What they are and how they can help
EMDR Intensives have been shown to help people process in a shorter amount of time. Some therapists solely do intensives vs. single sessions. These therapists all report faster processing. Processing happens faster because there is no need to stop in the middle of a target and wait until the following week to pick it back up again.
The therapists I know of offer intensives lasting 6 hours over several days (or less if the work is complete). After this, they have brief follow ups to see how the client is doing and if more processing is needed. The therapist whose training I attended shared that oftentimes they can work through most or all of the disturbances a person is having in a weekend. My thoughts at the time were ‘this is amazing but I’m not sure I would like to do it’, and I tucked the idea in the back of my mind.
Recently, the thought of intensives has sounded more appealing to me. I had several clients who were somewhat frustrated at their slower process. For example: they had a 60 minute session that decreased their level of disturbance to 4 (on a scale of 0-10). We “contained’ the material that was processed. Also, they had practiced tools to prevent being triggered by the memory during the week. Ideally, the level of disturbance would stay the same or decrease. However, in this case, the level of disturbance had actually increased.
Life happens!
The clients who seemed to be ‘stuck’ were those who returned to a lonely house, or a chaotic house, or they experienced a negative event during the week. Each week after making progress, they returned to their environment. They had learned some good tools to help them stay regulated during the week, but in all of the chaos that is life, they may have forgotten to use those tools. The events of the week increased their disturbance. At times, It seemed they were taking one step forward and two steps back.
I suggested to a frustrated client that we could try an intensive. He agreed to try it for a 3 hour time span. I was amazed at how quickly he was able to resolve each of the targets we worked on. And, at a check-in one month later, he reported no disturbance for any of the targets, despite having lost a good friend to cancer during that month.
How can I offer intensives?
I began to wonder how I could offer this to people without wearing myself out by working on weekends and maintaining my weekly clients. Here’s what I came up with:
-Offer intensives for 3-6 hours either at a time when there is a large gap between clients or on my business management day.
-Offer them only to clients after we have worked together to build a good therapeutic relationship. They are able to calm their nervous system and are staying within the window of tolerance most of the time, and are actively using the resources (tools) they learned. These tools serve to help them regulate if and when they became triggered.
I’m predicting that it will be very helpful for clients and I will post blogs about the results!
