What can you address in a therapy intensive?
Many people, therapists and clients, are doing therapy intensives lately. One question that comes up often is “what can you address during a therapy intensive?”
In short, almost anything! Of course, this will vary from counselor to counselor, but generally speaking, most concerns can be addressed through an intensive model. Here are the ones that I personally do the most.
Trauma therapy intensives
This tends to be one of the main things people want a therapy intensive for. Someone may have what we call a “single-incident trauma,” like a car accident or natural disaster, or any other one-time event. They may not necessarily want (or need) ongoing therapy, but they want to address the traumatic event without getting into other areas of their life. Therapy intensives can be great for single-incident traumas, and for the most part, people generally are able to reach their goals after one intensive session. The intensive model allows them to dig deep into what happened, learn to implement different grounding and relaxation techniques, and help their brain make sense of the awful thing that happened. People can get the healing they are looking for without committing to months of ongoing, weekly therapy.
Therapy intensives can also be helpful for complex trauma, or traumas that are or were ongoing. A few examples of complex traumas are:
Abuse or neglect in childhood
History of abusive relationships
Witnessing ongoing physical abuse or violence
Being forced into prostitution
Being tortured or kidnapped
Even ongoing, invasive medical procedures.
While complex trauma often involves more in-depth and ongoing treatment, it can be difficult to get at everything with the time limitations of weekly sessions. During therapy intensives, you can focus on the trauma history and have the time needed to dig deep into what happened and how your body and brain are responding now. The longer session time allows for the flexibility of addressing extremely difficult things, while also taking time to ground and calm yourself during the session.
People who have experienced complex trauma tend to need more than one intensive session due to the ongoing nature of the traumatic events, however this can often be easier than carving out time for weekly therapy sessions, as intensives can have longer periods of time between them. There’s also the benefit of allowing the work you’re doing to “settle” to see what you need to continue to address.
And if you are in weekly therapy for ongoing life stressors, or anything else unrelated to the trauma, you can still do a trauma therapy intensive while getting the support you need from your weekly therapist as well.
Anxiety therapy intensives
The intensive model can work well for other types of anxiety as well. Whether you have specific phobias, generalized anxiety, or even obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a therapy intensive can give you the time you need to dig deep at the root causes of your anxiety. In traditional weekly therapy, we often spend a lot of time reviewing what has happened over the past week and making a plan for the following week, which doesn’t leave much time to get at the source of things. This happens even more when you have a lot going on in your life (and who doesn’t!). While the support for day-to-day stressors is beneficial, some folks are better served by really healing the underlying reasons for the anxiety.
Therapy intensives for Autism and ADHD
First of all, although I’ve said it many times before, ADHD and Autism are NOT things that need to be “fixed” and no one needs therapy solely because they are neurodivergent (more on that here). However, it is incredibly stressful living in a world that wasn’t built for how your brain works.
Therapy intensives can allow you time to address and prevent burnout, through identifying sensory strategies and finding accommodations to make your world work for you. You can also work on strategies to help with executive functioning skills (specifically for my ADHDers, but helpful for Autistic folks as well). Being able to really dig into a plan without being limited to 50 minute sessions weekly can help get a lot more done, especially if you struggle with task initiation.
Therapy intensives can also be helpful for neurodivergent folks to work on unlearning internalized ableism. You can also address the shame that many of us have from growing up undiagnosed and thinking there is something wrong with us (spoiler alert: there is NOTHING wrong with you!). An intensive can also give you time to work on unmasking.
We now know how traumatic it can be to live in a world that was built for neurotypical brains, so many of the things I discussed above about trauma therapy intensives apply for neurodivergent folks too.
So there you have it! If you want more information on my therapy intensive offerings, click here.
If you are interested in learning more about how a therapy intensive can help you, whether for trauma, anxiety, ADHD, autism, or anything else, click here to schedule a free 15 minute consult to get your questions answered and to see if we would be a good fit.
