THERAPY INTENSIVES · SAN MATEO
Sometimes you need more than an hour.
There are times when you finally get to the thing that matters and then the session is over.
Maybe your schedule makes weekly therapy difficult. Maybe something has happened and you need more time than a regular session gives you. That’s what intensives are for.
THE THREE FORMATS
Half Day
Three and a half hours, with breaks.
Two Days
Two consecutive full days. What happens overnight between them is part of the work.
Full Day
Seven hours, including an hour for lunch.
Every intensive starts with an intake
Scheduled separately, before the day itself. It’s what makes the day work.
The day itself has a shape.
We begin with what we agreed to focus on. We work in blocks with real breaks, because the breaks matter more than people expect. Something usually shifts in the middle of the day, and there’s still time left to do something with it.
We close by talking about what changed and what you’re taking with you. Most people want at least one follow-up session to see what held. Those are scheduled separately.
COUPLES INTENSIVES
A weekly hour often isn’t enough to get anywhere. You spend twenty minutes arriving, hit something real, and then it’s time to go and you carry it home unfinished.
A full day means we can go past the argument and into what’s underneath it, and still have hours left to work on it.
INDIVIDUAL INTENSIVES
Useful when there’s something specific: a breakup you can’t get past, a decision that’s been sitting on you, a pattern you understand completely and can’t interrupt.
This is also where EMDR does some of its best work. Reprocessing has a natural arc, and an hour sometimes ends before that arc finishes.
WHAT AN INTENSIVE ISN’T
It isn’t a faster version of therapy that gets you a year’s work in a day. It’s a different shape, better suited to some things and not to others.
It isn’t a rescue. A day of good work doesn’t undo what took years to build.
It isn’t the right container if there’s violence or ongoing abuse in the relationship, or if untreated addiction is driving what’s happening. It also isn’t right if one partner is being brought in to be fixed. I’ll say so at the intake, and help you find what would actually help.
I don’t publish fees. Call or email and we’ll talk about which format fits and what it costs.