Ketamine Assisted Couples Intensive Retreat - 11/7/2025 - 11/9/2025

The Porches Inn at Mass MoCA, MA

A 3 day Group Ketamine Retreat for Couples for connection and communication

Accelerate your relationship growth and evolution!

Sapience, in partnership with The Couples Center of Pioneer Valley, is offering this 3-day Couples intensive Retreat in The Berkshires, MA

This retreat is for couples who want to:

  • Rediscover play, connection and joy in their partnership through the exploration of the Ketamine space

  • Undertake honest confrontation of self and develop curiosity toward partner

  • Move through defensive blocks and well-rehearsed projections

  • Transcend narratives about what is possible for “us”

  • Grow new emotional muscle and empathy

Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) allows couples to support one another through a transformative healing process that can interrupt negative reactive patterns, increase personal accountability and enhance emotional intimacy in their partnership. In addition, KAP reduces trauma response, increases self-awareness and improves emotional regulation.

Using Ketamine has the powerful potential to create deeper and more rapid growth and healing in couples who have been stuck for some time. Sometimes described as a “lubricant” for the release of defensiveness and anxiety, Ketamine is a tool that can provide a steppingstone toward shifts that might otherwise take years to achieve.

The Couple’s Retreat includes more than 20 hours of interactive and experiential work for your relationship in a single retreat. Through didactic and experiential modules, and two Ketamine journeys, couples will learn to navigate the complex, vulnerable, and transformative terrain of emotional intimacy, and get to play and explore in the medicine. The Developmental Model of Couples Therapy is a powerful accompaniment to the facilitation of KAP. The model incorporates three main pillars: differentiation theory, attachment theory and neuroscience. The aim of the Developmental Model is to help each partner to understand the way that attachment, level of differentiation and hardwired conditioning are showing up in the ways they relate to each, both in the bedroom, and outside of it. 

By learning more adaptive defense strategies and flexing new emotional muscle around vulnerability, truth telling and boundary setting, many of the destructive cycles that create, exacerbate or maintain sexual difficulties, emotional separation and suffering are diminished.  Through Ketamine journeys, couples will learn to experience and express emotionally complex desires and feelings and hold space for their partners to do the same, enhancing the vitality in their connection.

The Developmental Model, coupled with medically administered Ketamine, allows each partner to more fully self-define and assess to what degree they are living in alignment with their own values, become vulnerable in the expression of their desires, identify defenses and choose more adaptive coping strategies to face their partner’s and their own feelings.

The Couples Retreat will be held at the cozy and historical Porches Inn, across from MASS MoCA, in North Adams, MA, a beloved destination for couples seeking a whimsical and warm getaway.  Porches has been welcoming couples to its beautifully detailed 19th Century Victorian row houses since its inception in 2001.  Couples will have a choice of eclectic accommodations and access to the Inn's amenities.  Retreat activities will take place in Studio 9, an intimate state of the art venue, situated on the Porches Inn campus.  

Join us for a deeply transformative journey.

Retreat Details

  • Dates: 11/7/2025 - 11/9/2025, a three day intensive

  • Location: The Couples Retreat will be held at the cozy and historical Porches Inn, across from MASS MoCA, in North Adams, MA, a beloved destination for couples seeking a whimsical and warm getaway.  Porches has been welcoming couples to its beautifully detailed 19th Century Victorian row houses since its inception in 2001.  Couples will have a choice of eclectic accommodations and access to the Inn's amenities.  Retreat activities will take place in Studio 9, an intimate state of the art venue, situated on the Porches Inn campus.

  • Number of Couples: Our retreat is intended to be an intimate group experience, and we are limiting participation to 11 eligible couples

  • Sessions: Two Ketamine sessions, one low dose session done together, and one moderate-high dose, with partners holding space and witnessing for one another

Cost:

  • Non-refundable application fee: $200 per couple

  • Medical and psych evaluation: $550 per couple

  • Retreat Intensive: $3,300 per couple

  • Room and board is not included. Porches is an historical inn and has beautiful accommodations; attendees at this retreat can receive 10% off of their stay by calling and asking for the “Sapience Therapy” discount for this weekend. There are also several other boutique inns in town.

Cancellation policy:

Application fee is non-refundable. Full payment is due at the time of receiving an acceptance email and confirming your spot in the retreat. A 50% refund may be requested if cancelling 60 days prior to the retreat start date. Please note all fees are non-refundable beyond this date.

Cancellation due to Covid-19 or other medical emergencies: Please provide appropriate documentation for cancellation in the event of a medical emergency/Covid-19 infection for a refund. Refunds will be considered on a case-by-case basis

Covid-19 policy: Participants will be expected to perform a rapid covid test at home within 24 hours of arrival.

  • Donna Gilman, Psy.D. is a clinical psychologist and Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Couples Center of the Pioneer Valley, a comprehensive specialty treatment center serving couples regionally, nationally and internationally. She specializes in couples therapy, with concentrations in trauma-informed treatment, sex therapy, neurodiverse partnerships, affair recovery, non-monogamy, psycho-spiritual integration and LGBTQIA issues.

    Dr. Gilman has taught advanced couples therapy, trained and supervised clinicians and clinical interns in private and community practice, graduate academic settings, and through an appointment with Tufts University, since 1995.

    Although Ellyn Bader’s Developmental Model of Couples Therapy is the predominant model from which Dr. Gilman works, she integrates strategies from several models, including Internal Family Systems, Gottman, EFT, solution-focused and narrative therapy. She also integrates mindfulness-based techniques and is trained in clinical hypnosis and the integration of spirituality counseling. The majority of her clinical work today takes place in private and group retreat spaces.

    Dr. Gilman is passionate about the facilitation and integration of Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) with couples and individuals. She has completed KAP training with Sapience in Greenfield and has witnessed first hand the incredible healing that Ketamine can provide. In addition to reducing trauma response, increasing self awareness and improving affect regulation in individuals, KAP allows couples to support one another through a transformative healing process that can interrupt negative reactive patterns, eliminate gridlock, increase personal accountability and enhance emotional and sexual intimacy in their partnership.

    Specialization in Trauma Treatment

    In addition to KAP, Dr. Gilman is well versed in several trauma-informed and energy psychology modalities to transform and release trauma, such as Emotional Freedom Technique, Emotional Trauma Release, Somato-Emotional Release, Psychodrama and Gestalt work.

    Couples and Sexuality

    Dr. Gilman has a passion for working with couples around emotional and sexual functioning and intimacy, incorporating the three main pillars of the Developmental Model, differentiation theory, attachment theory and neuroscience. It is her goal to help couples navigate the complex, vulnerable and transformative, terrain of emotional and sexual intimacy issues.

    She views emotional and sexual intimacy as different sides of the same coin, and understands that while most adults long for greater connection, few have the emotional muscle necessary to create and sustain intimacy. She sees her role as helping each partner to more fully self define, including assessing to what degree each partner is living in alignment with his/her/their own values, become more vulnerable in the expression of their wants needs and desires, learn to emotionally accept and manage difference, set and maintain boundaries, identify defenses, lower their reactivity, regulate their anxiety, and choose more adaptive coping strategies in order to face his/her/their own and their partner's feelings.

  • Karen Scott, MD is passionate about the promise of psychedelic medicines to help people find psychological healing and facilitate personal and spiritual growth. She is board certified in internal medicine with 20 years of clinical practice experience, including working in hospital medicine as well as addiction treatment. She has post-graduate training in ketamine assisted psychotherapy, psychedelic integration therapy, and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and holds a certificate in psychedelic therapies and research from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Dr. Scott believes that all people have within them the capacity for wholeness, and that access to this innate healing capacity can be facilitated by the use of consciousness technologies including (but not limited to) psychedelic medicines.

    Dr. Scott is a long time practitioner of meditation, and holds with reverence the knowledge that all life is an interconnected whole. She aspires to embody integrity and compassion in all her actions. She believes that our natural state prior to trauma and adversity is inner peace, and that it is the birthright of all people to experience this peace in daily life

  • Founder of Sapience Therapy LLC. Practicing Internal Medicine Physician. Trained in Ketamine assisted psychotherapy. Graduate of Center of psychedelic therapy and research program at California Institute of Integral Studies. Passionate about education and research in the field of psychedelic medicine. Focused in studying the neurophysiology and neuropharmacology of psychedelics.

    She is the principal investigator in the first large scale KAP data project, studying safety, efficacy and treatment outcomes in multiple ketamine clinics across the country. She is a Yoga Alliance certified teacher of vinyasa and restorative yoga and is trained in trauma informed yoga. She holds a certificate in ayurvedic nutrition, mind-body medicine and guided imagery. Her focus in healing is aligning body, mind and spirit through holistic nutrition, movement, rituals and grounding.