the heart as it is | courage • grief • beauty

I meant to make a post about this for a while and since then, Onsite Workshops has even re-branded its name to ‘Experience Onsite’. This post has been a long time coming and is a post about how I ended up participating in Onsite’s Healthy Love and Relationships workshop in May 2022. From time to time, I talk with people here and there about my amazing experience at Onsite’s campus right outside of Nashville, TN, and maybe this post can be a resource to those who are thinking about participating, because it is 10000% worth it (I realize this post may also be an ongoing one, as I slowly remember things here and there when thinking about my time at Onsite)

The very first time I heard about Onsite workshops was through a John Crist video on YouTube sometime in the late 2010’s, where he shared that he went because being a comedian negatively affects his mental health at times. I looked into it and thought it seemed really cool, but after I saw the price, I didn’t look at it again for a while.

Fast-forward to the early 2022’s where I came out of a really unhealthy relationship, and I could not figure out for the life of me why I kept choosing unhealthy and emotionally unavailable men to be dating. I had been mentored by a dating coach (Rachel Sherill at The True Feminine) here and there and through one of her initial groups, and on her podcast, she featured another podcaster and author, Kait Warman. Kait wrote a book called “Thank You for Rejecting Me: Transform Pain into Purpose” – which I read twice – and there’s a section in that book where she also shared about her experience with Onsite.

From there, I started doing as much research as I could about Onsite for about a couple of weeks. I looked around their website, sent emails and had calls with someone on their administrative team, prayed about it, asked mentors and friends for their thoughts and asked them to pray with me, looked at reviews – all the stuff. I did all this research very intentionally because the cost for me to go was $6,400 for one week: boarding, therapy, materials, food all included, but that is a LOT of money (I want to be transparent and share here that Onsite has also raised their prices since then). I realized, however, that everything that I had been doing that I thought would heal me was not working with regards to my relational health – church community, monthly talk therapy, Bible studies, 12 step groups, etc… Granted, all those things are still very important to me and I still have some of those, but it was not enough. I needed an expert’s help if I wanted to move on in not only my dating life, but also improve my relationship to myself, so in January, I went ahead and pulled out money from savings to pay for a spot in their May 2022 workshop.

I flew in on a Wednesday, and amazingly, Onsite has a shuttle where they can take about 20-ish (maybe more) people from the Nashville airport to their Cumberland Furnace campus. I believe the shuttle only ran a few times a day between the airport, as the site is about an hour away from the airport. The drive was absolutely beautiful, as we drove through the deep countryside of Tennessee to get to the lovely Onsite campus.

Once everyone was finally there, there was a quick announcement about how to get keys to our cabins and things like that. The check-in process was very organized and I was very impressed. However, we also did have to turn in every single electronic device we had. I only had to turn in my phone, some people had to turn in tablets, laptops, and smart watches as well. Thankfully, we were notified of all this ahead of time so I brought along a regular watch. Onsite provides alarm clocks in every bedroom (something funny that people did was if they didn’t have a watch, they brought along their alarm clocks with them). Everyone got a card with a lanyard on it, as well as the key to their cabin (which were VERY nice, it felt like luxurious camping in the woods, basically). Something to note about Onsite is that they are intentional about placing roommates together – with a max of 3 roommates. Additionally, the 3 roommates would not be in the same therapy groups together. I was in my late 20’s when I attended onsite, and my roommates were quite some years older than me, but I actually appreciated that because I am pretty introverted and liked to sleep early when I was there, especially due to the jet lag (of two hours). There was some other orientation later that evening I think, as well as a review of how the week will go, where and when to get food, etc… (side note about the food: all the food was amazing ! And they will literally accommodate any food restrictions and preferences – that was quite impressive)

For the next five days we would have a lecture in the morning – with usually things about attachment theory, and then we would all split up into our groups. My group was co-ed, which I was not very comfortable with in the beginning as I’m not used to doing therapy with men, but I later really appreciated their presence very much and they were vital to my healing.

Our first day of therapy was a lot of getting to know our group mates and our therapist. We did some things that reminded me of what I would do in grade school when I was the VIP (i.e., making a poster of myself and presenting it to the class). Per our therapist’s direction, we made a list of what constitutes a ‘safe space’ for us, as that term is being thrown around a lot and we wanted to solidify what that actually looked like. I don’t remember doing very intensive therapy that day, but we did start go deep and share some of the moments that brought us a lot of trauma, including the moments where we all realized we needed to come to Onsite.

For our second day to last day of therapy, a lot of the experiential therapy started. Basically, how that works is that someone in our group would work through a particular traumatizing moment in their life with the therapist, or work through a relationship to anyone in their life. The rest of the group may stand in to represent someone or something in the person’s life, such as a parent, sibling, partner, emotion, higher power, concept, etc… The helpfulness of the group being co-ed and of different ages really helped at this point, as it was helpful for all of us, for example, for an older male to play our father and an older female to play our mother – if those were relationships we wanted to work through. Coming to this topic, I want to acknowledge that we knew we weren’t asking healing the relationship with that person at that moment, but we were working on healing our relationship to that person.

It was also during the second day that someone in my group was asked to leave – and I thought about if I should include this on the blog or not. To be honest, no one really knows why they were asked to leave. But one theory, which is something that I wanted to share about Onsite, is that Onsite would prefer that all of us not share what we do for a living until the last day. The main reason is that Onsite wants all of us to get to know each other as people aside from our jobs. Another big reason is that there are actually a handful of celebrities that go through Onsite as well, and it’s just a much richer therapy experience if the celebrities can maintain their anonymity. I found out finally at the end of my time at Onsite that there were a few celebrities, mainly country singers and/or actors who are people I don’t know and don’t listen to anyways.

Since it is difficult to be in session all day (4-5 hours a day), we had frequent breaks, and therapy usually ended mid-late afternoon. At that point, there was usually free time. People could choose to socialize together before and/or after dinner, and sometimes Onsite even had evening activities for us to do. I mostly slept early.

On my therapy group’s last day, unfortunately our therapist could not make it and we were all very sad about it. However, we had one of the really reputable clinicians step in instead, and that was just as cool. We went through one more groupmate’s experiential therapy session, and then we did some farewell exercises. My group all went to hang out at the nearby river and it was really fun to hang out there as the weather in Cumberland Furnace was quite warm. I wish I had some photos, but I forgot to bring enough film rolls. Our last day was the day after our last day of therapy – it was just an early breakfast and then everyone parted ways. My group took a photo together and then a few weeks later, one person sent us frames of our group photo. I still have that photo up in my work office.

Some other notes about Onsite:

Food: We all first arrived sometime in the afternoon, so dinner was provided. Every day that we were there, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and fresh & delicious snacks were provided in a breakroom sort of area. It was all really high-quality and fresh food, and all the meals were cooked right on site, too. It was all very delicious, and I know Onsite’s philosophy was that with eating healthy food, it would help our minds and bodies to do therapy more effectively (basically).

Religion: As someone who has grown up in a protestant evangelical church setting, I honestly was a little unsure of Onsite’s approaches to therapy before I signed up. I wanted to ask if Onsite’s approaches where Christian, but they aren’t. I called their administrative offices to ask about their therapy approaches, and basically nothing seemed off to me. Everything was science-based and after talking with close Christian friends, mentors, and therapist, and they all said that it would be a really great experience for me, which it was ! Plus, I had heard of Onsite through a couple of Christian names, so that gave me some ease at the time. They definitely do incorporate things about spirituality, such as allowing people to connect with their ‘higher powers’, and also participate in some things from Celtic and Indigenous spirituality – however, you are not obligated to participate if you do not feel comfortable. To those who are also Christian and are concerned about their approaches, I would say that God really used the therapy there to heal, and more particularly, heal my relationship with God and also with myself.

Race: I was the only colored person in my cohort during my time there. There were clinicians that were colored, but I was the only colored (Asian) client out of the 40 or so people that week. I have heard there have been people of color at Onsite in the past, but it is predominantly white. That was something that I was actually worried about, experiencing racism at a place where I wanted to get healing, but I mentioned this early on when my group was going over what is considered a ‘safe space’ for us, and I was fortunate to have a really good time – but this is something important to consider as well.

At the end of it all, I think Onsite was very worth it. The person I am married to is a huge testament to that. I will be honest and say that I have always wanted to be with someone healthy and emotionally present & available, but in order to do that, I needed to be that kind of person for myself, which Onsite helped so much with.

Some photos that I managed to take on the campus (mostly film, taken from my instagram):

Some landscape, nature, and scenery shots:

Some photos in, right outside, and around the cabins:

Some areas around the old green house:

The entrance to the area where the horses roamed:

Speaking of animals, this was Beyoncé the Onsite cat:

Some areas around the main building:

This one area where I would like to sit and read/journal:

Thank you for reading ! Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions about Onsite ! (: