A psychotherapy intensive is…

an opportunity to give yourself the time and space to safely go deeper into your counseling work. Intensives are a concentrated time of counseling that can be configured in a format that works best for you. For example, an intensive may range from 4-hours to four 8-hour days while another may involve 10 to 20 hours each week for 4-8 weeks. The intensive block can be customized to meet your unique needs.

Safety is the key ingredient for counseling work. In a typical hour-long weekly outpatient session we can only go deep for a short period of time because at the end of the hour you need to return to your daily activities. With an intensive, you step out of life’s regular demands, together we build a safe container, and we have a much larger timeframe to safely go into the deeper work before needing to return to life’s routines. This larger timeframe allows for some very deep, life changing work to occur. Intentional time is planned to aid in the transition from the intensive back into regular life.

Intensives are for individuals, couples, and families who are looking to make some significant changes in their lives in a shorter period of time. People who have struggled to make steady progress in their regular outpatient counseling. And for those whose work schedule or privacy needs are not conducive to the weekly outpatient meeting model.

The format and components of an intensive are customized based on your specific goals and needs. Depending on the location, we may have the option of including some outdoor adventure-based therapeutic activities as well as equine or feline interactions, if such activities align with your therapeutic goals.

As you can imagine, counseling intensives can be intense and thus they are not for everyone. They can be a great compliment to existing weekly outpatient counseling work. The intake process for an intensive is a bit more involved than for regular outpatient counseling. We will schedule a 30-minute meeting to discuss your situation and goals, this will give us both an opportunity to see if an intensive would be a good fit for you. If you are currently working with a counselor, I will need to connect with them to coordinate our work so as to help facilitate safety.