Do You Want To Experience Deeper Healing From Trauma?
Have you been suffering from trauma, anxiety, or relationship issues that just won’t go away? Deep down, does it ever feel like you’re:
Carrying more than you can handle?
Stuck in past patterns that are no longer serving you?
Struggling to balance your busy life with your own need for healing?
Maybe a painful experience has left you feeling scared, vulnerable, and hypervigilant. Perhaps you’re not entirely sure if there’s trauma in your past, but you get the feeling that something’s not quite right—your sleep is poor, your motivation is low, and your relationships are unsatisfactory. Sometimes you might even feel like you’re not present in your body or own life. As determined as you are to heal from the pain of the past, you may not know where to start.
Maybe You’ve Tried Therapy, But Haven’t Found The Breakthrough You’re Looking For
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If you’re like many people, you may have spent years trying to heal your emotional wounds and move on from the pain of the past. Yet standard therapy hasn’t given you the relief you wanted. Perhaps the sessions lacked focus or were too infrequent for you to build and maintain momentum from week to week. On the other hand, maybe you struggled to find time in your busy schedule for weekly sessions.
If this is the case, then an EMDR intensive with The Abundant Life Institute may be perfect for you. Drawing on the evidence-based, trauma-informed wisdom of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), an intensive allows you to process and resolve your trauma in a more focused and accelerated manner. This is a great option for people looking for a structured approach to healing trauma that can easily fit into their busy schedules.
How Do I Know If An EMDR Intensive Is Or Isn’t Right For Me?
If you’re too busy for weekly therapy, but you’re struggling with challenges that you know you can’t keep putting off, then an EMDR retreat may be the most practical option. That said, there are occasionally times when an EMDR intensive may not be the right choice. If you have a history of complex trauma—trauma that has many layers and has taken place over a long period of time—intensives may not leave you with enough time to fully process and resolve your pain.
Why? That’s because intensives work best to address one issue or one traumatic event. When trauma is the result of repeated emotional injuries—such as happens in a long-term abusive relationship—it can be hard to undo the effects in a matter of days. If you have extensive trauma in your past, you can certainly experience relief after an EMDR intensive, but you may not experience the same level of healing that you would in a more long-term format.
An EMDR Intensive Is a Chance To Achieve A Mental And Emotional Reset
At Abundant Life, our EMDR retreats offer a focused way of doing therapy where you spend several hours—or even a whole day or weekend—working on healing unresolved trauma. Our intensives are designed for people who want a deeper reset. They can provide you with new coping skills, new insights into trauma, and a new sense of purpose in your life.
Many of our therapists are trained in EMDR, and our practice’s founder, Betsy Mejias, is an EMDR-certified consultant who provides expert consultations for our staff. Our approach is client-led, trauma-informed, and built on the belief that you are the expert on your life—our mission is to help you achieve your goals and offer unconditional support on your journey toward healing from trauma.
What To Expect In EMDR Intensive Sessions
The first step of EMDR treatment is the resourcing stage, where we’ll equip you with real-life tools for lowering your stress and staying grounded throughout therapy. You’ll gain mindfulness skills, grounding techniques, breathing exercises, and other strategies for calming your mind, body, and spirit.
Once you’re ready, we’ll begin the bilateral stimulation part of treatment. After identifying a “target” memory to focus on, you’ll engage in a series of audio, visual, and tactile exercises while safely processing your trauma. You and your therapist will continue these exercises until the emotional charge associated with your trauma does not affect you as heavily.
Although intensives offer a more uninterrupted format than standard therapy, there will still be regular breaks throughout treatment, giving you adequate time to eat, recharge, etc. The entire intensive package consists of seven hours, and you are welcome to divide those seven hours however you see fit.
What Does The Research Say About EMDR Intensives?
Research shows that intensive trauma therapy can be as effective as weekly therapy, and in some cases even more effective for resolving PTSD and trauma symptoms. As a practice, we’ve witnessed many of our clients find sustained healing through focused and extended treatment.
Because you’re not stopping every hour and starting therapy again the next week, intensives give you space to actually process what’s underneath the surface. That momentum often creates breakthroughs that weekly therapy just can’t deliver—at least not as quickly.
Additionally, intensives allow for a more focused and streamlined therapeutic experience. Oftentimes, clients who’ve done weekly therapy find it fragmented—sessions tend to spend a great deal of time cycling through weekly updates, and new skills and insights usually get lost in the shuffle of people’s busy lives.
An EMDR intensive makes it easier to sustain the gains made in therapy, since you are essentially packing months’ worth of treatment into a short space.
You Don’t Have To Keep Carrying The Weight Of The Past
Through the power of intensive EMDR treatment, you can put the pain of yesterday behind you and embrace a brighter, more joyful tomorrow. Our EMDR therapists have all undergone rigorous training to ensure that we can help you find lasting relief from trauma. To get in touch with us, schedule a free, 20-minute phone consultation by using our contact page or calling (770) 246-2822.
