The traditional model of weekly psychotherapy is shifting to meet your needs. Now more than ever, we need freedom and flexibility in how we get support. EMDR intensives are personalized treatment plans that allow you to skip the waitlist by giving you exclusive access to preferred time slots, and are designed to support your preferred schedule and timeline for your treatment goals. By dedicating extended time to focus on your specific needs, EMDR intensives offer numerous benefits:

• Accelerated Healing: Intensive sessions allow for deeper and more sustained therapeutic work, often leading to faster progress.
• Reduced Overall Therapy Time: With concentrated effort, you may achieve your therapeutic goals in a shorter overall time frame.
• Focused and Personalized: Intensive sessions are tailored to your unique needs, allowing for a highly individualized approach.
• Deeper Connections: Extended sessions foster a stronger therapeutic relationship and a more profound connection with the healing process.

Understanding INTENSIVES: is this you?

Maybe you love your therapist or generally value the healing that comes from weekly therapy but… you find yourself in this dynamic. You show up for session and spend the first 20 minutes setting in (transitioning work work, following up on last session or stress from the week, figuring out what to focus in on), you begin to grab hold of a powerful insight and just as its time to go deeper, you have to button it all up in time for the end of the session when you jump right back into work, parenting, or life challenges you are hoping to address in the first place. Multiply this dynamic by 5,6 or 12+ session and, of course you see some benefits, but it starts to feel like the breakthrough and freedom you’ve been dreaming of is always just beyond where you are. As a therapist, I’ve experienced this dynamic first hand on both sides of the therapeutic coach (therapist and client) and so I began to dream of a better way.

Therapy Intensives: A Better Way

Most therapists won’t tell you this but I will let you in on a secret: There is nothing inherently beneficial about the 50-60 minute therapy session. That is, other than that this is the session length that insurance companies traditionally approve. Many of us who care deeply about helping our clients receive equitable healing and the work of collective liberation work within these systems in order to increase access as much as possible. And yet, in reality, we understand the research and lived experience suggest that longer, more flexible formats for healing support are needed. I want for you to have access to healing that is at the pace of your nervous system’s wisdom, not dictated by the standards put forth by the profit driven insurance companies within the Mental Health Industrial Complex (MHIC).

Our Therapy Intensives here at Healing Insight are that dream made manifest.

Who is an ideal candidate for EMDR Intensives?

Our EMDR intensives are designed for individuals who are ready to make significant progress in their healing journey. You might be an ideal candidate for EMDR intensives if:

• You Have a Busy Schedule: Intensives can be more accommodating for those with demanding schedules who prefer to dedicate specific periods to their healing. We offer 90 minute, half day, and 3-day programs to address your needs.
• You’re Facing Specific Issues: If you have targeted concerns or specific issues you want to address comprehensively, EMDR intensives can provide the necessary focus.
• You’ve Experienced Trauma: Whether it’s a single event or complex, ongoing trauma, EMDR can help process and integrate these experiences in an intensive format, meaning you can experience relief
• You’re Stuck in Traditional Therapy: If you feel like traditional weekly sessions aren’t moving you forward quickly enough, an intensive might be the catalyst you need. Plus you don’t have to fire your therapist! Many individuals receive adjunct therapy intensives, allowing you to keep your primary therapy while using intensives to address a specific goal or aspect of your healing.

What is EMDR and how does it work?

You may be curious about EMDR. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a specialized therapy that targets traumatic memories and associated negative beliefs, allowing you to update old story lines with more adaptive beliefs about yourself, others, and the world. It combines elements of cognitive therapy, exposure therapy, and bilateral stimulation to facilitate the change. During an EMDR session, a trained therapist guides you through bilateral stimulation techniques, such as eye movements or tapping, to stimulate both hemispheres of the brain. This process helps to alleviate emotional distress and foster adaptive insights and healing.

Evidence Base: Why EMDR Intensives

• Intensive application of trauma-focused therapy seems to be well tolerated in patients with PTSD, enabling faster symptom reduction with similar, or even better, results, while reducing the risk that patients drop out prematurely. Learn more here and here. 
• Intensive EMDR treatment is feasible and is indicative of reliable improvement in PTSD symptoms in a very short time frame. Learn more here. 
• An intensive program using EMDR therapy is a potentially safe and effective treatment alternative for complex PTSD. Learn more here. 
• The economy is compelling: even compared to other trauma therapy, the intensive format may decrease treatment time, because of time not spent on a) checking in at the beginning of each session, b) addressing current crises and concerns, c) focusing on stabilizing and coping skills that the client won’t need after trauma healing, or d) assisting the client in regaining composure at the end of the session. Learn more here.