Is Intensive Therapy Right For You?
The emotional pain you’ve been carrying is too much. You're struggling with mixed, intense emotions following a betrayal, attachment wounds from childhood, or other past traumas. It's beginning to feel like you cannot wait one more day for life to get better, and going into regular therapy just once a week for an hour is proving to be inefficient for the change that you seek.
Intensive therapy is an opportunity to devote ample time to your pain so you can figure out what it’s telling you and how to resolve it.
In multiple hours or days in the counseling space, you can accomplish what might otherwise take months in weekly therapy sessions. By kickstarting your treatment this way, you can learn and immediately begin practicing new ways of coping and communicating.
The Intensive Format: A Meaningful And Effective Approach To Counseling
Intensive sessions accelerate the healing process. Because therapy intensives are tailored to the needs of each individual, couple, or family, they afford creativity and uniqueness in developing solutions. Uninterrupted time allows each participant a chance to tell their story and move from the problem to the solution—almost like a boost of healing energy.
Intensives were initially developed through inpatient addiction programming. Clients had ongoing support from a counselor who could help them manage urges—digging deeper into what was happening on a physical and emotional level as their cravings developed. Eventually, these inpatient services morphed into 30-, 60-, and 90-day programs and shorter, day-long sessions.
While intensive therapy remains effective for both inpatient and outpatient addiction programs, it’s been proven widely effective for an array of mental health issues, including symptoms related to anxiety, depression, and trauma. More and more clinicians have integrated intensive options into their practice, and just as in-person counseling, intensive therapy is effective when also done virtually via telehealth.
Intensive Therapy At Crown & Cloak
I offer intensive therapy to clients struggling with the fallout of betrayal (particularly in cases involving sex addiction) and other trauma-related issues. Whether you attend counseling on your own, with your partner, or with your family as a whole (for parents of adult children only), we can use our concentrated time together in therapy to come to a place of repair and resolution.
Each daylong intensive session is six hours, with additional time budgeted for breaks. Depending on your goals and scheduling needs, the therapeutic process is concentrated into one, two, or three days. However, it is my goal that we continue working in therapy together beyond our intensive sessions. As such, ongoing counseling sessions and 12-step options are recommended after the intensive is completed.
My Approach
The specific details of therapy are tailored to meet the needs of each client or unit, but I do follow the same structure to ensure that our time is action- and solution-oriented.
Step 1 – Participating in icebreaker activities to build safety, trust, and rapport
Step 2 – Clarifying goals through experiential activities (including role-playing, meditation, and visualization)
Step 3 – Evaluating each client’s resources and support system(s)
Step 4 – Sharing historical trauma timelines to go deeper into internalized shame and unhealthy coping
Step 5 – Using further experiential exercises and mindfulness to identify what remains unresolved while developing a solution based on treatment goals
Step 6 – Continuing education, resourcing, and learning new coping tools
Step 7 – Participating in closure activities
Step 8 – Identifying next steps and recommendations
This process within intensive counseling is beneficial for many reasons. For starters, you will be able to accomplish major exploration, processing, and healing in a short amount of time, allowing you to get to the root of the problem quickly. In addition, my integrative method—including psychodrama, mindfulness, meditation, and experiential therapy—engages both sides of the brain, especially the areas where trauma is stored. Furthermore, my approach involves movement and physical awareness, allowing your nervous system to target and heal trauma at the brain and body levels.
Conventional talk therapy is essential to our work in intensives but talking only activates the left “logical” side of the brain. Merely thinking about problems is not a helpful solution—experiential methods engage the right “feeling” side of the brain to heal psychological pain at the core. Weekly therapy puts long breaks between the body’s ability to resolve trauma, but an intensive session gives you a chance to meaningfully focus on this important work.
What To Expect From Intensive Treatment
In the concentrated, focused space of intensive counseling at Crown & Cloak, you can:
Increase self-awareness
Gain clarity
Understand when/where trauma and shame messages originated and how to combat those messages
Identify unhelpful coping skills and replace them with healthier, more effective ones
Learn new communication strategies, especially for couples
Escape codependent or dysfunctional interactions to instead move towards healthier responses
Safely feel and express anger
Reprogram your brain’s response to distress and trauma
My clients have expressed how quickly this form of counseling offered relief. Not only will you leave intensive therapy feeling freer and lighter—you will see that it’s possible to recover the joy in your life.
Additional Information And Training Experience
Intensive therapy has been important in both my personal and professional life. The work I have done through the intensive model has allowed me to better understand how to structure my own—and my clients’—healing journey. I decided to integrate intensives into my practice upon seeing the transformative potential it had in my life.
Though I have been in practice since 2010, I began incorporating intensives in 2017 after beginning contract work with Onsite Workshops outside of Nashville. Through these workshops, I witnessed major life changes in my clients that contributed to healthier outcomes. Recognizing the power that intensive therapy has in catalyzing growth, healing, and change, I decided to enhance my training by pursuing additional credentials through the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals (IITAP) as a Certified Partner Trauma Therapist (CPTT) and through the Association of Partners of Sex Addicts Trauma Specialists (APSATS) as an APSATS-Candidate.
Go Farther Faster
If you, your marriage, or your family are in crisis following a betrayal or other form of trauma, intensive therapy gives you the time and space needed to accelerate the healing process. For more information about if intensive treatment is right for you, schedule a free, 15-minute consultation here.
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