IFS Intensives
Intensives are an alternate approach to therapy that is unique bespoke, and digs deeper.
One of the most important and powerful features of IFS, that sets it apart from other types of therapy, is that the mechanism of action is 100% inside of the client, in the interaction between their Self and their parts.
IFS Therapy demands a great deal of courage and dedication from the client.
You are freely choosing to confront aspects of your own desires, fears, losses, and traumas that are often very painful, and that you have spent most of your life attempting to forget or ignore or cover up.
People who are already engaged in regular psychotherapy can also benefit from intensives.
Very often, a person will make reasonable progress for some time in weekly psychotherapy and then run into some particular issue where they feel especially stuck or their progress stalls out. In such cases, an intensive can help the person do the deep, focused work necessary to work through that particularly difficult issue, and then build on that progress in their weekly psychotherapy.
An IFS intensive can accomplish in a few days what would take up to 6 months of weekly psychotherapy, with drastically less emotional distress and life disruption.
Because the process is so brief and concentrated, it allows participants to clear their schedules, arrange childcare, get sufficient sleep, etc, so that they can devote 100% of their attention and energy to the psychological healing process for a few days, then fully recover and apply their newfound perspective and capacity to the important work of their lives.
How does an IFS Intensive work?
An IFS Intensive is a highly concentrated period of IFS psychotherapy, typically a total of 15 hours over 4-5 days.
There is a 90-minute pre-session a few days before the intensive to set goals, orient me to your system, history, and needs, and make any necessary preparations for the intensive.
The intensive itself is 12 hours of psychotherapy spread out over 2-3 days, depending on your preferences and schedule.
There is a 90-minute post-session a few days after the intensive to help consolidate your progress and plan how to integrate your new insights and growth into your daily life.
Transformational psychotherapy is much more like surgery than it is like having a comforting conversation with a friend.
Imagine if a person had a cancerous tumor that they needed surgery to remove, and the entire surgical process, start to finish, would take 6 hours. The first 15 minutes would just be the surgeon sterilizing instruments, scrubbing in, administering anesthesia, etc. The last 15 minutes would be sewing the patient back up, sterilizing the wound, and checking to make sure they were ready to go back out into the world.
Imagine that a health insurance company told the surgeon that they could only operate on the patient in 45 minute increments, once per week. Each time they would scrub in, anesthetize the patient, actually operate for 15 minutes, then immediately sew them back up and send them home to wait 6 days until the next operation. Even the absolute best surgeons in the world would take 6 months to complete an operation that could have been done in an afternoon, and the patient would spend that entire 6 month period suffering not only from the cancer itself, but also from the enormous pain of being repeatedly cut open and sewed back up week after week.
