What is EMDR Intensive Retreat?
An “EMDR Intensive” is a therapy approach offered in a self-care retreat format. During the intensive retreat, you will target one issue or a theme within days. Longer sessions allow enough time to process the underlying problems and come to a resolution instead of carrying them with you over weeks and months. EMDR Intensives can be scheduled half-day, full-day, and up to 4 days, depending on your goals and target(s).
Expectations at the end: we cleared and finished the trauma memory decided at the beginning of the treatment.
Types of EMDR Intensives:
1.) Single Incident Intensives: A client comes in with the understanding we are working on this specific incident. (Estimated time half day-3 days/6-7h a day). Even if there are more things to work on, your intensive focuses only on the particular content we decided to address. See the following examples below.
Recent Events:
• Natural disaster
• Public violence/shooting/robbed at gunpoint
• Medical trauma
• Car accident
• Work-related trauma
Ongoing Traumatic Stress:
• First responders processing vicarious trauma
• Frontline medical workers
• Racial Trauma
• Divorce and custody battle
• Current domestic violence
• Gender identity and LGBTQ trauma
• COVID stress
• Medical trauma, e.g., Cancer
• Loss of child (including stillbirth, abortion, miscarriage)
“Stuck Beliefs & Fears” that block us in daily life:
• Avoidance of exercise
• Overeating
• Performance challenges in sports, writing, or music
• Considering a career change
• Considering a big move or lifestyle change
2.) Story clearing intensive (comprehensive treatment): Here, we address and reprocess all the trauma memories you have. (Estimated time: 4-5 days)
Childhood traumas:
• All kinds of abuse; emotional, physical, sexual, neglect
• Attachment wounds
• Bullying
• Death of parents, grandparents
• Religion or cult trauma
• Significant changes, such as moves, loss of financial stability
Advantages of EMDR Intensives
Often, clients can resolve issues and past traumas in one Intensive Retreat. This is archived because we don’t spend much time opening and closing the target memory and can process more efficiently. Moreover, the therapy plan is less hijacked by an emerging crisis of the week. There is more time to get instead to the root causes of those crises. Therefore, the results of an intensive retreat can equal weeks or months of traditional weekly therapy. Overall, you get on with your life much more quickly, and you become more effective in your job and relationships when not dealing with trauma. Last but not least, not only your life satisfaction grows significantly faster, but you also won’t be left managing symptoms in between the sessions, as is the case in the weekly format.
Please reach out to Dr. Julia for a FREE 20mins call if you are interested in this effective form of trauma treatment.
Credit to Ricky Greenwald, who has previously presented these advantages (Greenwald, R., Camden, A., Gamache, N., Lasser, K., Chapman, R., & Rattner, B (2021). Intensive trauma-focused therapy with victims of crime, European Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 5(3)
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