The Money Shift: A Therapist Retreat in Belize
6 days on the Caribbean coast, up to 10 CE hours, and a real look at your own money story. You'll fly home with a clinical framework you can use on Monday and a practice that runs differently because you do.
Registration is open. $600 holds your room, and you build your own payment plan from there.
Hold your roomNot sure yet? Let's talk it through. Schedule a free 15 minute call.
February, as usual
The office, the gray light, the space heater under your desk.
You've got a CE course open in another tab that you're half watching between sessions, on a topic you picked because it was cheap and it counted.
You'll click through the post test. You'll file the certificate. And nothing about your practice, or your week, or your life will be any different on the other side of it.
Or, February looks like this
You leave your house in the morning, and your toes are in the sand by the afternoon.
Someone else carries your bag, makes your meals, and washes your towels. Mornings are the most interesting subject you've never been taught. Afternoons are the reef, or new friends at the pool, or finally reading the book that's been sitting on your nightstand collecting dust.
Dinner is with people who already know exactly what it feels like to be a therapist and an entrepreneur, so you never once have to explain it. You just get to share stories and laugh, because we all understand.
Same month. Same CE requirements. Wildly different outcomes.
Why have a therapist retreat about money?
Let's be honest, money is one of the most interesting topics in the room. It's what people lower their voices for at dinner, and the question everyone wants to ask and nobody quite does. It's a little mysterious, a little taboo, a little complicated, and psychologically fascinating.
You see it constantly in the therapy room:
- The client who hasn't opened a bank statement in four months, knows exactly which drawer they're in, and avoids that drawer like the plague.
- The one who learned that a gift is what you get in lieu of an apology. Of course they love you. Just look at what they got you.
- The client who grew up in poverty, makes a very nice income now, and feels out of place in both worlds.
- The client who can't leave their affluent partner, and can't tell you whether it's the money or the fact that his contempt feels exactly like home.
- The workaholic who's about to drop, because they believe rest is earned and nobody will love them if they aren't providing.
- The couple still tiptoeing around the secret credit cards that wrecked the marriage. It feels like infidelity, but can they really call it that?
- The client having panic attacks in the middle of the best year of their life, because stability has never once been safe.
And if you work with affluent clients, you already know money is tangled into the attachment work. It runs through couples sessions and family of origin work and it almost never gets named as money.
And nobody trained you to look for it. There was never a class for this, and there still mostly isn't. But there it is, in almost every client you're working with.
So how are you supposed to work with something in a client that nobody ever taught you to look at in yourself? I'm so glad you asked, because that's exactly what this week is meant to do.
Who flies home
The ten CE hours are important, but they're also the easiest thing to describe about this week.
What's harder to explain is what happens in your body when something you want requires you to want it out loud. That moment shows up all the time in private practice:
- Saying your fee without immediately offering a reduced rate.
- Launching the offer that's been sitting in a Google Doc since 2023.
- Hiring someone. Signing a lease.
- Turning down the referral source that pays badly and takes forever.
- Raising a rate on a client you've had for six years.
- Enforcing a late cancellation policy.
- Charging for the thing you've been giving away because it's easier than explaining why it's worth money.
Aren't you tired of that? The little freeze that happens when you go to make the move, the pang of anxiety that hits when you do it anyway, the way we can feel so stuck sometimes without even knowing why. Yeah… that's what this week is for.
No more guessing about "why." You'll leave with a different understanding of your own money beliefs, the ability to recognize them in your clients, and, most importantly, you'll finally be able to do something about it.
Hold your roomWho goes on therapist retreats?
More people than you'd guess, and for more reasons than you'd guess.
Some go because the CE hours are coming due anyway, and spending them in a hotel conference room in February stopped making sense a while ago. Some go because they're running on fumes and a long weekend hasn't touched it in three years. Some go for the room itself, to sit with people who set their own fees and finally stop feeling like the only one asking these questions out loud. And some go because they want one week they can point at later and say that's when it turned.
If you want the longer version of that, I wrote about who goes on therapist retreats and why.
This one draws a particular mix.
Maybe money is the thing you find most interesting in the room, and you've wanted a real framework for it since the first client who cried about a credit card.
Maybe money is the thing that makes your own stomach drop, and you've been avoiding your numbers about as well as your clients avoid theirs.
Or maybe you saw Belize, and the CE hours, and a room of your own, and thought yes, that, in February.
Whatever brought you here, you're in the right room, and not one of those is the wrong reason to come.
Here's who it isn't for. If what you want is the most CE hours for the least money, this isn't that, and I'd point you somewhere else, because you can get twenty hours online for a fraction of this. What you're buying here is ten hours you'll actually remember, four afternoons that belong to you, and a room of under twenty people who set their own fees.
What a day at this therapist retreat looks like
Mornings
Breakfast is open from 7:00, and training runs 9:00 to 11:45 with a break. It's experiential, so you're trying the material on yourself while you learn it. Day one you take a formal money script assessment, which gives the rest of the week something specific to work on instead of a vague sense that money is complicated.
Afternoons
Lunch at noon, then the day is yours until dinner. The only things ever on the calendar after lunch are pool hours and the Garifuna cooking class, one afternoon each, and both optional.
Evenings and nights
Dinner around 7pm with a table of people working on the same things you are. Then a journal and a prompt each evening, built to follow whatever came up that morning. No CE credit attached, nobody collects it, and it's where a lot of the actual movement happens.
Ten contact hours across four mornings, and four afternoons that belong to you. If you've ever sat through a six hour training day in a hotel ballroom, that ratio is the whole point. A typical day. Exact times are confirmed in your welcome packet.
Pool hours
For those of you looking to expand your business and not just your caseload, here's the thing: you have to get yourself into the room. Not the webinar, or the podcast episode, or liking the video of the person you follow. The actual physical room, with people who are already doing the thing you're trying to do, close enough that you can ask them how.
Here's why this works. Your brain has been collecting evidence for years about what's realistic for someone like you, and almost all of it came from watching people in the same position you're in. Or worse, you've been absorbing the fear and panic that sweeps through the therapist Facebook groups every few weeks telling you the sky is falling and to brace for impact.
Now, sit next to someone charging what you've been afraid to charge, and the argument stops being theoretical. That quiet dream you've been scared to say out loud stops feeling impossible. Your brain starts thinking yes, where before it was saying no.
Some of you are coming partly because of how my practice is built, and that's not a thing you have to be coy about once you're here. Some of you have no idea how it's built, so let me fill you in.
My practice runs 10am to 3:30pm, two to three days a week, roughly nine to twelve client hours, all private pay, six figures, and it stays booked solid even though I only offer sessions of ninety minutes and up. I built it that way deliberately, over years of testing, including the parts that didn't work. The practice itself is at Good EMDR Therapy, which will tell you more about how I think than a paragraph here can.
So ask what you actually want to ask. What to charge. How to fill a caseload at a real fee. Whether to leave the group practice. What going private pay actually costs and how long the thin months last. That's what pool hours are for. One afternoon, two hours, at the pool, set aside to absorb all of it.
Booking two hours with me runs $800. Here it's an afternoon in the water with a drink, and it's already inside what you paid.
See the rooms and prices
You will not think about food once
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are covered for all five days at Limilia, the resort's restaurant, with indoor and outdoor seating. Seafood forward, built on Garifuna recipes, with produce out of the resort's own organic garden. Coconut and tamarind, chimichurri and cacao.
Which means you won't decide where to eat, or when, or whether a group of adults can agree on somewhere. That decision is gone for the entire week. You can finally just focus on you.
Vegan, vegetarian, gluten free, and allergy needs are accommodated. Note them at registration and they reach the kitchen before you land.
Why this therapist retreat is in Belize
Because the travel should be the easiest part of the week, and for most of you it's the part you're actually dreading.
English is the official language, so you won't spend the week working around a language barrier. US dollars are accepted everywhere. There are direct flights from major US airports to Belize City, then a short 30 minute domestic hop to the resort. It's Central Standard Time, year round, so your body clock doesn't shift at all.
One travel day in, one travel day out. That's it.
What if leaving is the part that scares you?
So here's a thing that doesn't usually make it onto a sales page. For a lot of you, the money isn't the blocker at all. It's the passport, the childcare, the six days, and the person at home who's going to have to run the entire operation without you.
That stops more people from registering than the price does, and I'd rather say it out loud than pretend it isn't sitting there.
Belize is my answer to it. I won't book anything that takes me more than 8 hours away from my kid, so this whole retreat got designed with those boundaries in mind, because I know other parents are feeling it too.
And the first time I left the country without my kid was a therapist retreat in Costa Rica. Four hours through the jungle just to reach the airport. An eco lodge in the rainforest, snakes and bugs, hiking boots, nobody looking cute for a single minute of it. I was completely certain I'd be a wreck the whole time.
What actually happened is that for six days, nobody needed anything from me. Count the hours in your normal week where nothing is being asked of you. If it isn't a client it's a spouse, and if it isn't a spouse it's a kid, and somewhere underneath all of it is the business, which is the neediest one of all if you're building toward something bigger than what you've got now. Moms and my fellow neurodivergents, I cannot stress this one enough.
Then there's the part nobody warns you about. Your brain gets quiet enough that the good ideas come back, usually at dinner or somewhere near the pool, and you fly home with things you weren't even looking for. When I started going on therapist retreats, leaving all of that behind, I found myself again and I also found some great friends. I want that for you too.
Talk it through with me firstAbout your retreat host, Jessica Good
EMDRIA Approved Consultant · Trauma of Money Certified
Member, Financial Therapy Association
Money used to terrify me. Not in an abstract way, either. My parents built a fortune and lost all of it, and by my twenties I was broke enough to skip medical care when I needed it. The scripts I picked up in that house ran the show for years before it ever occurred to me to go looking for them.
So here's the thing about doing that digging. Once you can see where the scripts came from, you get to decide whether you're keeping them. Money went from something I braced against to something that funds the life I actually want, and that life now includes getting on a plane a few times a year, because it turns out retreats are one of the better things a person can spend money on.
And I go to a lot of them. Enough to have strong opinions about what makes one worth the flight, and what makes one a long week in a hot room next to a stranger you just met. This one is built from every single one of those opinions.
What people say about working with me
The retreat runs for the first time in February. The work inside it isn't new, and neither is what tends to happen to people's fees and to what they believe they're allowed to charge.
“Jessica helped me confront and challenge the negative beliefs that many therapists hold about running a business... I now feel more empowered to own my role as a therapist and a confident business owner.”Crystal Colbourn · Registered Psychotherapist, Ontario
“Jessica helped me to organize my thoughts and, importantly, stop underselling myself... The process felt forward-moving, clarifying, and absolutely worth my time.”Tiffany Thomas, LMHC · Iowa
Is a therapist CE retreat a business expense?
Most likely, yes. If you own your practice, or you work as a 1099 contractor, you run a business, and continuing education is generally a business expense. Your accountant will tell you exactly how that applies to your return, and nothing on this page is tax advice.
You'll have a timed agenda and your CE certificate, which is the part that does the proving, and your payment records already say what they were for.
Now, one thing worth knowing before you pick your payment dates. If you're on cash basis, whatever you pay in 2026 lands in your 2026 books, so finishing your plan in December keeps the whole thing in this year.
Which also means you're not spending that week after Christmas hunting for something to buy just so the year closes out right. Your accountant will tell you how it applies to your situation.
What the retreat price covers
- Up to 10 CE hours of programming
- Six days and five nights at Itz’ana Resort
- Breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day
- Ground transfer between the Placencia airstrip and the resort
- The Garifuna cooking class
- Welcome reception and farewell dinner
- Air conditioned workshop space
- Two hours of open consulting at pool hours
Coming in early or staying on? Your group room rate is held for extra nights on either side of the retreat, so extending doesn't cost you resort rack rate.
What you buy separately
- Your flights
- Travel insurance
- Your bar tab
- Spa treatments
- Excursions you add on
- Nights you stay past the retreat
None of it is required to get everything the week is built to give you.
You are allowed to want this
Honey, you need a break. As therapists and entrepreneurs we are constantly giving to other people. Our time, our energy, our attention, and often our money. We don't flinch at spending thousands on a training as long as it's in service to our clients, and then something comes along that gives back to us too, and suddenly there's a whole debate about it.
You are allowed to want this for you too.
And what this actually competes with isn't a cheaper retreat. It's another February exactly like the last one, and that February isn't free either. It costs you a year of the same.
Pick your room.
Every price below covers the whole retreat, and every one of them is for a room of your own. No roommate, no shared bathroom, and nobody sleeping four feet away.
Deluxe Room
A private terrace and daybed of your own, steps from the pool, the beach, and the workshop space.
Beachfront Suite
King bed, a separate living area, and a wrap-around terrace so the view follows you. Light fills it all morning.
One Bedroom Villa
Your own deck, your own plunge pool, a full kitchen, and complete privacy. And if booking it makes you flinch, bring the flinch, because that's exactly the work.
The villa costs less here than it does from the resort
Yep, that's right.
Booking this exact villa for these exact nights straight through the resort costs more than booking it through the retreat. Same villa, same dates, and none of what comes with it.
Your rate includes every meal, your airport transfers, the air conditioned workshop space, the Garifuna cooking class, pool hours, and up to 10 CE hours. Their rate only includes the room.
Flights, your bar tab, spa treatments, and any excursions beyond the cooking class are yours. Everything the retreat runs on is already paid for.
Your person can come with you
You don't have to spend six days on the Caribbean coast in February while the people you love are home in the gray.
A guest shares your room and joins every meal, the welcome reception, the Garifuna cooking class, and every open afternoon, for $2,500. No CE credit, because they're not there for the CE. They're there because you should get to have the reef, the long dinners, and the person you like most sitting across from you at one of them.
There's one exception, and it's the next section down. If the person you're bringing isn't sharing a bed with you, the two bedroom villa gives them a bedroom of their own, and a guest there is $3,995.
Guests can be added up to thirty days before the retreat, so this isn't a decision you have to make today.
Bringing someone you don't want to share a bed with?
Most retreats give you two options, which are a room to yourself or a stranger four feet away. So if the person you'd actually want to bring is your sister, or your grown kid, or a friend who is not sharing a bed with you under any circumstances, there has usually been nowhere to put them.
The two bedroom villa is that place. It's beachfront, 3,375 square feet, with two bedrooms at opposite ends, each with its own bathroom, and an open living room and full kitchen in between. There's a plunge pool out on the beachfront deck and a lap pool in the private interior garden. Two bedrooms, two pools, and plenty of room to not be on top of each other.
You each register separately, and you each earn your own CE hours. Sort out between yourselves who takes which end of the villa.
Your guest takes the second bedroom. Every meal, the welcome reception, the cooking class, the farewell dinner, and the open afternoons are theirs. No teaching mornings and no CE hours, because that's the part they're not here for.
Booking this villa straight from Itz'ana for these exact nights runs $2,309 a night before tax, which is roughly $13,700 for the week, room only. The two of you together pay $9,290, and every meal, the transfers, the cooking class, and the CE hours are already in it.
If sharing a room works fine for the two of you, the $2,500 guest add-on above is the simpler way to do it. This one is for when it doesn't. There's one villa like this, and it goes to whoever claims it first.
Bringing more than one person? Send me a note before you register and we'll figure it out.
Claim the villaWhat your money scripts are saying right now
You just looked at a number, and your nervous system said something back. That happens in under a second, and most of the time it doesn't feel like a belief. It feels like a fact.
Those beliefs sort into a few broad patterns. Brad Klontz and his colleagues named them in their research on money scripts, and taking that assessment is how you start day one. Three of them do almost all of the talking when someone hesitates on booking.
Money vigilance won't let you spend it. You saw the number and you were already out, before you'd checked whether your business could carry it easily, which for a lot of you it can, with or without a payment plan. Vigilance doesn't run that math, because running it might come back yes. You built the practice, but you never actually let yourself enjoy the success of the practice.
Money avoidance hasn't run the numbers at all. You don't actually know whether you can afford this, and underneath that there's usually a sentence that goes something like "I couldn't be the type of person who does something like that." Meanwhile there have been fifty other things this year that got paid for without a second thought and gave you nothing back. You want the next level and you can't work out why you're stuck. Those two facts are related, and that's the most fixable thing on this list, because it starts with information you already have.
Money worship hesitates over what the week itself would cost. Not the tuition, the days. The sessions you won't hold, the revenue that won't come in while you're gone. There's always one more thing that would move the needle faster than resting would. When more is always the answer, six days off reads like a cost.
Some of those reasons are real, by the way. Some of you have a genuinely tight month, or a household where this isn't the right use of the money right now, and neither of those people is wrong about anything. A script and a real constraint will say the exact same sentence out loud.
The difference is what happens when you check. A constraint holds up when you run the actual numbers. A script gets quieter, or a lot louder, and either way it doesn't want you to look.
So look. That's the whole ask. If the number doesn't work you'll know inside of ten minutes, and you'll know for a reason you can name. And if it does work, you'll have found that out too.
Let's just talk about it
Some of you are going to read this entire page and still not know, and that's a completely normal way to feel about a decision this size. Usually it isn't the retreat you're stuck on. It's your February, your caseload, your household, and whether this is your year.
So take fifteen minutes and let's talk about it. No pitch, no pressure, no follow up sequence, and I'm not going to sell you a room over a video call because that's not how I like to work.
And if it turns out this isn't your year, I'll tell you that, and I'll tell you what I'd do instead if I were you.
Book 15 minutesTherapist retreat program information
Contact hours
Up to 10, pending NBCC approval and APA co-sponsorship through the Advanced Mental Health Training Institute
Presenter
Jessica Good, MA, LPC. EMDRIA Approved Consultant, Trauma of Money Certified, and a member of the Financial Therapy Association.
Target audience
Licensed clinicians, whether you own a practice or work as a 1099 contractor. Non-licensed practitioners welcome without CE credit.
Format
In person. Four teaching mornings, 9:00 to 11:45 with a break, 2.5 contact hours each. The only scheduled items after that are pool hours and the Garifuna cooking class, both optional.
Group size
Under 20, with a private room for every attendee
Dates and place
February 21–26, 2027. Itz'ana Resort, Placencia, Belize.
Tuition
$4,295 to $5,795 per person, covering lodging, all meals, programming, and CE hours.
Cancellation
Deposit non-refundable. Full terms in the Registration Agreement.
Extending your stay
Your group room rate is held for extra nights on either side of the retreat.
Approvals will be named here the moment they're confirmed in writing.
Therapist CE retreat FAQ
Is a therapist CE retreat a business expense?
Most likely, if you own a practice or work as a 1099 contractor, because continuing education is generally a business expense. You'll have a timed agenda and your CE certificate for your records, and your payment receipts already describe what they were for. Check with your own tax advisor for your situation.
How many CE hours do you get, and how do they work?
Ten contact hours, earned as 2.5 hours across each of the four teaching mornings. Approval is in progress, and this page will name the approvals the moment they're confirmed in writing.
How much time do I need to take off work?
One week out of the office. The retreat runs Sunday through Friday, and some attendees add days on either end at the group rate.
What does a day at the retreat look like?
Breakfast from 7:00, training 9:00 to 11:45, lunch at noon, and dinner around 7pm. Between lunch and dinner the only scheduled items all week are pool hours and the Garifuna cooking class, both optional.
Will I have to share personal things in front of the group?
No. Depth is invited and never required. The experiential work happens on paper, in your own head, and in pairs if you want it. Plenty of people say very little all week and still leave with the thing they came for.
Can I come alone if I don't know anyone?
Most people do, and the group is small enough that it stops feeling that way somewhere around the first dinner.
What if leaving the country is the part that scares me?
That stops more people than the price does. Belize is the answer I built to it, and there's a whole section above on why I picked it and what happened the first time I left the country myself.
What if money is not my sore spot?
Then you'll get more out of the clinical half than most people in the room. Being comfortable with your own money isn't the same as having a map for someone else's.
Can I split a room with a friend?
Yes, and they don't have to be a clinician. The two bedroom villa is beachfront, 3,375 square feet, with a bedroom at each end and a plunge pool on the deck plus a lap pool in the interior garden. Two clinicians is $5,295 each and you each earn your own CE hours. A clinician plus a non-CE guest is $5,295 and $3,995. Either way, nobody is sharing a bed.
Who else will be in the room?
Private practice owners and 1099 contractors who set their own fees and are done playing small. People actively deciding what to charge, what to build, and what to stop doing. Under twenty of them, which is small enough that you'll know everyone by the second dinner.
Is the meeting space air conditioned, and is there wifi?
Yes to both, in the rooms and in the workshop space. Worth asking of any retreat you're considering, and worth checking that the answer covers the room you'll be learning in.
Can I bring someone who is not a clinician?
Yes. They share your room and join every meal, the welcome reception, the cooking class, and every open afternoon, for $2,500. In the two bedroom villa a guest gets a bedroom of their own rather than a share of yours, so that one is $3,995. No CE credit either way, and guests can be added up to thirty days before the retreat.
Can I come early or stay on afterward?
Yes. Your group room rate is held for extra nights on either side of the retreat, so extending doesn't cost you resort rack rate. Those nights are billed to you directly and aren't part of the retreat price.
Do I need to book flights before I register?
No. Your $600 deposit holds your specific room. Fly into Belize City, then a short hop to Placencia, and the resort collects you at the airstrip.
Do I need travel insurance?
Yes. Travel insurance is required for every attendee, which is why it's a condition of registration rather than a suggestion.
Can dietary restrictions be accommodated?
Yes. The resort accommodates vegan, gluten free, vegetarian, and other restrictions or allergies. Note it on your registration form so it reaches the culinary team.
Is the venue wheelchair accessible? Will there be stairs?
The property has stairs and uneven, sandy terrain throughout, and it isn't wheelchair accessible. If mobility is a concern, reach out before you register and we'll talk it through.
What is the cancellation policy?
Cancel within seven days of registering and you owe nothing beyond the deposit. After that, a cancellation fee applies on a schedule tied to the retreat date. The full terms are in the Registration Agreement.
How do I pay, and can I spread it out?
A $600 deposit holds your specific room. After that you build your own payment plan and finish it by December 15, so the earlier you register the more months you have to spread it across. Paying the balance in full instead takes 5% off. If you're on cash basis, finishing in December also keeps the whole expense in your 2026 books.
Still have a question? Email me or book a free 15 minute call.
So which February are you having?
$600 holds your room, and your payment plan finishes December 15.
Hold your roomOr book a free 15 minute call first.
Ask me anything.
Dates, CE hours, payment plans, bringing a guest, whatever is on your mind. Send it over and you will hear back from me, not a bot.