Urban Recovery

Recover your authentic self and restore healthy intimacy in your relationships

A Four-Day Men’s Recovery Intensive

Dates: March 26 to March 29 2026

Location: Truth or Consequences, New Mexico

Facilitated by Liminal Intimacy LLC and Mark Pugsley, PhD, LCSW, CSAT

An intensive for men working toward recovery, integrity, and healthier intimacy.
Find your way back to yourself and back to authentic intimacy

Feet beneath three arrows pointing left, up, and right, representing choices.

Urban Recovery Program Overview

Urban Recovery is a four-day, in-person intensive for men who are ready to do deeper work around sexual behavior, intimacy, and relationship repair. During the retreat, you will look at how early attachment wounds and long-standing relationship patterns still shape your choices today, often without you realizing it. You will also explore how sexually compulsive behaviors often developed as ways to cope or protect yourself, even though they now block real connection and intimacy.


A central question we explore is: What is authentic intimacy — with yourself and with your partner?


Over four days, you will learn what healthy intimacy actually looks like and take practical steps toward building it in your daily life and relationships.

This retreat offers a strong, supportive space with other men facing similar struggles. Through guided exercises, group work, and reflection, you will gain clearer self-understanding, begin loosening old patterns, and create real movement toward healthier connection. This is about getting unstuck and opening a path toward honesty, intimacy, and meaningful relational change.

  • Understand your attachment patterns

  • Recognize what blocks intimacy

  • Develop skills to regulate your nervous system

  • Clarify what authentic intimacy really is

  • Reconnect with your authentic self

Urban Individuation

Separating from what no longer serves you

“Urban” refers to the fast, crowded, and overstimulating world many of us live in today — both online and in daily life. We are surrounded by noise, distraction, instant rewards, and constant pressure. This pace keeps the nervous system activated and often fuels dissatisfaction, comparison, impulsivity, and emotional intensity.


Urban also refers to the pace we live at inside our minds — the speed of our thoughts, urges, conditioning, internalized messages like shame, and our automatic reactions.


A key focus of this intensive is learning how to stay connected to yourself across different environments, both external and internal. You will practice slowing down, mindfulness, reducing sensory overload, noticing manipulation and distraction, delaying gratification, and choosing your response instead of reacting automatically.


These skills help you feel more grounded, regulate your nervous system, and stay present with yourself and others. Over time, this supports clearer desire, healthier boundaries, and more satisfying connection.


Place

The setting as a mirror

The retreat setting is part of the work. The pace of the town, the quiet, the closeness, the open space, and the hot springs all invite reflection. What you notice in the environment often mirrors what is happening inside you.


As the days unfold, you may notice irritation, anxiety, loneliness, desire, comparison, avoidance, hyper-alertness, or familiar coping patterns. These reactions are not problems. They are information about your nervous system, your protective habits, and your attachment history.


Throughout the intensive, you will pay attention to how your inner world meets the outer world. This helps you practice real contact — staying aware of yourself, aware of others, and aware of what is happening between you.


Challenge

Meeting yourself in real time

Over the four days, a personal challenge will show up — and that is expected. It may involve travel, lodging, food, fatigue, group dynamics, something said, or being triggered by another man. Rather than avoiding it, you will choose one challenge to work with directly.


The focus is not the challenge itself, but how you respond. This gives you a clear window into your coping patterns, protectors, and emotional habits.

You may notice patterns such as avoidance, entitlement, withdrawal, aggression, minimizing, overreacting, or familiar shame stories. With guidance, you will learn how to stay present, regulate yourself, and respond with awareness rather than reflex.


Your challenge becomes a teacher throughout the retreat, helping you build self-leadership instead of reactivity.


Authenticity

Connecting with your core self

Your compulsive or addictive behaviors are not your true self. They are coping strategies that developed over time. Many traditions describe the core self as something already present beneath the noise, defenses, and habits.


You can call it what you like — authentic self, true self, awareness, inner gold. It is not something you have to create. It is something you learn to notice and return to.


This intensive helps you see what blocks that connection: shame, self-sabotage, confusion, disconnection, rigid identities, or inflated self-images. As you reconnect with yourself, intimacy with others becomes more possible.


Authenticity grows when you can stay connected to yourself while also staying engaged with others, especially your partner.


Authentic Intimacy

Intimacy requires courage

This retreat is designed to interrupt cycles that undermine trust, intimacy, and connection. Many of these cycles once helped you survive, but now keep you stuck and disconnected.


A central focus of this intensive is uncovering what blocks intimacy and learning new ways to reconnect with yourself and with your primary relationship. Another focus is clarifying what authentic intimacy actually means, building a healthy foundation for intimacy, recognizing unconscious or ineffective patterns that interfere with connection, and learning practical ways to apply this understanding in everyday relational life.


The goal is not relationship perfection. It is ownership, presence, and awareness. Over time, this builds agency and intimacy in places where you may have previously shut down, acted out, or pulled away.


Urban Recovery is for men who want to live with greater integrity, clarity, and connection—within themselves and in their relationships.


Therapeutic Orientation

This intensive is grounded in an attachment-based, trauma-informed approach to recovery and intimacy. The work integrates relational attachment practice, parts-based work, mindfulness, and somatic awareness to help you understand how your nervous system, early relationships, and protective patterns shape your behavior and your capacity for connection. These approaches are applied in practical, experiential ways to support emotional regulation, honest self-contact, personal responsibility, and the development of healthier, more secure intimacy. The focus is not insight alone, but lived change that can be carried back into daily life and relationships.

Blue and orange vertical lines flanking a yellow circle on white background.

Five Key Takeaways from the Mens Retreat


  1. A clearer understanding of your attachment history
    You will understand how early relationships shaped your patterns of closeness, distance, and coping, and how these patterns continue to affect intimacy and connection today.

  2. Awareness of what blocks intimacy
    You will identify the habits, defenses, and emotional patterns that interfere with connection, including avoidance, distraction, and automatic responses you may not have recognized before.

  3. Practical tools for nervous system regulation
    You will learn ways to slow down, regulate emotional reactivity, and stay present with yourself and others, especially in moments that previously felt overwhelming or triggering.

  4. A clear understanding of authentic intimacy
    You will clarify what healthy, authentic intimacy looks like, learn to recognize unconscious or ineffective patterns, build a stronger foundation for connection, and put intimacy into practice in your relationships.

  5. A renewed connection to your authentic self
    You will reconnect with a more honest and integrated sense of self, supporting healthier choices, stronger relational integrity, and more meaningful intimacy in your relationships.

Who This Retreat Is For / Who It’s Not For



This Retreat Is For Men Who:


  • Are struggling with sexual compulsivity, avoidance, or relational disconnection

  • Feel stuck in patterns they want to understand and change

  • Are willing to slow down and look honestly at themselves

  • Want recovery rooted in responsibility, not shame

  • Are open to group work and relational learning

  • Are seeking healthier intimacy with themselves and their partners

This Retreat Is Not For Men Who:



  • Are looking for a quick fix or surface-level solution

  • Are unwilling to take responsibility for their behavior

  • Are currently in active crisis and need immediate stabilization

  • Are seeking a purely educational or lecture-style experience

  • Are not open to self-reflection or participating in a group process