Orientation Statement
“I [am writing] to let you know just how liberating and life-changing the program was for me.”
Written by a graduate almost three years after completing our Program, this outcome is echoed repeatedly by our graduates. Results are long-lasting and life-changing because we uncover and resolve the core issues in your life.
These core issues of the past:
- diminish your self-esteem
- negatively affect relationships
- distort communication
- block career progress
- impair intimacy
- prevent a sense of serenity, inner peace, and connection to your spiritual self
Our Group Intensive excavates and removes the root causes of painful life and relationship patterns and teaches you specific behavioral and emotional tools that allow you to create the life you want and deserve.
Combining breakthroughs in neuroscience with Brené Brown’s teachings about shame and vulnerability and John Bradshaw’s pioneering healing work with the inner child, shame, and codependency, our Healing Your Past – Transforming Your Future 20-Week Program provides a safe and dynamic space in which lasting transformation occurs. Our experiential processes repattern your brain allowing you to create new, vibrant experiences of emotional health within yourself and your relationships.
Designed for people who wish to create authentic, nurturing, and enduring relationships in life, our approach is to identify and heal the wounds of our past and to learn to build healthy relationships in the present
At the heart of the process are shame reduction exercises, as well as original pain and inner child therapy work.
Methods include:
- experientially-oriented education
- assertiveness training
- development of healthy boundaries
- self-image work
- guided imagery
- powerful psychodramas
John Bradshaw, in his ground-breaking work, describes how early childhood experiences cause each of us to lose touch with our real self. As a legacy of growing up in a dysfunctional or addictive family, being subjected to emotional, physical, verbal, or sexual abuse, repetitive or abusive criticism, abandonment or neglect, we learn to hide our real self. Having a parent or caregiver who was stressed, distressed, or distracted during our childhood years can produce the same result. In all these situations, we do not feel seen or heard. A sense of “toxic shame” about ourselves takes hold.
Brené Brown, building on Bradshaw’s perspective, describes how this pervasive feeling of shame makes us feel too vulnerable to create real and authentic relationships. Instead, in order to feel some form of acceptance and love, we develop an adapted, codependent self. Bradshaw defines this “codependency” as a “disease of the lost self.” As a result, when we’re caught in this codependent trance, we rely on approval from others and on compulsive behaviors in an attempt to find safety, self-worth, and a sense of identity.
Codependent traits include:
• feeling flawed, defective, empty and lonely
• consistently sacrificing one’s own needs to meet the needs of others
• need to control others and self
• inability to enjoy life
• repetitively unsatisfying or destructive relationships
• diminished or nonexistent sense of inner peace and spirituality
Recovery is possible. Through non-shaming therapy and group support, you can transform low self-esteem, fear of abandonment, and anxiety into recovery of your true self and experience authenticity and serenity
Our Program facilitates your understanding of how you got to be the way you are and provides you with the tools and opportunities to transform yourself and your experience of life.
With facilitators trained by the John Bradshaw Center, the Center for Creative Growth has provided this powerful group intensive program to almost one thousand people in the Bay area since 1991.
Conducted in a caring, non-shaming, and nurturing manner, our Program creates the necessary environment for deep healing to occur. With a maximum of 11 participants, over the course of 20 sessions, you experience a three-stage process that guides you through uncovery, discovery, and recovery.
The power of doing this work on a weekly basis, in the company of the same supportive companions, allows you to have the time to integrate the deep processes experienced in each group session, practice the new life skills that are taught, and be ready to absorb the next layer of healing — all of which blend together to create deep-rooted change in you.
We welcome you to step into this healing journey out of the pain of the past
and into the transformation of your future
Location and Length
Our structured, time-limited intensive group program is offered to anyone living in California via Zoom video conferencing.
The Program consists of 20 group sessions, each 2½-3 hours in length. The program operates as a whole, from beginning to end. We take breaks for holidays and recommend that you miss no more than two sessions, if necessary, during the course of the Program.
Financial Information
Our 20-Week Group Intensive Program costs $97.50 per session, for a total fee of $1,950. To reserve a place in this Program, you either pay in full, in half, or make an initial deposit of $390. If you pay an initial deposit of $390, you would then make four more payments of $390 monthly during the course of the Program. If this plan poses a financial hardship, we also have an Extended Payment Plan option: the total cost of the Program ($1,950) stays the same, but the monthly payments are extended over a longer period of time, up to six months after the end of the Program.
If you have health insurance, your plan might cover part of the cost. Some insurance plans cover group therapy. We would be glad to check your insurance coverage for you. During your initial free phone consultation with our staff, you can provide us with your insurance information if you would like us to check for you.
Interested in taking the next step in creating the life you want?
Call or e-mail us now at the contact info below. After an initial free phone consultation, we provide a free private interview with the group facilitator to determine together if our Program is a good fit for your goals at this time.