What If Healing Didn't Have to Take All Year?

You know the feeling you've been carrying.

The anxiety that shows up uninvited. The reaction that's always a little too big for the moment. The memory that still tightens your chest, even now.

You've maybe thought about therapy — or you're already in it, and there's something that keeps not quite shifting. But another standing weekly appointment, squeezed between everything else, for who-knows-how-long? That's a lot to take on.

What if there were another way in?

What a Therapy Intensive Actually Is

A therapy intensive is focused, dedicated time to do deep work — and actually feel it move.

Instead of a single hour each week, you set aside a morning, a day, or a stretch of consecutive days to work on one thing you're ready to heal. No stopping and restarting. No losing your place. No spending the first ten minutes catching up on what happened since last time. Just real, trauma-informed work, paced with care, with you in the driver's seat the whole way.

It's well-suited to the kinds of things that trace back to something earlier — and especially powerful with approaches like EMDR, IFS, and somatic therapy, which genuinely thrive on uninterrupted time. These are modalities that work by helping the nervous system process what it's been holding. Give them more time, and they can go further.

Who This Is For

Intensives aren't just for people in crisis, and they're not the same as a retreat. They're for people who are ready — who have something specific they want to work on and who want to move through it with more momentum than a weekly schedule allows.

That might be a trauma that's been sitting there for years. A pattern you've recognized but haven't been able to shift. Grief that hasn't had enough space. An old wound that keeps showing up in your current life and relationships.

It's also for people who are already in weekly therapy and want to go deeper on something specific, without stepping away from the ongoing work they're doing with their own therapist.

Already Working With a Therapist?

An intensive can work right alongside your existing therapy — and often does its best work that way.

If you and your therapist keep circling the same stuck place — a trauma that needs focused EMDR, IFS, or somatic work to really shift — an intensive offers the dedicated time to move through it. Then you return to your therapist to continue the work you're already doing together.

We're glad to consult and collaborate with your current provider. We see adjunctive intensive work as a partnership, and we're committed to supporting the long-term therapeutic goals you're working toward with your therapist.

Therapists and providers: we welcome referrals for adjunctive intensive trauma work. We'll keep you in the loop and support the relationship you have with your client.

What This Looks Like at Our Practice

This summer, our clinicians at Family Matters of Marin are offering intensives in a range of formats — morning sessions, full days, or multi-day stretches — and we'll shape the work around your goals and your schedule. Because this has never been one-size-fits-all.

We draw on EMDR, IFS, somatic and creative therapies, and other trauma-informed methods. You'll work with a clinician who knows this terrain and can hold it with you.

If a part of you just thought *that's me* — that's worth listening to.

Reach out for a consultation and let's talk about what healing could look like, on your terms.