Abandonment to Healing: Overcome Your Patterns of Self-Sabotage

Abandonment to Healing is a weekend healing retreat at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, led by psychotherapist and author Susan Anderson. It is an intensive for anyone who recognizes a pattern of self-sabotage, a pull toward unavailable partners, or a fear of being left that shapes how they live and love. Laypeople and mental health professionals work side by side, using mind-body exercises to address abandonment at its root.

What to Expect

Susan Anderson approaches abandonment as a primal fear that can sit beneath emotional distress and self-defeating behavior. The work is experiential. Participants learn abandonment recovery techniques and practice them in the room, in a group she is known for keeping safe and open.

The themes the program addresses include:

- Healing primal abandonment and reversing self-abandonment, which Anderson names as the primary source of self-defeating patterns
- Resolving relationship issues and the pattern she calls abandoholism, being attracted to the unavailable
- Accepting being loved, and easing the insecurity and self-doubt that disrupt relationships
- Working with procrastination, avoidance, inertia and other "outer child" patterns
- Building self-esteem, confidence, social life and career
- Trimming excess emotional weight, clutter, debt and anxiety
- Offering healing to the source of depression and low energy

The weekend begins with check-in in the afternoon, a Kripalu Yoga class, dinner, and an evening program session from 7:30 to 9:30. The full day follows a steady rhythm: yoga in the early morning, a silent breakfast, a program session from 9:00 to noon, lunch, and a second session from 1:30 to 4:15. Another yoga class and dinner close the day. On the final morning there is yoga, silent breakfast, and a last session from 9:00 to 11:30, then lunch and departure.

About Susan Anderson

Susan Anderson is a psychotherapist and author whose work centers on abandonment and recovery. Her books include Taming Your Outer Child: Overcoming Self-Sabotage and Healing Abandonment; The Journey from Abandonment to Healing; The Abandonment Recovery Workbook; and Black Swan: The Twelve Lessons of Abandonment Recovery. She is known for creating safe, open processes within groups, and for offering experiential training that treats recovery as an ongoing program of growth and healing rather than a single event.

The Setting

Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Stockbridge, in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, is a residential retreat center. Accommodations are intentionally simple, meant to help you unplug and feel grounded. Private rooms suit those who want solitude, and shared, community-style dorm rooms suit those who want connection. Rooms are ready by 4:00 pm, and a luggage room holds your bags until then.

Three nutritious meals are served each day, with breakfast taken in silence. More than ten yoga classes are offered daily across the campus, and the Kripalu grounds are open to you throughout your stay.

Before You Go

The program is open to all levels, and no prior experience with this work is needed. It is taught in English. Please bring a notebook, since the sessions include written exercises.

Your stay includes accommodation, three daily meals, daily yoga classes, access to the grounds and amenities, and the program sessions with Susan Anderson. Healing Arts sessions, items from the Kripalu Shop, and Cafe purchases are extra. On the day of departure, room check-out is at 10:00 am, and you are welcome to remain on campus and take part in the workshop until 2:00 pm. Times may shift slightly, so check the schedule you receive at check-in for room locations.