flirt and most of our true nature remains hidden in the shadows. When we enter into a relationship, unspoken arrangements begin. With the intrusion of everyday routine, practical constraints, fear of loss and convenience often prevail. These prevent open communication and intimacy.

Not only have relationship dreams been lost, but individuals have become distant from themselves, suppressing their needs and bending in anticipatory conformity.

The evil world and the unreasonable partner, then often become the only truth. What remains is a victim attitude that demands compensation for lost enjoyment of life and inflicted suffering.

If the partners avoid conflict at this point, a blanket of considerate, shame-filled and cold silence lies over everything. When anger rises against the partner, the cause of all unhappiness, a war breaks out: I can’t with you and I can’t without you.

When constraints, fear and convenience prevail, it becomes a frozen conflict – a situation in which both persist in unspoken accusations against the other and there are only losers. The actual is not named in these confrontations; instead, the fights ignite on superficial things that suddenly seem elementary.

It is time for truth.

This becomes hurtful. And if there is only one correct truth, it is not clarity, but dogmatism and dictatorship. The focus can therefore never be on one’s own truth, general reason, the usual, but only on tolerance and acceptance of deviating ideas. In partnerships, this concerns above all the idea of what love is.

Courage for truth means developing tolerance, not taking disappointments personally, and living with the frustration that there is more than one view of the world. It means recognizing that there is no right to satisfaction of one’s own demands and to say goodbye to the dream of an always fulfilling partnership in an adult way.

The Courage to Truth workshop is a journey into the shallows of partnership and the quagmire of one’s self compressed into 2 ½ days in our Berlin practice. It consists of 3 couple sessions and with each partner 2 individual sessions of 90 minutes each.

In the couples sessions, we focus on what is unspoken, what has become divisive. We create a framework that is supported by tolerance and compassion, and in which what is not said can be named. In the individual sessions, on the other hand, we look at the fears that prevent an open heart and clear speech, as well as the overlying shame.

Compassionate clarity creates a space in which new possibilities unfold, resulting from the sincere development of each individual and thus for the partnership.

The price for 2 ½ intensive days consisting of 3 couple sessions and a total of 4 individual sessions of 90 minutes each is 2,160 CHF. We are available for a short preliminary interview, if necessary also via Skype / Zoom / Teams, or further questions.