Online across California & Oregon
EMDR Intensives
Personalized therapy experiences. 3-hour, 1-day, and 3-day formats available. Find relief & experience change. . . fast.
Is traditional therapy just not cutting it anymore?
You’ve done the work. You’ve learned the skills. But something is still holding you back.
You don’t have the time to commit to weekly therapy sessions
Weekly appointments no more: Stop scheduling your weeks around therapy sessions. Process more information in a shorter amount of time: Dedicate 1-3 days to focus on healing, growth, and connection, much like a wellness retreat.
You’re seeking deeper, more concentrated healing
Don’t just cope with anxiety and stress - learn the root of it. We will “pull the dandelion out from the roots” and plant new seeds instead. It’s possible to not feel anxious. It’s possible to not doubt yourself. It’s possible to believe in your “enough-ness.”
You’re in the right place.
EMDR Intensives can help you accomplish in one session what might take months in traditional therapy.
What is an intensive?
EMDR (Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) Intensives provide a faster way to heal from trauma and anxiety. EMDR is a highly researched therapy that has been proven effective for treating anxiety and trauma symptoms, helping us rewire our memories so that we process emotions and change the way we think about ourselves and our memories so that we are no longer coping with negative thoughts and feelings that showed up because of trauma.
EMDR is well-researched and recommended by leading health organizations around the world. Because EMDR is so effective and it isn’t talk therapy, there’s no reason to spread it out once a week over a long period of time, when extended sessions produce fast and effective results. Our clients have reported massive transformation with their relationship to the distressing memories, shifting from feeling “highly impacted” to feeling “zero impact” by the end of our work together.
1
Pre-Intensive Assessment
Prior to scheduling, we will have a 20-minute consultation to assess fit and the right length of service for you. I’ll ask you some questions to determine your goals, and you can ask me anything you want about how I work and what to expect. If everything seems like a good fit, we will schedule your intensive. You will receive a pre-intensive questionnaire.
2
Intensive Session
We dive right in! You made an investment in your healing and I want to help you get the most you possibly can out of it.
We begin with reviewing the schedule, expectations, and making sure we are specifically targeting your goals. We will do some guided visualization in order to practice some tools to regulate if anything starts to feel too intense in session.
I will guide you to identify target memories, then we will begin the trauma processing and crank out as much as we can.
3
Post-Intensive Follow-Up
If you so choose, we can have a follow-up session or sessions to process what came up during the intensive, or go back and fine tune anything we missed. You will also receive a post-intensive questionairre in order to compare and celebrate your progress from before the intensive.
It is recommended to have an individual therapist to process with after the intensive, whether it is with me or someone else.
WHAT YOU GET
Evidence-based treatment
A partner on your journey to healing
Lasting change
Cost-Efficient
Your options
Choose the right format for you.
I offer intensives in a few formats, depending on your budget, needs, & goals.
-
Get a big head start
Perfect for recent incidents
Specific time to efficiently target your goals
Investment: $600
-
Perfect for going deep
Uninterrupted time to make significant progress
Months of therapy condensed into one day
Investment: $1200
-
Rework your life story
An opportunity to deeply look at why you feel the way you do, process it, and transform it
Big results. This could be months if not years of therapy condensed into a 3 day retreat
Leave feeling like a new person (in a good way)
Investment: $3600
Imagine finally getting to. . .
✓ Resolve deep wounds
No one makes it out of childhood unscathed. Whether it’s a capital T “Trauma” or lowercase t “trauma,” your experiences have shaped you into the person you are today. Your brain knows it’s in the past, but your body keeps the score. You don’t have to be stuck feeling the way you feel forever.
✓ Experience accelerated healing
In an ideal world, everyone would get to do an EMDR intensive. You deserve to feel better in a timely way. We’re so used to doing what insurance says is the “norm.” Why wait to feel better when you could feel better now and start living the life you deserve?
✓ Overcome the obstacles that make you feel stuck
Whether it’s struggling to communicate your feelings, avoidance of intimate relationships, poor sleep, feeling shame about who you are, or any other number of trauma symptoms, you don’t have to live that way forever.
Find the healing you’ve been seeking.
FAQs
Other intensive questions? I’ve got answers.
-
Our brains have a natural way of storing memories in a healthy way. However, when we experience traumatic moments, our brains (thank goodness) go into survival mode and are not able to store the memory effectively. That’s why trauma can feel so fresh and like it’s happening now. Our bodies feel like it IS happening now because our brains weren’t able to store the memory effectively.
Everyone has been through trauma of some sort—whether it’s a criticism a parent made that had a profound effect on you, a loss, or even abuse. EMDR is designed to address a wide range of those traumatic experiences without requiring you to discuss them in depth.
EMDR helps brains that have been affected by trauma process the traumatic memory and store them effectively, like any other memory, creating distance, integrating new positive beliefs about yourself, and releasing the power this memory has on you. While you’ll never approve of the trauma, you can be free from it. Human nervous systems are experientially built and experientially edited. We create a present moment experience that will neurologically challenge the emotional learning of your past.
If your trauma taught you that you are unloveable, we create a moment where you feel deeply loved, and KABOOM! Your brain realizes these two experiences can’t both be true and reconsolidates the traumatic memory, integrating the feeling of being loved.
-
Individual therapy tends to be 50 minutes per week, because this is what insurance covers and is good practice for talk therapy. In individual therapy, it’s expected to need time between sessions to practice coping skills and strategies discussed in session to implement in real life. EMDR is actually designed to be done in longer chunks, because with trauma processing, the more time you have, the deeper you can go and the more you can achieve. You can certainly do EMDR in individual therapy, but in the time it takes to get settled into therapy, discuss the events/stressors of the week, and wind down by the end of the appointment, EMDR processing can be shortchanged. Individual therapy is also more relational in nature, where an intensive is more outcome-focused.
For research on EMDR intensives, click here
-
You are:
Ready to do deep work
feeling stuck in your current therapy
Wanting to make therapeutic gains and don’t have a lot of time
Ready for relief, fast
You are not:
Experiencing a mental health crisis (intensives are not a substitute for crisis services)
Actively in a suicide crisis (if you are, please contact your local crisis line)
-
Traumatic or distressing memories
Anxiety related to driving, air travel, or performance
Grief/Loss
Phobias
Anxious or Avoidant attachment styles
Low self-esteem
Childhood trauma
Chronic pain/Tinnitus
Witnessing or experiencing assault or violent acts
Stress reduction
Life transitions (Job loss, Relationship loss, etc.)
Uncovering the reason for getting activated in situations now that don’t make sense anymore
Performance Enhancement
-
EMDR has no homework. That said, you can prepare in the following ways:
Make sure you have a space free from distractions, with privacy, and with a good internet connection when you take the session.
If you want to bring any comfort items to the session, such as a weighted blanket, tea, essential oils, or whatever feels right to you, please do so.
I also recommend not using mind-altering substances in the 24-hour period before and after the session, as your brain will continue to process and re-consolidate information in that time.
Bring a clear sense of 1-3 goals you would like to target in the session
If you so choose, bring a journal, and journal about what you notice after the appointment
-
Yes! I guide you through the process and it is all about you noticing your own internal experience. Studies have been done that indicate online EMDR is just as effective as in-person EMDR.
-
Click the link below to schedule your free, 20-minute consultation to see if we are a good fit. If we are, we can schedule then and there! If none of the consult times available work for you, email me at hello@emmabridgeslcsw.com and I’ll be sure to get you in.