Therapy intensives involve extended, immersive, focused sessions that all the time to get to the root of your challenges and actually do real work on them before the session ends. Since sessions are extended and often closer together it doesn’t feel like you are spending each session catching up on the latest challenges and trying to pick up where you left off. Instead all that work goes into increasing your ability to regulate, find calm in mind and body, reprocess trauma, shift your beliefs, and move towards healing.

Traditional therapy can be powerful but recent traumas, anxiety or patterns that are stuck despite lots of self-work or talk therapy, or symptoms you need relief from sooner may mean you need something more. It can also be a challenge to find regular time for weekly sessions if you have a busy or irregular schedule.

With traditional therapy it often takes an initial assessment plus 3-4 sessions to get into root issues and deeper work and that means a month of more of time passing with issues evolving and pain continuing. In addition, traditional therapy requires you carving out weekly or bi-weekly sessions for months.

We start by setting clear goals during your assessment so that we can dive right in during the intensives. Sessions typically opening with resourcing practices aka practices that get your nervous system connected with regulation, peace, and/or wellbeing. Then we go into reprocessing painful memories using EMDR or somatic work, using somatic practices to gain clarity on a challenging decision, exploring your automatic responses to a current life stressor and building your toolbox of ways to respond differently using EMDR or somatic techniques, it all depends on what your goals for the session(s) are.

There are so many ways intensives can be set up! Intensives are flexible and the length and format depends on what you are wanting to work through. You will need more time for deeper issues, longer standing patterns, multiple traumas etc. You will need less time if you would like to do very focused work on a specific issue or making one challenging choices etc.

Let’s say you have an upcoming project at work, speaking engagement, or test and you cannot regulate your nervous system. A 2-hour intensive focused on regulating and practices to get you better equipped to approach that challenge with more clarity and calm. If you had a recent traumatic event and want to process it so you can re-engage with your life it could be that 3 or 4 3-hour intensives or 5 2-hour intensives are what you need. If you wand to get to the root of a long-stranding harmful relationship patterns you may want to do 2 or 3 half-day intensives or 1 month of twice weekly 2-hour intensives.