As a therapist immersed in the world of trauma-focused therapy, I have spent most of my career with an ear to the ground in pursuit of the most effective and transformative ways to help people in pain. Basically – of all the many tools out there, which one is the most effective? Which ones will help my clients reach their goals in the most helpful way? The truth is, there are MANY effective therapy modalities out there. And at the same time, in the arena of stuck emotional pain, one particularly powerful method is EMDR Therapy, and even more specifically, EMDR Intensives.
About EMDR
TL:DR – EMDR taps into your body’s ability to address and reprocess traumatic memories to help you integrate these experiences into a more adaptive and less distressing narrative resulting in low to no distress. Yay!
If you’ve been dancing around therapy circles for a while, you probably already have heard of EMDR. Developed by Francine Shapiro in the late 1980s, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) helps individuals process distressing memories and alleviate symptoms associated with trauma and other psychological issues. The hallmark of EMDR is bilateral stimulation, which is fancy language for alternately engaging the left and right sides of your brain. Fortunately the stimulation is pretty simple – typically facilitated through guided eye movements, auditory tones through your ear buds, or buzzers you hold in your hands.
If it’s starting to sound kinda strange, that’s because it totally feels like it is! ‘You mean, I’m going to move my eyes back and forth or listen to some beeps and suddenly feel better?’ Well, yes, kinda. One of my clients likes to call EMDR therapy ‘Voodoo Magic.’ But it’s really not voodoo, I promise!
There are lots of theories about why this bilateral stimulation works to process stuck trauma elements, and without derailing this article into a lot of complex theory the takeaway is that something about the bilateral stimulation taps into your body’s innate ability to process distressing events. In EMDR they call this the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model. AIP is why we are not all traumatized by upsetting things all the time. Most of our negative experiences in life actually do NOT get stuck as trauma. We have a bad day, get the support and rest and resource we need, and then we move on from the upsetting event – no longer upset. Why? Because just like healing a cut on your finger, your body already knows how to heal itself. It just needs the right conditions for healing like nutrition and rest. It does the rest of the healing work. The same applies to emotional and psychological distress. Your body knows how to heal itself – it just needs the right conditions. EMDR taps into and focuses that innate ability to help you finish processing elements that overwhelmed your system in the past.
So About These Intensives…
A normal EMDR therapy experience looks like 50-minute weekly sessions with a therapist. You set out your goals together, identify the material you want to work through, and start plugging away at the prep, setup, and processing over the series of a couple months for a single incident, up to a year or more if you want to get through a lot of material. Instead of spreading sessions over several weeks or months, EMDR Therapy Intensives compress the entire process into a concentrated timeframe, often 3 to 6 hours a day, for 1 to 5 days*. This condensed format allows clients to delve deeply into their healing journey without the interruptions of the standard once-a-week session model. An important note – What makes an intensive ‘intensive’ is the increased amount of time all at once; The actual emotional intensity is not increased. (Phew face)
In Your Therapist’s Own Words – Why are Intensives So Powerful?
In an attempt to fully explain the superpowers of EMDR Intensives, I enlisted the help of three Denver EMDR Intensive therapists – interviewing them to hear their experience about the transformation they’ve experienced and seen. Below is the top five list of reasons why an Intensive model is so powerful.
An Intensive means you get to feel better now rather than months or years from now
In my conversation with Sadie Smith, LMFT from Akeso Counseling who has conducted EMDR Intensives all over the world and is also an EMDR Intensive trainer for other therapists, Sadie compares Intensives to putting your healing on layaway. Do you remember layaway? For those of you are new to this concept – layaway is when you didn’t quite have all the cash on hand to pay for everything at once, so instead you have the store hold onto your purchases for you. You’d come in over time and make payments, and then once you’d paid for everything, you would get to take your purchases home.
Sadie shares how traditional, weekly therapy is the layaway program of trauma healing. You come in week after week, pay your time bit by bit, and at the end, you get to ‘take home’ your healing. She states “With an Intensive, you just mitigate or eliminate a lot of that. Clients can get their lives back or get to their lives faster.” What most people don’t realize is that with a lot of trauma healing you don’t need to spread it out in the traditional way. It can be done in a much more condensed process.
An Intensive allows you to give the pain the full attention it needs
Have you ever been talking to your therapist and right when you get to the main point of your issue, the time is up? When asked about how she would explain the benefits of Intensives to others, Kimberly Hoxie, LCSW, from South Denver Women’s Therapy whose practice is exclusively EMDR Intensive focused, says that she explains how the Intensive model, “allows me to not make decisions where I have to try to bring you to resolution before you really are ready to do that.” Doing an Intensive allows your pain to be held in the space it needs, instead of being repeatedly paused after 50 minutes.
An Intensive gets to the roots of an issue
An Intensive allows you to get to the root of issues in a way that is far more targeted and sustained than normal weekly therapy. Sharon Burgamy, LPC the owner of Sharon Burgamy Counseling emphasizes the critical importance of addressing the root causes of ongoing challenges. She says that the issues we go to therapy to heal “keep happening because of the stuff from the past. And it’s going to keep happening. Whether it’s relationships, work, whatever, fill in the blank. It’s going to keep happening unless we get to the root of these things. So, in order for you to feel this relief and not have these patterns keep repeating themselves, let’s get to the root of it. Let’s spend some time to really clear these beliefs, clear these memories so that they’re in a different part of your brain and you don’t have to struggle the way that you’re struggling now.” She continues, “You need it. You deserve that.”
Sharon’s words highlight the perpetual nature of unresolved trauma and the necessity of diving to the heart of the issue to pave the way for a more fulfilling present and future. Intensives help you do just that – providing a focused, concentrated effort to unravel the layers of trauma and provide lasting relief.
An Intensive achieves rapid progress over less time
Not only is an EMDR Intensive condensed in terms of length of treatment (days, not months), it also requires less therapy time overall to achieve the same results. If you think of a standard 50 minute session, the first few minutes are always committed to getting settled and refocusing on what you are working on. It can take 10-15 minutes to get past the hellos, the updates, the admin, and emotionally transition from the day-to-day happenings to the issues you are bringing to therapy to work on. Even a very focused, highly resourced person following an EMDR treatment plan still requires 5-10 minutes of starting, and 5-10 minutes at the end to contain the material still unprocessed. So of your 50 minute session, only 30-40 minutes of it can really be given to active processing of stuck material. Sharon Burgamy explains her experience when she states, “Until you do it, you don’t know how powerful it is… What you can do in four hours with one person sitting there is way more than you can do in four one-hour sessions.”
An Intensive allows you to process the whole of a trauma all at once, avoiding the need to manage open emotional wounds between sessions
When you talk about something painful, it brings up the unprocessed painful emotions memories, and sensations along with it. While therapists help their clients to contain the unresolved elements of trauma between standard sessions, it is still true that, as Sadie puts it, “talking about trauma activates trauma.” That’s why so many people avoid facing their trauma head-on. They don’t want to experience that negativity and consciously or not feel it would just be easier to ignore or distract from it.
Speaking of her clients, Kimberly says, “If they’ve processed trauma before, they probably know just how challenging later in the day or the next day that it can be once you start working on material.” One of the main reasons she loves Intensives so much is that you only have to open and close the material once. Kimberly states, “It’s really efficient because we don’t have to open and close, open and close.” With an Intensive, you get to skip the weeks of opening up a painful place, and slowly working through it over time and instead, move through and release the content all at once.
In essence, EMDR Therapy Intensives go beyond being just another option; they are a powerful and effective way to untangle the complexities of trauma. In the words of Sadie, Sharon, and Kimberly,
“We don’t have to open and close, open and close.” – Kimberly
“You can get your life back faster.” – Sadie
“Let’s get to the root of it. You need it. You deserve that.” – Sharon
So What Now?
If you’d like to have a face-to-face (virtual) conversation to see if an Intensive is a good fit for you, I’d love to chat more! Sign up for a Free Consultation HERE.
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