Custom Trauma Intensives
We specialize in creating custom intensives for adults and adolescents (ages 13 and up) wanting to process past traumas. Utilizing a blend of Trauma Informed Care, EMDR, Accelerated Resolution Therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, we help clients identify and work through past traumatic experiences on a 1-5 day basis. Most clients work through and confront various identified topics during their time in intensive therapy. This format can be an excellent jumpstarter to processing something that may feel daunting to do so on a weekly basis in therapy.
If you feel you have hit a wall in regular therapy, or would like to dive deep into topics that may be too much to navigate week after week, intensives are a great option. We work diligently to prep you for your intensive, and identify goals to help you get the most out of your time in intensive counseling.
Trauma work done intensively can help you process what may take months or years to work through in individual therapy, helping you find rapid relief and get back to what we are meant to do, live and experience joy. Although intensives are rapid, they give you the tools to know how to re-envision your story in a way that feels less distressful. Each intensive day is 6-7 hours, but if shorter times are needed, that can be accommodated.
Topics we can create an intensive for:
Attachment Trauma
Sexual Abuse Trauma
Betrayal Trauma
Grief Due to Unexpected Loss
Prolonged Grief
Addiction (drug, alcohol, sex, love, and pornography addictions)
Chronic Relapse
Early Childhood Trauma
Emotional Childhood Neglect
PTSD
Adoption Trauma
Single Event Trauma
Complex PTSD
Phobias
Parental Estrangement
Any Emotionally Disturbing Event
We coordinate closely with anyone on your care team, and create a curriculum and schedule that works for your desired pace of healing. We have invested into years of training to provide the highest quality of care, and have seen incredible healing happen in intensive formats. The benefit of intensive trauma work, is the investment in you, your story, and dedicating a specific period of time to your healing. If you have any questions about your specific needs and if an intensive would be beneficial, please reach out directly via email or phone call to discuss your needs further.
In preparation for your intensive, you will be provided a variety of mental health assessments to help coordinate what intensive format would best suit your needs. Given that your work with us will be brief, we invest time into getting to know YOU, so that your time in my office is both productive and healing. Assessments provide a level of insight that normally would be gained in numerous therapy sessions. They give us background information that helps us jump right and and work towards completing your goals.
Lunch, snacks, and drinks are provided to help you focus on YOU during your time at Pecan. If you have specific requests or dietary restrictions, we work with you to accommodate exactly what you need during your time with us.
Potential Assessments Utilized:
- MCMI IV: Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-IV (18+)
- MACI: Millon Adolescent Clinical Inventory (13-17 years old)
- Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI)
- Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire
- Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI)
- Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-2)
What is ART?
Accelerated Resolution Therapy is an evidence based trauma therapy utilized to help process emotionally disturbing memories. Each ART session is 90 minutes to 2 hours, involving rapid eye movement and strategic guiding by your therapist. Unlike other somatic based therapies, ART targets the visual memories associated with the identified trauma, helping you directly address the cause of your pain.
Depending on the intensity/complexity/ length of the trauma, you will have space and time to process what happened. If several sessions of ART are needed, intensive counseling gives you space and time to directly address the source of pain. This direct approach offers you space to find healing and often gives a new perspectives on what happened. After completing ART, it is normal to feel emotional relief and to experience positive imagery newly established with the memories you worked on.
For more information about ART visit: https://acceleratedresolutiontherapy.com
What is EMDR?
There is no better explanation than from EMDRIA (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing International Association). More information can be found: https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/
"EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a psychotherapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences. Repeated studies show that by using EMDR therapy people can experience the benefits of psychotherapy that once took years to make a difference. It is widely assumed that severe emotional pain requires a long time to heal. EMDR therapy shows that the mind can in fact heal from psychological trauma much as the body recovers from physical trauma. When you cut your hand, your body works to close the wound. If a foreign object or repeated injury irritates the wound, it festers and causes pain. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. EMDR therapy demonstrates that a similar sequence of events occurs with mental processes. The brain’s information processing system naturally moves toward mental health. If the system is blocked or imbalanced by the impact of a disturbing event, the emotional wound festers and can cause intense suffering. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. Using the detailed protocols and procedures learned in EMDR therapy training sessions, clinicians help clients activate their natural healing processes.
More than 30 positive controlled outcome studies have been done on EMDR therapy. Some of the studies show that 84%-90% of single-trauma victims no longer have post-traumatic stress disorder after only three 90-minute sessions. Another study, funded by the HMO Kaiser Permanente, found that 100% of the single-trauma victims and 77% of multiple trauma victims no longer were diagnosed with PTSD after only six 50-minute sessions. In another study, 77% of combat veterans were free of PTSD in 12 sessions. There has been so much research on EMDR therapy that it is now recognized as an effective form of treatment for trauma and other disturbing experiences by organizations such as the American Psychiatric Association, the World Health Organization and the Department of Defense. Given the worldwide recognition as an effective treatment of trauma, you can easily see how EMDR therapy would be effective in treating the “everyday” memories that are the reason people have low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, and all the myriad problems that bring them in for therapy. Over 100,000 clinicians throughout the world use the therapy. Millions of people have been treated successfully over the past 33 years.
EMDR therapy is an eight-phase treatment. Eye movements (or other bilateral stimulation) are used during one part of the session. After the clinician has determined which memory to target first, he asks the client to hold different aspects of that event or thought in mind and to use his eyes to track the therapist’s hand as it moves back and forth across the client’s field of vision. As this happens, for reasons believed by a Harvard researcher to be connected with the biological mechanisms involved in Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, internal associations arise and the clients begin to process the memory and disturbing feelings. In successful EMDR therapy, the meaning of painful events is transformed on an emotional level. For instance, a rape victim shifts from feeling horror and self-disgust to holding the firm belief that, “I survived it and I am strong.” Unlike talk therapy, the insights clients gain in EMDR therapy result not so much from clinician interpretation, but from the client’s own accelerated intellectual and emotional processes. The net effect is that clients conclude EMDR therapy feeling empowered by the very experiences that once debased them. Their wounds have not just closed, they have transformed. As a natural outcome of the EMDR therapeutic process, the clients’ thoughts, feelings and behavior are all robust indicators of emotional health and resolution—all without speaking in detail or doing homework used in other therapies."
Pricing: $5,000 per daily intensive
Travel to your location is also possible (in Texas only), for an extra fee.
