For Single People Who Want Relationships Based on Trust: Creating Relationships with Conscious Intention

Niela Miller & Blaine Hartford
April 13-15

Most of us have some sense, or fantasy, of what an ideal relationship would be like. Though most of us have sought to find someone who matches our ideal, eventually we come to realize that such a relationship doesn't exist; it is up to us to create and maintain it. The sad aftermath of this realization, however, is that we were never taught effective relationship-building skills. Nor did we have good models to use as patterns for making what we wanted come true.

You are invited to participate in a retreat with two leaders who have faith that ideal relationships can be created and can be sustained. Our time together will be spent mostly in small group discussions and exercises defining the components essential for creating such relationships. We will examine the connection between self-affirmation and affirming others. We will experience ways of extending affection and love. We will explore caring, competency, and commitment, which are the components that make trust possible. Together, we will search for ways to release our beliefs in the romantic myths that influence our thinking and cause needless suffering. We will break our habit of projecting onto others responsibility for either our happiness or unhappiness.

We will also relax, laugh, and have fun together. If you are single and want to participate in creating a nurturing and supportive community responsive to your unique needs, please come to this retreat over the Easter weekend. You will leave feeling more empowered to create the relationships you want and more connected to a vital community of singles whose needs are often ignored by the larger society.

Niela Miller, trained by many of the pioneers of humanistic and Jungian psychology, Gestalt, theater, music, bioenergetics, and Dreambody work, uses her profound skills to create a safe and challenging workshop. Niela has taught graduate courses, presented workshops, and trained therapists for a quarter of a century. She founded her own consulting company, People Systems Potential, and her book, Counseling in Genderland, offers therapists the benefit of her extensive experience working with transgendered people. She just wrote Being Alive! Creative and Emotional Intelligence Tools for People Professionals. Niela offers the rarely combined gifts of educator, therapist, and artist in a unique balance. Blaine Hartford is a UU minister who has presented workshops at Rowe for 25 years and is one of our oldest and dearest friends. He's also a psychotherapist, a long-time practitioner of transactional analysis, and an intense student of the Seth material. For the past 29 years he has served as a consultant to over 200 major corporations, non-profit organizations, and religious communities. He's the owner and director of ChangePoint Associates, a collaborating group of self-employed human resources development consultants. He believes trust will be the most important issue of the coming century, and he's writing a book about trust in personal and professional relationships.