EMDR and Internal Family System/Parts Intensives

Accelerate your healing journey. Spend more time living and less time healing

  • Are you ready to move on with life without all those intrusive images and thoughts?

  • Is the thought of weekly sessions to recover from what happened discouraging or overwhelming?

  • Are you struggling with feeling normal in the way you interact in the world?

  • Have you struggled with people pleasing or shame for a long time?

  • Do you feel like you are in fight or flight all the time?

  • Are you working with a therapist, but the progress has slowed or paused due to past trauma(s)?

Heal and move forward from those hard moments in life from the comfort of your own space.

What is an
EMDR
intensive?

An intensive takes the regular EMDR treatment, which can take months or longer, into a shorter time frame. Weekly, 60-minute session EMDR can take a month or longer to fully process one moment or event. Intensives can last 1-3 days, each session lasting 3-4 hours, allowing the brain to stay in the healing space where processing and relearning take place for a longer period of time.

EMDR believes that your brain has a natural ability to heal. The work we do is just the needed treatment to allow your brain to do what it already can.

Learn more about EMDR

What is Internal Family Systems?

I love using Internal Family Systems (IFS) with my clients!! You may have heard it called “parts” work. IFS believes that the mind is naturally in multiple states, which is a normal and good thing. You see this when you talk to yourself, when you say, “a part of me wants dessert but a part of me wants to work out”, or when something happens, and you get activated and find yourself cleaning or organizing.

When using IFS in therapy, the goal is to be able to be fully present in a compassionate way for every part that shows up and heal the wounds that get activated, like those that make you need to organize everything. When the healing occurs, you finally feel in control, because those parts do not have to take control anymore.

Using IFS only 55 minutes at a time can be helpful, but it often takes time to really start to hear the part, have empathy for it, learn about it, and gain any permission to work on those underlying wounds. Intensives can be amazingly insightful and create HUGE progress when using IFS. The extra time allows you to stay connected to a part of you that is finally communicating, making the most of those precious minutes that will allow you to really heal yourself.

  • Pre Intensive

    This first session lasts 120 minutes. During that time, we will identify your goal for the time we spend together. The main point of the pre-intensive is to do the pre-work to identify any significant history, as well as memories, beliefs, or feelings you would like to heal from. You will also learn coping skills and tools to use during the intensive.

    When using IFS, we will identify those significant parts that need to be focused on…the ones that show up and cause the struggle that brought you in.

  • Customized Intensive

    This takes place 3 hours at a time. Some people choose to do one intensive, some choose to do a couple a week, and some want one a month for a few months instead of going to weekly therapy.

    I tend to use a combination of IFS and EMDR. What this means is that we will identify any part of you that is protecting the hurt and pain (such as perfectionism, obsession, or being a fixer), understand it and work to gain its permission to work on the hurt, and healing the wounds using EMDR.

    If you have ever done EMDR or therapy and it stalled, it may be because a part of you didn’t agree to move forward. This is why IFS and gaining permission from those protective parts is necessary.

  • Post Intensive Debrief

    The debrief session will last 90 minutes and occur days after the intensive. The purpose of this session is to reflect on the intensive experience, reinforce anything that may be needed, and identify any next steps that may be needed to continue towards your goals.

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FAQs

  • All sessions will be virtual. As long as you have internet access, you can do an intensive. I would suggest a quiet and relaxing place, as it is called an intensive for a reason. You can get an airbnb or hotel, making it a day just for you and schedule a massage after. You can do it from the comfort of your own home in your favorite chair. As long as you are in North Carolina, you can be anywhere.

  • Each 3 hour intensive is $495. If you are a current client, this is all that each intensive will cost you.

    New clients will also need to complete the pre-intensive session at $260 and the post session which will be $195.

  • I do not accept insurance for intensives.

  • Intensives can be a larger cost up front, however, if you add up the cost of weekly sessions you will find that the cost is significantly less.

    When working through trauma, I often find that we really get going about 30 or so minutes into the session. So, in a regular 55 minute session, this gives us about 10-15 minutes per week to do the deep work before we have to wind down so that you can get back to your life.

    It can feel like trying to push a car uphill.

    In an intensive, you get 2 and a half hours of deep work. Can you imagine how much farther that can take you?!

    Intensives allow you do stay in the moment and do the deep work without having to stop and making actual movement forward.

  • Each intensive is 3 hours long. How many you choose depends on your goals, symptoms, and progress made. One intensive may be exactly what you need, and you may decide that you want to really dive deep and do multiple intensives.

  • I do not want finances to stop anyone from being able to feel like they can function in life. So, reach out and we can see what would work.

Finding the right therapist is the first step.

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