RELATIONSHIP: A WORKSHOP FOR SINGLES, COUPLES AND FAMILIES

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

RELATIONSHIP: Part One

Relationship is essential to living. Life is relationship. When there is disorder in relationships with our families and with others, our society may go to pieces.

We hope to give and receive affection, appreciation, creative stimulation, and recognition that we are wonderfully sane and unique friends and partners. But relationships often go awry. Let us try to understand how we form and maintain soul-mated partnerships and why we lose them.  One key may be the most archaic, the instinctual layer of our minds holds the secret of being in relationship. Acknowledging this inner reality is one path to self-knowledge and health.

Through mini-lectures, the retelling of myths and group discussion we will focus on deepening our understanding of basic experiences in relationships: love and loneliness, kindness and cruelty, intimacy and betrayal, freedom and conformity, responsibility and surrender.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN ‘RELATIONSHIP: Part One’

  • Why a true relationship can come into being only when there is self-knowledge.
  • That conscious affection is the truest and most enduring communion.
  • How the powerful instincts, hardwired right back to the mists of time strongly influence feelings and behaviors.
  • Neither masculine nor feminine energy belong exclusively to one gender or the other.
  • An overview of gender identity: heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, queer, and transgender love.
  • How the spell of romantic love is Mother Nature’s way of testing what you are made of.
  • How to pass Her test and keep the spell of romantic love.
  • About feeling and its shadow.
  • How the psychological health of your family of origin affects your ways to feel about yourself and others.
  • How the psychological and physical health of current family members can affect your relating to others.
  • Psychological factors affecting intimacy (impotency, premature ejaculation, frigidity and painful intercourse).
  • Patterned behaviors between mothers and sons, fathers and sons; mothers and daughters, fathers and daughters.
  • How to avoid the pitfalls.
  • How the social and cultural repression of sexual instinct will affect your relationship.
  • About the use and abuse of pornography.
  • How surrender brings transformation and the union of conscious and the unconscious thought.
  • How to build consciously affectionate relationships with your lover, friends and family.

TOPICS TO BE COVERED IN ‘RELATIONSHIP: Part Two’

  • The instincts: anima and animus
  • Feminine sexuality deformed into lust.
  • Male sexuality deformed into brutality.
  • Phallic instinct in men and women.
  • Phallic instinct as liberator.
  • Man’s liberation from mother.
  • Women’s liberation from father.
  • The complexity of psychological relationships between parents and LGB and transgender children.
  • Compulsive sexual promiscuity.
  • Drinking and drug abuse to lose inhibitions.
  • The separation of sex from the rest of life.
  • Transformation and the union of conscious and unconscious thought.
  • Building consciously affectionate relationships with your lover, friends and family.

TOPICS TO BE COVERED IN ‘RELATIONSHIP: Part Three’

  • Body and spirit in men and women.
  • Sex and death, war and violence.
  • Sex and creativity.
  • Affirmation of the man’s body identity.
  • Affirmation of the woman’s body identity.
  • The importance of the marriage ritual.
  • Sometimes divorce is a good thing.
  • Talking about sex, death, creativity and violence together.
  • Building consciously affectionate relationships with your lover, friends and family.

PEGGY FIRESTONE, M.Ed., A.M. has run a private practice in psychotherapy for thirty years with a specialty in the psychology of creativity. She received Masters Degrees from Rutgers University and The University of Chicago and studied Jungian psychology combined with Indian philosophy for a twelve-year period, living alternately in Chicago and Bombay.

PARTICIPATION: This seminar is open to the general public and mental health professionals. No prerequisites are required to enroll. Seminars are generally limited to 25 participants.
TAX DEDUCTION:  Seminars of this type generally meet the requirements for IRS deductions.

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