Why I love EMDR Intensives - Complete a recent event in one session!

There are many reasons why I love EMDR intensives… they’re highly efficient and productive, they allow for accelerated healing and growth, and they bring relief to clients in a shorter period of time. I especially love being able to address a recent traumatic event during an EMDR intensive session. Typically, recent events are faster to heal with EMDR in general because the information is not embedded into the long term memory yet, and it’s not yet connected to a lifetime of neural networks. When we can combine this with an intensive session, the progress is so fast! 

During one of my three hour EMDR intensive sessions, I used the PRECI protocol to address a recent traumatic event. (Side note, if you’re not familiar with the PRECI protocol, I highly recommend it. You can check it out here). It was incredible! In three hours, we had enough time to complete the entire protocol, including the future template. I was amazed! I was fairly confident that we would only need one intensive session to address the recent event, but you don’t know for sure until you get into it. Every time I have a session work out the way I had planned and hoped it would go, I feel like a rock star therapist. 

One of my favorite parts about addressing recent traumatic events in the intensive format is that I can bring relief to a client in just one day. It amazes me every single time that I witness such a massive transformation from the beginning to the end of just one session. I’m constantly comparing intensive sessions to how this would have played out in a traditional one hour session. My conclusion is always the same, if we had done this in a one hour, weekly session format, it would have felt so much worse because we would have had to open it up and shut it down, open it up, shut it down. But instead we got through the whole thing in just one day.

This is a huge reason why I'm only working in the intensive therapy model now. I believe the intensive model is a better way to deliver relief and healing. The more intensive sessions I complete, the stronger I believe this is true.

If you're thinking about working intensively, try it out! If you have already started to work in the intensive model, I highly encourage you keep doing it because it is so powerful and transformative.