intensive vs Standard Therapy
What Is an EMDR Intensive?
An EMDR intensive is a short-term, highly focused therapy format that allows you to make faster progress in a matter of days rather than spending months or years in weekly therapy. Instead of one-hour sessions once a week, an EMDR intensive provides several hours of treatment per day, usually six hours per day, for three to five consecutive days. This approach eliminates the start-and-stop cycle of weekly therapy and allows for deep, uninterrupted healing.
The typical schedule is:
9am-12pm Therapy
12-1pm Break for Lunch
1-4pm Therapy
What’s wrong with standard one-hour sessions?
Weekly therapy can be very helpful, but standard one-hour sessions often have hidden limitations that can make progress feel slow or fragmented. Each session requires time just to prepare your nervous system, grounding, regulating, and settling in before deep healing can truly begin. Depending on what happened during the week or even that day, this preparation can take varying, unpredictable amounts of time. Over multiple sessions, these repeated start-up periods add up.
Ongoing life stress and week-to-week crises often take priority in a standard weekly session, leaving less time for deep healing. EMDR intensives allow for longer, continuous sessions where this start-stop process is minimized. Once you are in deep work, your time becomes exponentially more valuable because each minute after you’re prepared for the deep dive, now become a deep healing minute. It’s more like compound interest, then just adding minutes together after the preparation to work has taken place. Six hours in an intensive is not equivalent to six separate one-hour sessions. The stacked, continuous focus produces far more insight, deeper connections, and transformative healing than the same number of isolated hours. It is an incredible experience to have that much focused attention on you and your life in a way that you’ve probably never experienced before.
A Working Retreat All About… You!!!
When is the last time 100 percent of your focus was on you and your happiness? An EMDR intensive gives you the chance to fully immerse yourself in understanding who you are, what you long for, and how to move toward it. During the day, you work closely with your therapist in focused, concentrated sessions designed to uncover patterns, process experiences, and explore goals.
Many clients come from out of town and appreciate having the evenings alone, away from the usual pace of life, to reflect, rest, and integrate what they have learned. Locals are also encouraged to consider keeping their evenings free and private if possible to fully benefit from this immersive experience.
This combination of guided work and personal time allows your nervous system to settle, your insights to deepen, and your growth to accelerate. By treating the intensive as a retreat for yourself, you create the space to access more meaningful insights, make more connections, and leave the experience feeling more integrated and empowered.
The Value of Continuing Support
Weekly therapy remains an incredibly effective option for many people. Regular sessions provide ongoing support, a consistent space to check in with your therapist, and the opportunity to process challenges as they arise. Weekly therapy can be especially grounding when life feels overwhelming, stressful, or fast-moving. If you don’t need deep healing, but do need ongoing support, and frequent check ins, weekly therapy can be just what you need.
Many people combine approaches, doing an intensive to work deeply on a specific goal, then continuing weekly therapy to integrate the work and maintain support.
Next Steps After Your Intensive
Many clients find that one intensive provides a significant breakthrough, helping them process difficult material quickly and gain new insight. This is a great way to work through past trauma. Most people continue with therapy afterward to integrate the work, practice new strategies, and address ongoing challenges. Doing an intensive first can make this follow-up work faster, easier, and more productive because you have already cleared a lot of the deeper material.