In-depth Intensives
Have you heard of therapy intensives? It’s all about condensing the amount of time in therapy overall; going into deep dives in longer sittings to get more at the root cause. It’s all about radical healing.
Many are familiar with the typical model of therapy of hour long sessions weekly or bi-weekly. There’s even extended time of 75 to 90 minute therapy sessions.
Lets do the math: In a standard hour long session there’s about 5-8 minutes in the beginning to check in — chat about the weather — then 5-8 minutes at the end to wrap up. It takes about 10-15 minutes to get to the deeper content and so there’s only about 25 or so minutes of processing time.
In an intensive, depending on the model, there are 3 to 4 hours of time spent together in one sitting, allowing for more than two hours of process time. More content can be covered and breaks can also be taken as needed.
The value of intensives is that it can condense overall time in therapy from three months to one month, for example. With my model of 4 hour sessions weekly for 3 weeks. That’s 12 hours of work that would typically be spread over a three month period to just three weeks.
Intensives allow more time spent on specific issues and allow you to fully immerse yourself in them without the threat of the session coming to a close. It gives the opportunity to understand where you are feeling stuck in life (or in your relationship if doing couples intensives) quicker.
Scheduling can be also more convenient where it’s focused in one day for just 3 weeks rather than 1 hour weekly for months. It can be done on a weekend or take one day off of work to focus in on your self (or your relationship). It is recommended to have space before and after to rest as the intense work can create a sense of tiredness.
A final benefit I’ll mention here about intensives is that it can be more cost effective. Condensing the time for therapy can create improved outcomes (everyones experience is different and there’s no promise as to what you’ll receive out of any type of session). With condensing sessions, you may find that stretching therapy out over time costs more than in-depth sessions.
Therapy intensives are fairly new so there’s not a whole lot of research about them. But there are some great studies that support the effectiveness of intensives. The highlights include:
Faster trauma symptom reduction (learn more here and here)
Improvement in PTSD symptoms in a very short time frame
Safe and effective treatment alternative for complex PTSD
The intensive format may decrease treatment time
If you are curious about giving a therapy intensive a try, book your initial intake session. During the initial intake, we’ll discuss intentions, goals, and areas of focus for the 3 day long sessions. I recommend planning out a whole day to allow space before to prepare and after to rest to get the most out of the experience.
