Now, imagine if it were your loving niece that came from a disfunctional childhood, risky teen years and a few not-your-average heartbreaks. Then imagine your niece venturing out on her own in a strange place to discover her strengths and to understand the world. And she leaves all her family and friends behind. Then imagine that the niece you miss decides to help people because she saw that others were in emotional pain. Now imagine that your niece has helped many young lonely people understand themselves by making better life decisions from the columns that your niece had worked so many hard years to get published. You know that your niece is an honest, sweet, loving and generous human being who believes in positivity and taking personal responsibility for her own life. Now imagine that niece has blossomed even more in choosing to help others in an untraditional way. Imagine your niece is content, happy and successful. And now you don’t have to worry about her. Imagine that niece coming full circle and healing your 55-year old heart. This gem of a project, my cynical and bitter people, is developed by my niece. I am so proud of her and how far she has come from her worrisome earlier years. She radiates love that most of you may never experience. Your hateful comments reflect you. Reread what you wrote and imagine this business is started by someone you love and admire. Good luck on your journey.
7
the reporter obviously missed the bulletin on the camp dress code - one-shoulder jumpsuits with spike heels. those are all STILL in style?
What a pathetic waste of money! But then, as a business idea to rip people off and make a pile of money, it's great. As P.T. Barnum famously said "there's a sucker born every minute."
3
You’re very judgey. The woman that started this camp is someone very close to me. And I know her past and how she got to this was no easy journey. I hope you will not be as snarky, bitter and brutal when someone attacks your loved one the way you have to mine.
3
@Julie. We all heal in different ways, on different schedules. Clearly, you've found your own path -- why begrudge or judge those who need or choose different paths? Compassion and empathy are critically missing in today's society, and given that this article is about healing and grief, it feels even more important.
2
My daughter's Facebook comments on reading this article, with which I heartily agree: "The first time I threw up in my mouth reading this was the sentence 'he had an emotional affair with an Instagram model.' Then it kept coming reading more about spending $2500 to eat vegan food and talk about feelings. My God... to be that privileged is something I cannot fathom. If I were to run a “break-up boot camp” the menu would consist of pizza, Oreos and whiskey. For activities, I’d offer an arts & crafts class, where we’d make voodoo dolls of our exes and use their shredded clothing to make litter box liners. Then a lesson on which websites are great to blacklist your ex on social media and the correct terminology you should use to achieve that. Punching bags would be available 24 hours a day, along with screenings of My So-Called Life. If that’s not enough, everyone who participates leaves with a new kitten or puppy from a local animal rescue.
11
@Michael Engel. FANTASTIC! When you decide to take the step, and the risk, of actually starting your own business as you've described above, please do let us know.
2
Sounds like fun, and since I can't afford it-nor can most-we all could live it vicariously through the amusing reflections of Ms. Oswaks. I found the whole idea to be quite interesting. However, I did have a "me too" reaction as an older divorcee that there is a whole cottage industry of expensive "self" help and "coaching" marketed to women needing to rebound and move on from the misogynist male behaviour that often leads to breakups. In my case, I had to put up with years of a whole spectrum of increasing bullying behaviours that became so intolerable that I had to end it. After having children, it became nearly impossible to deal with. Any way you approach it, it is not easy being a woman in our culture, and any bit of help-especially from sympathetic men, is welcome.
7
Throw yourself into your work, into the passions that you have, with renewed vigor, or sit in a rocking chair and rock your pain away (as I did - it helped). Move, if you can afford it - physical distance is a great healer and helps to clear your mind. The person you lost can not be replaced, of course, but there ARE others, and another happy relationship IS possible. Learning to let go is the hardest, but I don't think an expensive "boot camp" can do that for you: you have to do it alone!
8
This boot camp is more than that.
A few things...
Aside from perhaps the visit by the dominatrix, this is exactly like somatic therapy. When you bring the body into the process of looking for your recycled pain it really opens up valuable new tools. Yoga and breathing are just extensions of this same idea especially in a context like this.
Quite a privilege it must be to be able to take a vacation and pay these fees in order to get access to such intensive and repetitive therapy.
Our entire culture needs access to this kind of 'work'. If only we could bring this experience to the black mother in Ferguson, MO who grew up sexually abused and lives in constant fear of what her neighborhood has become. Or bring this work to hard bitten laborer who no longer have work to feed his family and watches his nephews and nieces get addicted to opioids.
We're all worthy of healing, of finding out just who we are and how we've changed. Maybe we can start finding a way to connect these services to the 'least of us'.
15
THIS is exactly why I read the Sunday Styles section. Real-life stories of the clueless, self-involved, affluent, educated-but-believe-in-horoscopes "mostly white" people who exist in their self-contained little bubbles of priviledge--especially when they're trying to "break out" of their self-destructive patterns and embrace the spiritual, and get down to what "really matters," so long as it is exclusive, glamorous and luxurious. It is catnip, please, keep it up!
43
thank you for being so articulate and saying all the things i felt. geeze, what's in the water in america?
2
Should have gone to a luxurious spa for the weekend instead, with a couple of her best girlfriends. Or on a mission trip to an inpoverished area to help those in need. Either one of those would have provided more fulfillment. This thing sounds like the kind of parody they write into one of those Meryl Streep or Diane Keaton movies, after the heroine’s cad husband leaves her for his younger executive assistant, but before she is hit on by a hot somewhat younger man and her husband realizes he made a terrible mistake.
18
As a man, I think this article and this boot camp are fantastic.
To those spilling hate on the comment thread: some women have gone out and built successful careers and have enough extra money to spend of a weekend of peace, bonding, growth, healing, and great food — and you’re offended by that?
That’s what misogyny looks like, bro.
60
bingo
15
Wow, just wow. The commenters on here who are so derisive! You know what I see in all those put-down comments? Steadfastness, in a resolution that you should just get over it. Translation: stuffing feelings. And, too, upset around the fact that some people can pay to get a comfort weekend to spring-board them into healing. I can't it afford either! Sure, guys and gals and all of us in between, a weekend ain't gonna do it! But it will lead the hungry and the hurt to feel a connection and look into the journey to get them there, that place where healing is. Stop hating on the searching! And maybe you need a little searching, too. Just sayin'.
16
Dear NY Times you posted previously another article on the sex trafficking cult job. All these movements take a little bit of truth and from that you invest mostly your hard earned money for the cult leader's financial gain at your expense.
The two most effective healers are for free: time and distance.
3
I've dumped girlfriends and wives, and have BEEN dumped by both. In the former instances, I've felt an overwhelming wish to get out, for whatever reason, and usually there has been some hope of a better alternative. The women who've left me have also done so with a better person in view.
The mate on the losing end suffers a loss of self-esteem, and must find strategies to regain the hope that he or she is a good person, worthy of being loved again. This can be difficult.
As a man I wouldn't qualify for the "boot camp" described here, and I'm not sure I'd want to spend the money. Still, Molly Oswaks had tried lots of other remedies, and since she could afford it she was willing to try this one.
Since misery loves company, she could participate in intimate sharing with others who were going through the same kind of suffering as she - she was not alone. Secondly, she was offered a number of different ways to think about herself and her break-up - the spiritual, the psychological, the sexual, the mystical. It got her out of mental ruts she had dug for herself. Finally, the weekend was aimed at restoring her self-esteem, and with it her hope. A year's counsellng or psycho-therapy could easily have cost two or three times as much, so both are luxuries. Volunteering at a homeless shelter would teach her that hers is not the most miserable of conditions. Different people require different remedies. I can believe that for some, this could be an effective one.
15
I'll tell you who doesn't go to break up boot camps: the lucky guys who break up with such paragons of self indulgence and pity.
41
A real lack of compassion there. Perhaps you have never suffered real heartbreak. But these women have, and if this is helpful and it hurts no one else, why be cruel?
17
ditto!
2
Oh my! A very expensive "pity party". Staff includes a "professional dominatrix" and someone trained in "psychomagic"? Is this for real?
Yes, I HAVE been through a bad breakup - first with a college boyfriend who broke up with me and then married a close college friend, and a husband who left me for my best friend. I know what psychological pain is and how debilitating it can be.
But I also understand how to be a grown-up and how to allow the healing that comes from just getting on with ones life, can provide. Doing the laundry, grocery shopping, work - all these things help us move on as they simply must be done. And when I did need professional help, I hired a professional, not some "woo woo" bunch to help me and yes, it took far longer than a weekend in a glamping tent.
Only in the NYTImes and only among the affluent who apparently were raised by wolves as they appear to make more terrible decisions than one an even fathom being possible. The author's attempts a self-healing defy reality.
The "story of a breakup" can only be told so many times before ones friends and family tire of it. Surely, that should be motivation to move on, find others whose stories are far worse, and move beyond oneself.
This entire article screams "self-obsession". It's just so unattractive and dysfunctional.
46
A lot of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy vocabulary.
Maybe that’s what these ladies need, DBT. Certainly much more clinical than the expensive nonsense of this weekend retreat.
10
Who says they are ladies, RG? And who says "clinical" is what heals a broken heart? Indulge in some "nonsense," expensive or free, and see what it does for your heart. As Blaise Pascal wrote in his Penseés, "The heart has its reasons which reason does not know."
7
My ex dumped me by telephone after two years dating in January 2006. I had driven 600 miles roundtrip for her birthday to see her and gave her an expensive present (I was a student with no money). She waited until I got home on the Monday and made the call. She is a coward I still hate her guts and always will.
30
A friend of mine was dumped via text by her fiance just before their wedding. She found a load of huge bowling balls at a recycling facility, rented a pickup truck and hauled the balls to his house when he was at work, stacked them in his driveway for all the neighbors to see, so that he couldn't drive into his garage, put up a large sign which said: "Rob, now you have some balls." Took him a long time to get rid of the the bowling balls. We still laugh about this (she later married a fine fellow and has 3 wonderful children).
33
This is healthy and I endorse it!
6
Let it out, honey.
For those who can't afford luxurious bootcamp (though it sounds awfully nice) there's free solace and support in poems like Margaret Atwood's "you fit into me" and Michael Fried's "Somewhere a Seed" (for anger); Louise Bogan's "Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell" and Emily Dickinson's "After Great Pain" (for grief); Bogan's "Women" and Steve Kowit's "Cosmetics Do No Good" (for self-hatred); Pablo Neruda's "If You Forget Me" and Carolyn Creedon's "litany" (for false hope); Dorothy Parker's "Resumé" and Marie Ponsot's "One Is One" (and of course Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art") (for resolve); Georgia Douglas Johnson's "I Want to Die While You Love Me" and Edwin Morgan's "Strawberries" (for relapse); Jane Hirshfield's "Da Capo" and William Butler Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" (for real hope); and Mary Oliver's "In Blackwater Woods" and Miguel De Unamuno's "Throw Yourself Like Seed" (for moving on). (All from a little book from years ago, The Hell with Love.)
46
This operation is a catastrophe waiting to happen. Guests sleep outside in a tent heated with propane gas, yet there is little evidence of proper ventilation. Then again, that might be safer than sleeping in the house, given its faulty wiring. But, not to worry. The food is gluten free.
43
Can everyone who has a life, and that means everyone seems, be a life coach? What if you had a terrible life and had no clue why? What if you had a good life and had no clue why? What if the clues you had were wrong? Who decides that?
I would like to see some investigative journalism into the whole "life coach" movement. I have met two people who quickly handed out business cards with those words in the space where a typical profession would be listed. They were aggressivel selling their services; one had been a realtor and the other had been both a construction manager and a masseuse. I wonder if they trained each other.
29
Seems to me that the purpose of life coaches is to create more life coaches.
5
I respectfully disagree with the comments that pan the retreat, and my guess is that it is available also for men. The folks leading the BBC I think would not claim that in 52 hrs everything will be OK. But they do seem to offer tools and experiences that may well nudge a person in that direction. The comments that suggested this form of therapy is too "moon beams and namaste" were the most interesting to me. I have seen the bottom of the scientific/positivist pool and I can say that outlooks that purport to be strictly "scientific" are freighted with as many gratuitous assumptions as any perspective that is usually panned as "new age." I do wish opportunities like this were available to people who have limited financial resources, but that is not a reason to diss BBC and ignore the needs of people whose wealth obviously does not work as an immunity from the grief everyone experiences after failed relationships. Namaste and kindness everyone -
30
Thank you Rob. It's interesting how angry people are that there is a retreat for people who want to heal their hearts? I don't see anger being directed at yoga retreats (which is what I did after my breakup, and it was nice but not focused on the type of pain I was going through).
Heartbreak is a real thing. And we're not taught the tools for emotional regulation. This retreat is to provide a safe space, judgement free for people who are in a lot of pain, and be guided by different facilitators who are experts in what they do.
27
The hostility is directed to the expense, which these women can afford. Can you imagine this response to a piece about a group of hard-working male CEOs who go off to play golf at an expensive resort in order to decompress, bond with each other, and share friendship--even without the heartbreak piece? I doubt anyone would suggest that they should go do mission work in impoverished countries instead lol. As one male comments said, this is simple misogyny. These women are helping themselves and each other and there is nothing wrong with that.
5
Individual therapy can be helpful too, both in unpacking the event and building up self knowledge for future relationship.
13
I wish that every person on the planet had the opportunity to spend a stress-free weekend being cared for by others and allowed to explore and get support for healing emotional wounds. Think how much less acting-out and blaming there could be.
53
Validity is a function of belief, and if the author believes this weekend validated her (to the tune of about $1,500), then great for her. I guess those with broken hearts and spirits, but not with readily-disposable income, just have to be as miserable, happy, or "conscious" as they can afford. Maybe a few dinners with good friends, affordable food and affordable wine (no phones allowed) might work work as well, or better. Just sayin'.
24
Two words...."GROW UP". This "break up boot camp" idea is just silly
56
I wish as a man we had even a tenth of the emotional support available to women. A guy going through a bad breakup will get a "that sucks, bro, let me buy you a beer" and then he's left to carry his pain by himself.
101
Check out the comment of the person above you. These types of retreats are available to men, especially in our area. But hard-hearted, psychologically illiterate and envious folks are there to criticize, regardless of gender.
4
It seems that the only people who benefit long term from this are the property owners, Ms. Chan and her acolytes. They are taking advantage of people at their weak moments to sell them snake oil.
65
A bit too "woo woo" for my personality. But the essence of the author's discovery is the same as mine. I'd been trying to use other people as a means of emotional security, rather than learning how to find that within myself. A year of meeting with a good counselor has changed my life forever. I think a weekend like the one described is but a start to a new life of being honest with yourself.
23
I suggest volunteering at a homeless shelter or other community service organization will be more uplifting, and cheaper, for most people recovering from breakups than this "bootcamp."
72
It’s their money! Spend it as they wish!
1
Many years ago, I went through a very painful divorce when, the day our youngest son left for college, my wife of 25 years unexpectedly announced she was leaving.
I don't think two days of expensive hocus-pocus would have helped me very much. A lot of time did however, and now my ex and I get along fine.
56