Jennifer Budhan hadn’t meant to bring up her mother. When she signed up for a therapy intensive last year, she’d intended to use the time—20 hours total, across six sessions—to work through her fear of public speaking. But Budhan, herself a licensed clinical social worker and founder of EMDR therapy practice Soulful Flow, was still wrestling with enormous grief over the loss of her mother to pancreatic cancer seven months earlier. “I didn’t go in wanting to work on grief and loss, but that’s what came up. That’s what my body wanted to work on,” Budhan tells goop.
Those 20 hours changed her life. Her intensive started with three, four-hour sessions held over one long weekend, followed by a virtual four-hour session the following Friday. As a parent with a full-time job, she’d been compartmentalizing her grief. “I was facing it for 20 minutes here, 20 minutes there. But to be able to really be with my grief and allow whatever wanted to show up to show up—it was so profound. Weekly therapy, even 90-minute sessions, could never offer healing in the same way,” she says.
Therapy intensives are a burgeoning trend in the self-help space. Rather than a standard 50-minute session, therapy intensives involve multiple-hour sessions and/or take place over many consecutive days. “Think of it less like a slow drip and more like an immersive deep dive into a specific issue or pattern,” says Lesley Kirkpatrick, a Nova Scotia-based psychiatrist and founder of the mind-training mental health app mindcomb. They claim to deliver the benefits of months or even years of traditional therapy sessions in a much shorter time frame—sometimes just 24 hours.
In her own practice, Budhan has seen increasing interest among people who’ve already been in therapy for years. “I don't think someone without any therapeutic experience comes into an intensive,” she says. Instead, the people drawn to the practice “have been doing this work for some time, and are feeling like something's not shifting. There are improvements, there's more awareness—but this thing is still stuck, or this thing is still happening, and they really want to viscerally feel different,” Budhan says.
And that’s what therapy intensives can offer: an opportunity to feel transformed—if not always overnight, then still much more quickly than you could imagine.
What Happens In a Therapy Intensive?
A therapy intensive often involves sitting through multiple hours of therapeutic work, for one or several consecutive days. It may take place in a regular therapist office setting, but could also be a part of a residential treatment program, says psychologist Tamar Chansky, Ph.D., author of Freeing Yourself From Anxiety.
Therapy intensives are led by mental health professionals and typically have a specific goal, such as to treat a phobia or address a deep-seated trauma. Intensives may focus on a single modality, such as cognitive behavioral training, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Internal Family Systems, or somatic therapy, or they may combine multiple modalities.
They’re not the same as a wellness retreat, Kirkpatrick says. The latter may offer hours of therapeutic-adjacent activities each day, but may not be led by a trained professional, may focus on alternative treatments, or may be aimed at more holistic well-being rather than targeted treatment.
They often require you to turn over whole days to treatment—and that’s part of the benefit. Therapy intensives force you to take some time out of your regular life and focus on one specific problem, Chansky says. People often squeeze traditional therapy into their regular life, even toggling between virtual therapy and work with barely a few minutes' break to process the session. But therapy intensives take space. Being able to take a step away from the rest of your world—and any unhealthy patterns, behaviors, or triggers you’re trying to let go of—isn’t a requirement to work through problems, but it can be helpful, Chansky says.
What Can Therapy Intensives Be Used For?
Therapy intensives can be used to help manage a variety of diagnosable mental health conditions, Chansky says: OCD, PTSD, substance use disorders, generalized anxiety disorder, depression.
But increasingly, she says people are using it for less-defined reasons: to work through an attachment issue, to heal grief, to process a major life transition. “Maybe it’s because lives are so busy and cluttered, and people are thinking about how to clear space to really focus,” Chansky says. Therapy intensives may offer some people a way to “really focus on something that’s causing them distress or pain or interfering with their life.”
Research backs up the benefits of therapy intensives, but the strongest studies focus on its use for PTSD, phobias, or anxiety disorders, Kirkpatrick says. For instance, people who did 10 sessions of prolonged exposure therapy (a type of cognitive behavioral therapy designed to treat PTSD) in two weeks had fewer symptoms at a follow-up appointment than those who did the same number of sessions over eight weeks, JAMA Network reports. There’s also evidence that one intensive session of therapy can treat anxiety disorders and phobias as well as multiple sessions.
Therapy intensives have some obvious upsides. Mainly: fewer sessions to yield faster results. For others, convenience is a big draw. “People who travel frequently or work unpredictable hours are turning to intensives as a practical solution, traveling to see a specialist for a long weekend rather than trying to find someone qualified locally and carve out a recurring weekly slot for months,” Kirkpatrick says.
Budhan compares the practice to surgery for a chronic issue. Maybe you’ve tried alternative treatments, including pain medication and physical therapy, and they help a little. But finally you get so fed up with the issue that you take the plunge and get surgery. The immediate aftermath is hard—you’re achy, you have to recover. But once that’s passed, you feel relief. “It requires a lot of intense investment, but afterward you feel better than you have in years,” she says.
For Budhan, that relief came in the weeks after her intensive. Seven months after her mother died, she still couldn’t think about her without breaking down into profound tears, she remembers. But shortly after the intensive, she thought about her mother and smiled. “I was able to sit with the memory of her and just be happy, thinking about her. I hadn’t been able to do that,” she says. “That felt like, ‘Wow, something’s different.’”
The Downsides of Therapy Intensives
For the right person, therapy intensives can be transformative and speed up healing. But, as Kirkpatrick puts it, “Intensive does not mean ‘better’. It means ‘different’.” And this approach isn’t for everyone.
For one, the work can be, well, intense. The compressed format is emotionally exhausting and may be too much for someone in acute crisis to go through, Kirkpatrick says. (That might include someone experiencing suicidal ideation or an active substance use disorder.)
Additionally, intensives are often expensive and may not be fully covered by insurance, she adds. Budhan considers the practice an investment. “It’s a big upfront cost. But in some ways it saves money, because you get a lot further on a core issue in a short time than you would with years of 45- or 50-minute sessions,” she says.
Some of the benefits of therapy intensives have drawbacks as well, including the compressed time frame. Yes, intensives can fast-track breakthroughs. But they lack “the rhythm of time between sessions,” Kirkpatrick says. “That week of living with new insight, practicing a tool, noticing a pattern in real life, and bringing it back to the next session is not filler. It is part of how change actually happens. For some people, that gradual cadence builds emotional capacity in a way that concentrated work cannot replicate.”
There’s also a lack of research looking at the long-term effects of these programs, so it’s hard to know how long the results last—especially if people don’t seek out continued therapeutic support going forward, Kirkpatrick says.
Another risk baked into the intensive model is that people may see it primarily as a way to experience a big transformation without a major commitment of their time or effort. Therapy intensives can feel exciting and seismic—but chasing that high-stimulation experience can become its own kind of avoidance, Kirkpatrick cautions. Long-term transformation is founded on small changes, made slowly and maintained over time—even when it gets boring or difficult.
What to Ask Yourself Before Booking a Therapy Intensive
Therapy intensives can be used to treat specific conditions or help you break through stubborn mental blocks. If you’re interested in trying one, these five questions can help you make sure you’re fully prepared.
Are you a good fit?
First, ask yourself if you really want to do a therapy intensive and why. While it’s useful to know all the mental health options that are available to you, different people are best suited to different modalities. And if you don’t feel like you have a strong reason or desire to take part in an intensive, it likely won’t help you, Chansky says. And that’s fine! She likens it to taking off a bandage: Whether you prefer to peel it off slowly or rip it off in one go is up to you, and both methods will get you to the same end result, just at different speeds.
Do you have the right practitioner?
Finding the right person to lead your intensive may take some research. A good place to start is by talking to your current therapist, who might offer intensives themselves or recommend someone else. “You want someone with substantial, specific training in the modality they are offering, not simply someone packaging regular sessions differently,” Kirkpatrick says. “Ask about their clinical background, their approach to safety and pacing, what happens if you become overwhelmed, and what aftercare support looks like. Many reputable providers will do a consultation call and may coordinate with your existing therapist.”
Do you have a support system in place?
We often feel rocked by a single, 50-minute therapy session. So just imagine the emotional hangover that can result from a six-hour treatment. Chansky suggests telling a few trusted loved ones that you’re taking part in an intensive, so you have people to turn to for support if the going gets rough. You may also want to plan and prepare a handful of self-care activities ahead of time to make it easier to nourish yourself when you’re feeling drained.
What’s your reintegration plan?
“The work does not end when the session does,” Kirkpatrick says. Often, even short intensives might include one or more follow-up sessions a few weeks later. Budhan’s therapy intensive included two two-hour follow-up sessions about a month later, which gave her an opportunity to discuss any additional issues or insights that had come up after the work she did in the intensive had time to “settle.” It’s a chance to make sure you’ve applied the lessons learned during the intensive to your “real life” and that you have all the support you need.
What’s your plan for the weeks and months after?
“Intensives work best as a catalyst or complement, not a substitute,” Kirkpatrick says. She and Chansky suggest continuing to see a therapist for traditional sessions. “After being in that intensive environment, checking in with someone who understands what you just did can help reinforce those skills as a person returns to other aspects of their life, whether it's their job or socializing. That continuity of care is really important,” Chansky says. You may start with weekly follow-ups, then taper off over time if you find you can maintain your results.