Brainspotting
Intensives
Extended & Immersive Brainspotting Sessions in Portland & Online
Sometimes weekly therapy is exactly the right pace.
And sometimes you're getting stopped right when something wants to move.
Brainspotting Intensives are for people who want sustained, uninterrupted depth and who are ready to move something quickly rather than incrementally working on it over time.
The Pacing Math
Here's what a typical 50-minute weekly Brainspotting session is like:
10-15 minutes getting oriented
25-30 minutes of actual Brainspotting
10 minutes closing and grounding (so you can function the rest of the day)
In a 3-hour intensive, we get into the work faster, stay with it longer, and have 20-30 minutes at the end for grounding and integration.
My experience is that when people aren't stopped partway through, they find their own natural stopping point. The nervous system gets enough space to follow something through, and there's usually more movement because we're not interrupting it.
1 intensive
with intake + follow-up
=
2 months of weekly therapy
in focused processing time
(rough equivalent)
It's a different pace, and for some people and some situations, a much more effective one.
Why People Choose an Intensive
Something just happened and you don't want it to get stuck.
A car accident. A medical crisis. A rupture that shook you. You can feel it sitting in your body and you don't want it to be the thing you're still working on in three years. Recent acute events are well suited to intensive work, and we can reach them before they calcify.
You have something coming up that your nervous system has history with.
Surgery when medical settings carry old fear. A hard conversation you keep dreading. A custody process, a family visit, relationship challenges. If there's a known stressor on the horizon and your system has been activated by things like it before, we can do something about that.
A relational pattern keeps derailing the same relationship.
You know the pattern. You've probably talked about it plenty. It's the specific thing that keeps happening with your partner, your parent, your kid, and understanding it isn't changing it. An intensive can get at what's underneath in a way that actually shifts how you show up, not just how you understand yourself.
You're in therapy and something isn't moving.
You have insight. You've processed it out loud a lot. And it's still there. Sometimes a concentrated stretch of intensive work reaches what months of weekly sessions haven't been able to get to.
You're a therapist or first responder carrying more than you should be.
Cumulative exposure to others' trauma accumulates in its own particular way. An intensive can get to it more directly than weekly personal therapy and get you back to your work with more capacity.
You just had your baby and something went wrong.
Birth trauma has a window. The sooner we work with it, the less time your nervous system has to build defenses around it. An intensive gets you into real processing quickly, without spending weeks ramping up to it.
You want to do this work in person.
All of my regular sessions are virtual, but intensives are different. I’m able to travel to do in-person intensive work. Whether you’re in Portland or traveling through, I can come to you. If you’re elsewhere and want to condense real therapeutic work without building it around a commute or an office, that’s something we can talk about. It’s one of the things that makes this format flexible in a way that weekly sessions just aren’t.
You just want to move faster.
That's a completely valid reason on its own. You don't have to be in crisis to choose an intensive. If you have a clear sense of what you want to work on and you want to move it, this is a reasonable way to do that.
If it's still living in your nervous system, we can work with it.
How It's Structured
We start with a 60-90 minute intake to get clear on focus and make sure this is a good fit for where you are right now.
Then we work in 3-hour Brainspotting blocks. Up to two blocks in a day, up to three days in a week, depending on what makes sense for you.
We close with a 60-minute follow-up session for integration.
Investment:
$1,550 for one 3-hour Brainspotting block, plus a 60-90 minute intake session and a 60-minute follow-up session (all three included in this price)
$900 for each additional 3-hour Brainspotting block
In-person intensives are available. I’ll travel to you, depending on location, with travel fees included in the arrangement. Reach out to discuss.
Intensives are priced at a higher hourly rate than regular sessions. They require significant preparation, are scheduled outside my regular hours, and involve a level of sustained focus that's different from weekly work. The math on focused processing time, outlined above, is part of why many people find them worth it.
Insurance & Intensives:
If you have out-of-network benefits that cover working with me, the intake session, the first hour of the intensive, and the follow-up session can all potentially be billed to insurance.
Depending on what you're working on, there may also be options for billing the remaining two hours. That's something we can assess together.
Reach out if you want to talk through what might apply to you before committing. You can also check your benefits with me through the Mentaya link on the Scheduling page.
Payment plans are available and I am working on financing options to offer to clients. If you're not sure how many blocks make sense for what you're bringing, that's exactly what the consultation is for.
Questions I Get
Is this going to be overwhelming?
It can be intense. Intense and overwhelming are different things. I screen carefully for readiness, and not every nervous system is well served by acceleration at every stage of healing. If this isn't the right moment, I'll tell you that.
What if we open something and don't finish it?
Healing doesn't really work in neat endings anyway. When a network opens, your brain will often keep integrating after the session, which is normal and a sign the work is happening. The follow-up session is built in for exactly this reason.
Why not just do several weekly sessions back to back?
You can. The difference is that in weekly work, your nervous system ramps up and ramps down every time and we can often be interrupted in our main goal by what comes up in life. In an intensive, we stay with the thread long enough for deeper movement to happen without all those interruptions.
Do people actually move faster?
Yes. Instead of spreading that processing time across eight weeks, we move through it in days. I don’t promise a specific outcome, that’s not how this works, but condensed, uninterrupted processing time gets further faster than the incremental version.
Let's Figure Out If This Is the Right Fit
A consultation is the right place to start, whether you're comparing weekly sessions to an intensive, trying to figure out the right number of blocks, or just not sure if Brainspotting is even what you need right now.
We'll talk through what you're working on, what pace makes sense, and what I actually think would help. No pressure to decide anything before that conversation or even during it.