If you have attended therapy in the past, you know the drill. You have a quick fifty minutes to get a lot done. Think 5 minutes of checking in, 10 minutes addressing new concerns that have come up since the last session, 25 minutes on the long-term work, 5 minutes to wrap up the session, and 5 minutes to decide what to work on next and schedule your next visit. The minutes go by very quickly.
This model works. Real benefits include a measured pace that can help you build trust with your therapist. The weekly 50 minutes sessions can increase your capacity to handle the discomfort that often comes with processing difficult, charged content. The consistency of regular sessions can also help individuals create healthier patterns of connection and address dynamic, real time stressors as they come up.
For some individuals, fifty minutes can feel like it’s never quite enough to really dig in to some more entrenched issues. In some instances, extended sessions and therapy intensives can offer real benefits for therapeutic work. Therapy Intensives offer a novel approach, involving multiple hours of therapy within a single day or extending over several days.
What is a Therapy Intensive?
Therapy intensives provide time for a deep dive into your history and particular challenges. Intensives offer more space free from interruptions, distractions, and the stop and start of the more common weekly therapy. This deep exploration can help you unpack complex trauma, explore your patterns of relating, reacting, and responding, and build better resources to cope so that you can feel and function better.
With a mix of brain-based, body-based, and experiential therapies like EMDR, IFS, and Somatic Experiencing, many individuals are able to jump start their healing, integrate previous work they have done, and make measurable progress on their therapeutic goals.
What Benefits Might Therapy Intensive Offer?
Highly Individualized Treatment
With intensives, you and your therapist collaboratively develop a plan to make the time most valuable for you. You get individualized attention and time to share where you have been and where you want to go.
Streamlined Treatment A Therapy Intensive can condense your treatment timeline by eliminating the typical 5-10 minutes dedicated to initial check-ins, addressing emerging concerns between sessions, or focusing on coping strategies designed to help support you between sessions.
Immersive Focus
The intensive approach immerses you fully in the therapeutic experience, enabling a deeper understanding of yourself. Intensives can help you and your therapist hone in on areas that you may benefit from further development, and drive progress through extended attention to your individual concerns.
Cost
Therapy Intensives do require more upfront cost but may prove cost-effective compared to weekly therapy and the cost of not treating issues that are holding you back.
Reduction in Intensity of Distress & Symptoms
The practice of therapists offering Intensives is relatively recent, and research into their efficacy is dynamic and developing. No therapist can promise results but we do know that most people benefit from therapy and some people experience reduced symptomology from therapy intensives.
Therapy intensives are not right for every client. If you are interested in a therapy intensive, you and your therapist will need to discuss whether the format of these longer sessions would be helpful for your particular concerns. This kind of work can be, as the name suggests intense. Many clients really benefit from a slower approach and some clients need more structured care than an intensive can provide. Ultimately as therapists, we want to provide you with a safe space to effectively work through challenges that might be holding you back so that you can feel and function better, and create the life you want.
Reach out if you would like to schedule a 50-minute session to address your individual concerns or to inquire whether a therapy intensive might be right for you.