Who Intensive Sessions Are For

I am excited to offer IFS intensive sessions and believe they fill a meaningful gap that 50-minute sessions can’t always bridge. If you are interested in them, it’s likely that they would support you; that being said, here are some circumstances for which they are particularly adapted:

• you want to venture into deep work in a short amount of time. Maybe you are exploring what is surfacing for you around a recent experience, making an important decision, or preparing for something on the horizon.

• you are familiar with IFS from podcasts, reading, demonstration videos, meditations, or some experiences of beginning to name or notice parts of you in your therapy. You want to journey further into the IFS world with time to explore and really get to know your system.

• you are going through a difficult time and find IFS to be supportive. Intensive sessions can complement other therapy or forms of support that you’re receiving in offering a container to hold and connect with your experiences.

• you have a specific part, situation, or area of life that you want to devote sustained attention to, either as your main therapy experience or in addition to a different approach or area of focus in another therapy setting.

• 50-minute sessions just don’t do it for you! Your system needs more time to settle into the work or to transition out of it, you often feel like you would like to have more therapy, or the sessions simply feel too short.

If you are interested in intensive sessions but new to IFS, please contact me so we can talk more about what you’re hoping for. We may decide to try intensive sessions or I may ask that we begin with 50-minute individual sessions so you can feel out the approach before diving in.

What Intensive Sessions Are Like

Beyond naming parts and noticing feelings, intensive sessions are a facilitated experience of being with your own interiority. My intention is to support you in fostering relationships with your system of parts that bring feelings of connection, clarity, calm, and compassion, and that feel powerful without being overpowering. While everyone’s needs and pacing for this kind of experience vary, IFS intensives may lead to significant shifts in how you relate to yourself and the world around you, your inner dialogues and how you feel in the day to day, stuck points in different areas of your life, how well you know yourself and what you need, and how impacted you feel by past experiences, cultural messaging, and experiences carried by your ancestors.

I will support you in connecting with your parts using insight work and/or direct access techniques of IFS. If this feels comfortable for you, I will be glad to emphasize your body-based (somatic) experience using somatic IFS and other somatic techniques. I may also support you in holding experiences using emotionally focused therapy.