What if I need more than one or two-hour sessions?
Maybe you, like most people, entered therapy with hope. You were looking for relief, understanding, and meaningful change in your life. For many issues—especially situational challenges, mild anxiety, or specific behavioral changes—the traditional weekly therapy model serves well. But what about the deeper wounds? Where do you find healing from trauma that shapes your very way of being in the world or spiritual brokenness that leaves you increasingly disconnected from God and others?
If you’ve been in weekly therapy for months or even years and still find yourself caught in the same patterns, you’re not alone and you’re not failing at healing. You need a new approach.
The Hidden Limitations of Traditional Weekly Therapy
The weekly therapy model has been the standard approach for decades and we wholeheartedly recommend it. It fits neatly into our busy lives and insurance models. Yet for many people dealing with complex issues, this approach comes with inherent limitations that are rarely discussed.
The Depth-Time Paradox
Perhaps you’ve experienced something like the following. As your weekly session progresses, you begin to access deeper emotions or memories. Then, in the moment, as you recognize something truly significant, your therapist glances at the clock. “I’m sorry, but we’re out of time for today. We can pick this up next week.”
You leave the session with emotions stirred up but not processed. Raw. Vulnerable. Alone with the feelings and questions about what to do with them for a full week.
The brain doesn’t process trauma in neat 50-minute segments. When we interrupt the processing of difficult material at arbitrary time points, we can sometimes do more harm than good. The client is left to manage difficult emotions without the safety of the therapeutic relationship.
This isn’t a criticism of the highly qualified therapists who work within this model—they’re doing life changing work within a system that wasn’t designed for focused deep healing. It’s simply acknowledging a reality that many clients experience but few discuss openly.
The Reset Effect
The results of therapeutic change need time and support in order to be processed mentally, emotionally, and physically. Consider what typically happens in weekly sessions:
- You arrive and take 5-10 minutes to settle in and reconnect with your therapist
- You spend 10-15 minutes catching up on events since your last session
- You work to return to the vulnerable territory you left last week
- Then, just as you reach meaningful depth, time is up
Week after week, this cycle continues. With only about 20-30 minutes of actual therapeutic processing each session, deep healing becomes a painfully slow process—if it happens at all.
Daily Life Disruptions
Between sessions, life happens. Work issues, family tensions, and unexpected stressors arise. Many clients find themselves spending session after session dealing with the crises of the previous week rather than addressing the root causes or complex trauma behind their struggles.
“I felt like I was treading water. Every week I’d come in with good intentions to work on my childhood trauma, but something would always happen during the week that needed immediate attention. After two years, I realized we’d never even gotten to the deeper work I really needed.”
Two-Week Intensive Client
The Integration Challenge
True healing requires not only insights but integration—embodying new truths and practicing new patterns with support and guidance nearby. Weekly therapy often provides the insights but leaves clients to navigate the integration process largely on their own.
This can lead to what therapists sometimes call the “insight without change” phenomenon: clients may understand their patterns intellectually but lack the appropriate tools or perspective to translate this understanding into lived experience.
The Intensive Alternative: A Different Healing Container
At Restoring the Soul, we developed a unique intensive counseling structure around our Integrated Clinical Soulcare model specifically to address these limitations. The one and two-week intensive approach isn’t simply more therapy—it’s a fundamentally different healing environment that promotes lasting transformation at a deeper level.
Time for Actual Depth
With three hours of therapy each day, intensive counseling creates space for you to move beyond surface issues and truly address the roots of suffering. There’s time to tell your full story, to explore painful memories thoroughly, and to sit with difficult emotions until they begin to resolve.
Build and Maintain Therapeutic Momentum
One of the most powerful aspects of intensive work is the continuity it provides. Insights and breakthroughs build upon each other without disruptive week-long gaps. This generates a powerful sense of forward movement that many clients describe as transformative.
Protected Space for Vulnerability
By stepping away from daily stressors and responsibilities for one or two weeks, intensive therapy creates a unique container for healing. You’re not working to process childhood trauma in the morning, then having to face a difficult work meeting in the afternoon with another possible argument waiting for you at home. This separation allows our clients to reach a level of vulnerability, understanding, and focus that’s almost impossible to achieve in the weekly model.
For many clients, the protected space of an intensive is the first time they’ve ever been able to give their healing process their full attention. Here is our message to you — your healing matters enough to dedicate two weeks time to it.
Supported Integration
In intensive therapy, we never leave you alone to integrate profound insights and emotional responses. When difficult emotions arise or new awareness emerges, our trauma-informed therapists are fully present to help you process and integrate each as they arise.
This structured support for integration is critical for addressing complex trauma, where the brain needs to reprocess painful experiences within a secure attachment relationship. The intensive model provides both the time and the consistent therapeutic presence needed for this delicate and powerful work.
Faith as Central, Not Peripheral
Our intensive model weaves faith throughout the therapeutic process rather than relegating it to an add-on or afterthought. Scripture, prayer, and spiritual formation practices can be integrated fully and organically into our evidence-based therapeutic approaches.
“In my previous therapy, my faith felt separate from the healing work. At Restoring the Soul, my relationship with God was central to the entire process. We explored how my trauma had affected my spiritual life and how my faith could be a larger part of my healing. The spiritual and psychological aspects weren’t competing—they all worked together.”
Two-Week Intensive Client
Who Benefits Most from the Intensive Approach?
While many people can and do benefit from intensive therapy, our experience has shown that certain situations respond particularly well from this focused approach.
Complex Trauma
Trauma can shape your fundamental sense of self, safety, and how you relate to others. The intensive model provides the depth and continuity needed for meaningful healing. The definition of complex trauma includes childhood abuse, sexual abuse, spiritual wounding or abuse, neglect, attachment wounds, and complex PTSD.
Marriages in Crisis
Couples on the brink of divorce often need more than an hour a week to begin rebuilding trust and establish new patterns of relating. The intensive format creates a safe and supportive environment where couples can address long-standing issues, identify the sources of long-term conflict, begin to heal from wounding or betrayal, and learn new communication skills to build deeper connections.
Compulsive Behaviors and Addictions
Unwanted or unmanageable behaviors can become entrenched despite your deepest desire and best efforts to change. Intensive therapy can help you see beyond the behaviors to identify and heal the underlying wounds and stories driving them. These may include sexual compulsivity, anger issues, relational fractures or conflict, unmanageable substance use, and other compulsive unwanted behaviors.
Leadership Burnout and Crisis
Leaders facing burnout, moral failures, or spiritual crises benefit from the clear separation away from their work or ministry environment. The intensive format allows leaders to step back from responsibilities temporarily and address personal challenges affecting their ministry or leadership role. Leaders find space to stop focusing on everyone else and invest time and attention to their own healing and wellbeing.
Spiritual Wounds and Abuse
Religious and spiritual wounds and abuse are often some of the hardest to address. Who can you talk to about something that few are willing to address? The experience leaves many feeling wounded or disconnected from God, the inability to discuss or process what happens can create distance from the faith community you once looked to for support.
Intensive therapy provides a secure non-judgemental space to process these experiences fully and begin rebuilding a healthy spiritual life based on the truth of your relationship with God not the words or actions of others.
A Path Forward, Not Just Management
The most significant difference between weekly and intensive therapy is the potential for actual resolution rather than just management of symptoms. Many clients enter therapy believing that their best hope is to learn how to live with their wounds more effectively. Intensive therapy offers a different possibility—that deep healing is available and achievable.
“I had accepted that I would always struggle with anxiety and trust issues because of my past. What I discovered during my intensive was that these weren’t permanent fixtures in my life. They were responses to wounds that could actually heal. For the first time, I’m experiencing freedom instead of just better coping strategies.”
Two-Week Intensive Client
Is an Intensive Right for You?
Restoring the Soul’s intensive model of Integrated Clinical Soulcare offers real and lasting benefits. However, it requires a substantial commitment of time, finances, and emotional energy. It’s not the right approach for everyone or every situation.
Consider an intensive approach if any of the following sound like you.
- You’ve been in weekly therapy but feel stuck or find yourself addressing the same issues repeatedly
- Your struggles significantly impact your daily functioning, relationships, or spiritual life
- You're facing a crisis situation that needs immediate, comprehensive attention
- You’re ready to dedicate focused time to your healing process
- You’re seeking not just management of symptoms but deeper transformation
We understand that the decision to pursue intensive therapy is significant. Taking one or two weeks away from regular responsibilities represents a substantial investment in your healing. That’s why our team is available to help you discern whether our intensive therapy approach is right for your specific situation.
Taking the Next Step
If you’re trying to decide whether intensive therapy at Restoring the Soul might be the right approach for your healing journey, we invite you to:
- Schedule a consultation call with one of our intake specialists
- Explore our website to learn more about our Integrated Clinical Soulcare Approach
- Listen to some of our podcasts, we likely have covered topic you can relate to
- Talk with your current therapist about whether an intensive could complement your ongoing work
Healing from deep wounds is possible. Sometimes it simply requires a different approach—one that honors the complexity of your story and provides the time and space needed for genuine transformation.
“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves
those who are crushed in spirit.”
Psalm 34:18
At Restoring the Soul, we’ve witnessed this truth firsthand. God’s healing presence meets us in our brokenness, and sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is create space for that encounter fully to unfold.