The intensive therapy model
Customize your treatment to fit YOU
You and your healing needs deserve the best possible care: You will get optimal results from your treatment when it is geared to your specific needs.
Intensives are usually 3-6 hours of treatment for one to four consecutive days (more days can be booked as needed; but there will be at least one day's time off after four days). This model is ideal for people who are travelling to do an intensive with me.
People who live locally have additional options: many clients choose to book a weekend, or to book a few half or full day blocks intermittently.
Intensives are typically conducted in my Beaver, PA office. Retreat-style intensives at other settings are also an option.
Advantages of intensives
- Intensives are often the quickest way to reduce your suffering and achieve your therapeutic goals: People typically experience significant positive shifts in mood, thought patterns, behaviors, and physical sense of wellbeing - as opposed to months or years of coping with symptoms while trauma work is done 1 hour at a time, week by week.
- More reprocessing occurs during each EMDR Intensive, than happens in the same number of hours of hourly sessions. EMDR Intensives can reduce the amount of time spent in therapy overall.
Intensives may be ideal for you
- If you have been in therapy for awhile, have good insight and solid coping skills, but are still struggling or stuck in some areas, an intensive will likely be quite effective. You have already put in the hard work to build those healthy, adaptive neural networks; the EMDR will shift what is stuck, so that trauma memories can be reconsolidated within the neural networks you've built up in your therapy work.
- Busy professionals, college students - anyone who needs to prioritize their time and functioning may find that the intensive model is ideal.
- People who have difficulty accessing emotional material in a short amount of time or who are working with complex targets. These individuals often find that they are just reaching the material needing to be reprocessed, when the hour ends.
- People who experience their emotions intensely, and thus do best with a structure that allows for stabilization pauses to be integrated throughout the reprocessing.
- For people who have a primary treatment goal of sexual assault recovery, VCAP funds can be used to pay for intensives. If the sexual crimes took place in Pennsylvania, you do not need to have reported the crime to the police.
Why an intensive may NOT be right for you at this time:
- If you have significant dissociation that is not yet well managed, an intensive would likely be destabilizing. To be clear, people with dissociative disorders can benefit from intensives. Clients who have a solid awareness of their dissociative profile, and are grounded in working with their parts/ego states, may be good candidates for intensives.
- Insurance does not cover intensive treatment at this time. Cost can be prohibitive, unfortunately.
- Some people do best with the hour per week model. l For these people, an hour gives just enough time to complete a target, and they function well during the days between sessions, or use the days between sessions to rest and recover from the toll of the reprocessing.