At Retrouvaille you talk about yourself only. You cannot say "You criticize me unmercifully, and it hurts me." But you can say, " I feel like a child who is chastised by the teacher in front of all the other children. I feel humiliated when I make an effort to help with chores around the house." Do you see the difference? You have not said anything about her. But she knows why you feel this way. You just don't say it. And when you take that backdoor approach she can accept it better. She can think, "oh, I don't want him to feel bad when he helps. Maybe I could say thank you sometimes." And if she has that thought on her own, then your marriage will be improved. You speak as imagistically as you can to get the point across about how you feel in the marriage.
They will give you pointed questions to elicit these conversations. Then you both have a set period of time to write your feelings in your notebook. Next your go to the privacy of the room to exchange the notebooks. You read the letters twice, once with your head and once with your heart. And then you discuss them in the way that you are taught. You deal with the past first, thinking about what you might have done wrong yourself, and apologizing. After that, the past is taboo. You don't bring up the past. So when you have arguments in the future and one person goes back 15 years to something, you say, "you can't bring up the past." And that source of the circular argument is done with. If you really follow the rules of Retrouvaille, arguments become shorter and less frequent.
In the Post sessions there is an entire session on being critical. In that lesson not criticizing is pointedly discussed. But the weekend focuses only on learning the dialogue technique and doing the questions. So both the weekend and all the post sessions are equally important.
