What If Just Three Hours Could Change Your Life?

The Power of Therapy Intensives for High Achievers

How can you change my life in 3 hours? That’s a big claim Mark. I know it is. But

I do believe it and in fact I’ve seen it! Let me explain. In traditional mental health

therapy, progress can be slow due to the fact that we only have 50 minutes at a time

to dive into your issues. Then we have to stop at 50 minutes, this is usually when my

clients are just feeling ready to do a deep dive into their issues. Then by the next time

you see your therapist a whole week has passed and you have a ton of new

information to share with your therapist. However, when we approach therapy by doing

a session with 3 hours at a time (EMDR therapy intensive) we can achieve a lot

more! But more on that later. Let me show you what I have seen with my weekly clients

and how the weekly format can slow their progress.

Here is an example of a fictious client who has some real issues that I’ve seen in

different clients over the year. Let’s call this client John. John is a lawyer; he is a top-

level lawyer in the city and wins almost all of his cases. But recently, he has felt

incredibly anxious right before all of his cases, and he does not know why. He’s tried

everything that usually works and he still feels stuck. He knows he needs to do

something about it so he reaches out to me. We establish the initial goal of helping John

with his anxiety. Then as we explore this anxiety over the first couple months of

meeting we find out that it is tied to this core belief “I’m not valuable.” Each week he

shares a variety of issues with anxiety that are related to workplace drama that keeps

happening and recurring problematic interpersonal situations that are causing big

issues. We end up talking about John’s anxiety from the week for 25 minutes. Then we

spend 15 minutes addressing John’s core belief “I’m not valuable.” Then we wrap up

the session with our last 5 minutes to make sure John feels ok enough to handle the

stressors of the upcoming week. This means we are only able to address the root

cause of John’s problems for 15 minutes out of each 50 minutes session. Then we

repeat this cycle for months. In this weekly format of therapy we are making

progress, but it is rather slow. In this format of weekly therapy, it will probably take

John many months before he is able to address this belief thoroughly and feel

better at a deep level.

Now let me explain how doing an EMDR therapy intensive (an accelerated form

of therapy where we meet for 3 hours instead of 1) can be radically helpful. Now let’s

see what John’s case could look like in an intensive format. At the beginning of the

intensive process, we will do a more thorough and deep exploration of John’s

issues before we even get started. John fills out an extensive questionnaire and

during the first session together we uncover John’s belief about not being valuable and make this the primary goal of what to address in the intensive. We schedule a 3

day intensive of 3 hours each day and from the beginning we start doing the deep

work on this belief that is causing his anxiety at work. By the end of 3 days John

shares that he is feeling calmer than he has in years. John shares that he feels at

peace during every trial and he has fully met his goal. Now John has only spent 9 hours

working on this issue, but because of the intensive format it only took him 3 days

instead of many months to feel better.

I have seen this work with multiple clients. After completing therapy intensives

with clients they often “graduate” (as some of my clients like to call it) from therapy.

They often achieve their treatment goals after we do an intensive together. This is

because we are able to do so much work in such a short amount of time. Wouldn’t it

be nice to block off one week for addressing your issues rather than an hour slot

every week for months on end? Wouldn’t it be nice to feel better within one week

rather than within months of consistent effort?

This is what we can do with EMDR therapy intensives! I offer EMDR therapy

intensives for 1 day, 2 days, or 3 days. We can achieve one month’s worth of work in

one day, 3 months worth of work in 2 days, and 6 months worth of work in 3 days!

I’ve had multiple clients who have been working on one issue for months because of

this start and stop style of weekly therapy. But then when we address in it an intensive

format we are able to work through all the remaining issues within one day or just a few

days. You don’t have to spend years in therapy to see deep and lasting results, it can

just be a matter of days for transformative and lasting change.