A year round individually tailored personal growth program. The Vitality program is personally designed to meet a person's time schedule and program needs.

What Does The Vitality Program Offer?

The Vitality program includes quality in-depth experiential and integrative work for men and women who seek healing from poor self-esteem, ministry burn-out, grief and loss, life and ministry transition, psycho-sexual immaturity, the father wound, the mother wound and psycho-social impairment, recovery from dysfunctional family and community systems and healing victims of violence and adult children of trauma. The Vitality program is designed for both individual and group participation and offers a prayerful environment for those who seek personal discernment, healing and direction. This intensive whole person program combines the work of psychotherapy, inner healing, spiritual direction, body/breath work, dream work, and mandala assessment with professional educational training for adult life skills in order to effect personal life-change. We include a whole person approach that helps discern the participants personal needs and his/her capacity for renewal, life transition, career change, grief work, anger integration, loss of health and personal growth and renewal.

Who Can Benefit?

Our most recent participants have been men and women religious, priests, seminarians and laity of all ages from around the country with varied backgrounds and training. The one most common factor is their desire for an in-depth and intensive therapeutic experience that prepares them for active ministry and equips them with mature life skills for “living life to the full.” (Jn10:10) Many participants have come to heal their father wound which has left them unable to establish boundaries, maintain healthy relationships, manage and contain personal life choices, work well with authority, procrastinate and self-sabotage. Others have come to heal their mother wound that may has left them with emotional paralysis, frozen feelings or enmeshment, disaffected with body image, fear of sexuality and sensuality or an inability to relate to self, God and others.

The Vitality program has been designed using various helping and healing models to assist each person in achieving her/his personal health care program. Our program activities encourage growth in the Spirit. This growth in the spirit welcomes the God of mercy to journey with us, melt us, mold us, and shape us into the image and likeness of God's pleasure and will.

We teach our participants how to integrate adult life skills that will help them continue their journey towards healing, wholeness and wellbeing. The goal of our therapeutic program is to empower each person to achieve maximum competency as unique individuals who establish choicemaking skills and the ability to learn from both their mistakes and successes.

Integrity and personal dignity is our hope for each person as they learn how to become more authentic and merciful towards themselves and others. Understanding how to embrace and manage both healthy interdependency and fully functional adult independency is an ongoing process of personal growth and awareness.

The measuring cup of successful therapy and education is the participant's ability to live her/his growth out loud with pride and authenticity. Welcoming the wonder and awe of God's presence in our lives and seeking the Creator's pleasure, will, and design for us will shape and reshape us according to God's image and likeness.

The healing process includes each person's readiness to participate in the change process. We depend on God's Providence to make up for what we lack. We welcome and host a variety of personal growth opportunities that are intertwined with the most common parts of our day.

Who Provides the Training and Services?

The Mercy Center has established a team of professional men and women who combine the best of inner healing, spiritual direction, psychotherapy, body/breath work to produce an innovative treatment program. The emphasis of the Vitality program is to help men and women to live, grow and develop adult life skills and equip them for active ministry, effective personal development and growth in psycho-sexual and psycho-social maturity. We also have a clinical psychologist who can provide an in-depth psychological evaluation. Individual and group sessions are designed to provide each participant with adult life skills and to better equip them to ... live life to the full (John 10:10). Workshops and educational opportunities are included in the personally tailored program so as to enhance personal progress and healing. We are professional psychotherapists, spiritual directors, inner healing specialists, body/breath work practitioners, and massage therapists. Our therapeutic applications are determined by each person's pastoral care needs. We have been providing our educational and therapeutic programs since 1988.

How Long Is A Vitality Program?

Many of our participants come for a personally designed program and may stay in residence from 15 to 31 days to three months. The goal of each person's Vitality is to establish a health-care program that will encourage ongoing personal growth and development and a return to an active life, ministry, and career. The Mercy Center, located in Colorado Springs, Colorado, provides an eclectic therapeutic program for adult men and women.

How Do I Apply?

You will need to complete the Vitality Application that will be used to design a program to best help you achieve your personal and professional goals. The application helps us to determine with the individual what resources would best serve his/her personal and professional goals..An intensive whole person program that combines the work of psychotherapy, inner healing, spiritual direction, breath/bodywork, mandala assessment, personal and professional educational training for adult life skills to effect personal life-change.
Program Design Includes:

• 8 individual sessions per week of any of the following services
• Individual/Group Counseling Spiritual Direction Ritual Grieving
• Inner Healing/Healing of Memories Prayer Massage Therapy Breath and Body Work
• Dream Work EMDR - Trauma Resolution
• IntegrationMandala Assessment/Integration
• Additional Sessions $50 each.

The Retirement Vitality: Life Directions for Future Adventures

The Retirement Vitality offers a residential program for men and women who are anticipating, planning or experiencing a redirection in their career and life choice. Finding new purpose, new meaning and new vitality becomes essential to the spiritual, psychological, social and physical journey as we explore both mid-life and retirement issues. Offered year round.

Mission Re-Entry Vitality

This year-round program is for men and women who are returning from a mission experience either short-term and/or long-term who want a time and place to share their stories, work through their blessings and burdens and prepare for decisions about their future job, career and social network.

The Mission Re-Entry Vitality offers a wide range of supportive services to help a returning missionary reorganize her/his life focus so that health and well-being are restored and she/he can “Live life to the full.” (John 10:10) This program offers an intensive whole person program that combines the work of psychotherapy, inner healing, spiritual direction, breath/body work, mandala assessment, personal and professional educational training for adult life skills to effect personal life-change and healing.

The Relationship Vitality for Married Couples

Quality Time to Invigorate Your Relationship and Intimacy Skills

The Relationship Vitality can also be scheduled anytime throughout the year.

$1,200 per couple includes, room, board, classes, individual sessions and couple sessions, and all handouts and resources.

The Couples Vitality has been designed to help each person assess their capacity for learning new and effective intimacy skills that will broaden your capacity for:

• Emotional intimacy
• Conversational intimacy
• Physical intimacy
• Sexual intimacy
• Develop empathy for better communication
• Conversational intimacy
• Move from blaming to changing
• Relearn to play
• Creating new relationship patterns for mutual nurture and support
• Getting, giving and receiving strokes

Conscious Celibacy: Living, Loving and Serving Well

Areas of personal exploration and integration might include:

• Understanding addictive relationships.
• Healthy intimacy and authentic relationships.
• Sexual life continuum.
• Conscious Celibacy Assessment Inventory.
• Maintaining healthy personal and professional boundaries
• Managing the libido.
• Detoxing sexual projections and fantasies.
• Understanding the psycho-sexual-social demensions of a celibate way of life.
• Celibacy and religious addiction.
• Addictive love and infatuations.
• Establishing a definition and meaningful belief in celibacy as a chosen way of life.
• A spirituality of conscious celibacy that allows me to embrace and be embraced.

Life Transitions: Recovery from Life's Surprises

Areas of personal exploration and integration might include:

• Coping with the consequences of surgery and healing our body image.
• Chronic illness and pain: understanding redemptive suffering.
• Discovering God in all this mess.
• Ministry burnout.
• Ministry reorientation and reframing.
• Ministry transition and the discernment process.
• Vocation discrernment and career realignment.
• Mid-life crises and loving cooperation with menopause and manapause.
• Unresolved grief from life losses.
• Letting go of the past - grabbing hold of hte future.
• Career rediscovery - personal profile for job and workplace compatibility.

Recovery: Establish balance and proportion in life, work, and relationships.

Areas of personal exploration and integration might include:

• Food dependencies and/or addiction.
• Unmet emotional and physical nurturance.
• Relationship addictions and co-dependency.
• Anger and rage management.
• Fear and emotional paralysis.
• Anxiety and the inability to cope well.
• Depression and grieving losses.
• Personal and professional boundaries.
• Do's and don'ts for a healthy life-style and career in the helping profession.
• Inner exploration to meet unloved and unnamed potential.
• Shadow work, power shadow and patterns of self-sabotage and destruction.

top of page