Meet Yourself with New Eyes

Most of us are carrying more than we know. The persistent self-criticism. The physical symptoms that won’t resolve. The emotional patterns that repeat no matter how hard you work on yourself. The relationships that keep hitting the same walls. The sense that something is fundamentally wrong with you.

These are not character flaws. They are not failures of willpower or insight. In most cases, they are the unmistakable footprints of trauma—and they will not yield to approaches that don’t recognize them as such.

In this immersive retreat, author and teacher David Bedrick will guide you through a trauma-informed lens that changes everything. Drawing on 40 years of working with individuals and training practitioners worldwide, he’ll show you how trauma—and specifically the shame that grows in its wake—is the hidden root of our most persistent struggles, and how addressing it at that root opens the door to genuine, lasting transformation.

Trauma is not only what happens in moments of acute crisis. It lives in the inner critic that won’t quiet down. It lives in the body—in chronic tension, fatigue, and symptoms that defy diagnosis. It lives in the way we abandon ourselves in relationships, or the way we can’t quite trust our own perceptions. It lives in the shame that tells us our pain is our fault, our needs are too much, our authentic self is too risky to show.

When we learn to see these experiences through a trauma lens, something shifts. We stop fighting ourselves and start listening.

In this program, you’ll explore:

• How trauma forms, and why it’s the absence of compassionate witnessing, not just the original wound, that causes the deepest harm.
• Why shame is trauma’s most enduring legacy, and how unshaming dissolves what no amount of self-improvement can reach.
• How the body holds what the mind has had to push aside, and how to work with its signals safely and respectfully.
• How inner criticism, emotional reactivity, and physical symptoms are often trauma speaking—not problems to eliminate, but messengers to understand.
• How dissociation, fawning, and self-abandonment make sense as trauma responses, and what it looks like to honor rather than pathologize them.
• How trauma, when met with the right kind of witnessing, can reveal hidden gifts, clarify life purpose, and flower into your most authentic self.

Walk away with:

• A trauma-informed framework for understanding your own persistent struggles—physical, emotional, and relational.
• Practical skills for working with shame, inner criticism, and the body’s intelligence.
• A deeper capacity to witness yourself and others with the kind of compassion that actually heals.
• A lived sense of what becomes possible when trauma is met with understanding rather than judgment.

This retreat is for therapists, coaches, healers, and somatic practitioners who want a richer, more ethical trauma-informed foundation. It is also open to anyone—practitioner or not—who recognizes their own struggles in this program description and is ready to meet themselves through the transforming lens of trauma awareness and unshaming.