EMDR Intensive Therapy in Reading

Therapy intensives are half-day, day-long, or multi-day sessions to focus on serious movement on a specific goal or core issue.

In my practice, I offer them in 3-hour blocks.

EMDR is a psychotherapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress resulting from disturbing life experiences. Repeated studies show that by undergoing EMDR therapy, people can experience the benefits of psychotherapy that once took years to make a difference. It is widely assumed that severe emotional pain requires a long time to heal. EMDR therapy shows that the mind can heal from psychological trauma in a similar way as the body as it recovers from physical trauma.

Read more on my EMDR page.

Weekly/biweekly therapy:

• 60-minute sessions

• Helpful for gradual change over time

• Indicated for clients who experience relief and resolution within the 60-minute mark

• Memory reprocessing is broken up over weeks

EMDR Intensives:

• A half-day, full day, or weekend just for you

• Indicated for prolonged or chronic stress

• Indicated for complex/multiple incident trauma

• Gets clients through the full 8 phases of EMDR faster — leading to a more complete resolution of traumatic experiences in one sitting

• Prevents adverse EMDR experiences

• May be helpful for those needing deep change fast

When people begin their personal therapy journey, the typical recommended frequency is weekly or biweekly 60-minute sessions.

This rhythm is helpful for easing into the habit of discussing emotional and psychological problems, for managing ongoing or unfolding events, for increasing insight, for making gradual and slow change, or for building trust and rapport with your therapist.

EMDR intensives might be for you when…

• you have a clear grasp of a recurrent issue and are ready for bigger, deeper, and faster relief and change

• you can’t or don’t want to spend any more time dealing with this issue than you already have, because the issue has already eaten up so much of your time, energy, and beyond

• you’re not in a position to commit to weeks, months, or longer in standard therapy but still need depth work and transformation

Research has shown that EMDR intensives allow people experiencing post-traumatic stress (PTSD) to achieve faster symptom reduction, such as decreased intensity of auditory and visual hallucinations, hypervigilance, irritability, depressed mood, and confusion of past and present experience.

Click here and here to read studies on the efficacy of EMDR intensives for people with complex PTSD.

Click here to read a study comparing intensive therapy with weekly therapy for PTSD.

While most people think of as EMDR as all the flashy lights, tapping, tones, all the fancy BLS, and memory desensitization, that’s a perspective that too often leads clients to wondering if they’re doing EMDR right or wrong, successfully or unsuccessfully. The truth is, there is no way to do it wrong!

EMDR also includes the time spent telling your story, feeling safe in your body, connecting to your strengths, all the things, places, and people in your life that make you feel safe and happy now. This is called resourcing! Resourcing is healing and it is foundational for full trauma resolution.

I bring Somatic Internal Family Systems interventions, cognitive-behavioral approaches, relational approaches, and psychodynamic approaches into these intensives, as you need them, to strengthen your internal resources and to facilitate smooth desensitization & reprocessing.

I do not believe EMDR should be a rigid or hurried process, but rather, a flexible one that puts your safety and control first. And intensives make it easier to not rush.

While EMDR is popularly known to help people recover from the effects of different kinds of trauma and abuse, EMDR can also be an effective treatment for chronic anxiety, persistent depression, obsessions and compulsions, addictions, as well as grief and loss.

Mental health diagnoses and symptom clusters originate as responses to changes or stressors in one’s environment. Because EMDR is an information and memory reprocessing therapy, it is designed to target and help you release and reprocess a wide range of stress reactions that arose in response to something that happened in your life.

EMDR can be helpful for anyone who has experienced the limits of insight-based therapy. A successful treatment can help relieve emotional distress, reformulate negative beliefs, and reduce physiological arousal tied to stressors.

Keep scrolling for more info!