Eight days to confront your childhood: The Hoffman Method, extreme therapy with a cult following among the rich and famous
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Oprah Winfrey described it as “10 years of therapy in one week.” Katy Perry claimed it saved her life after a severe depression. And Vogue Paris has hailed it as “one of the best wellness retreats for healing body and mind worldwide.” They’re referring to the Hoffman Method, an intensive personal development program that, according to its official website in the U.S., aims to “identify negative behaviors, moods, and ways of thinking that developed unconsciously and were conditioned in childhood.” Its detractors, however, see it as far from a gentle path to self-realization. For some, the eight-day retreat is more of a forced immersion in suffering than a fast track to transformation.
That wasn’t Rafael de Cárdenas’s perception. A year after completing the process, the New York-based creative director and designer shared his experience on social media after spending a week isolated with about 20 strangers in Petaluma, California. “I’m not always grateful or joyful now. But I can see the dark patterns that shaped me,” he wrote on Instagram, in a post where he describes feeling “raw, vulnerable, exposed.” In a video call with EL PAÍS, De Cárdenas explained that he didn’t come to the method because of a crisis or a major life break. “I wanted to live with more gratitude; I felt like I was always competing. What I didn’t know was that I was going to have to face myself, because in the end, the work that needs polishing is you.”
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