Charity Trains Therapists About Intensive Therapy On a Therapist Retreat In Sedona!
Charity loved traveling to Sedona last week to train therapists about intensive therapy. Many of the therapists were not familiar with intensive therapy, so Charity started with the basics: understanding what intensive therapy is. There are many interpretations of intensive therapy; part of the beauty of an intensive practice is that it can be as creative as you want it to be! Charity’s intensive practice was designed with one core question in mind: What would have helped her the most when she was on her journey of healing from sexual trauma? So her intensive retreats contain all of those elements: beautiful nature to ground in, a deep bathtub to relax in at the end of a long day of trauma work, an infrared mat to soothe the body from all it’s aches and pains, a cozy library of good books, and of course cupboards full of tea! But perhaps that isn’t your cup of tea (pun intended)…the good news is, there is an intensive practice out there that is! Charity has helped consultees build intensive practices that are focused on equestrian therapy, nature therapy, movement therapy, adventure, relaxation, art, and more! The sky really is the limit when you are designing a practice that helps people deeply heal.
But the core of intensive therapy is the same no matter what the modality or the format is: Intensive therapy is uninterrupted time to heal.
The traditional 50-minute model of therapy forces clients to interrupt their healing process over and over to prioritize the clock. Dr. Ricky Greenwald of the Trauma Institute and Child Trauma Institute compares this to having surgery, only to have the surgeon wake you up an hour in and tell you that they ran out of time and you’ll have to repeat the process next week (and for many weeks thereafter). We would never tolerate medical care in that way! But for some reason we still tolerate it in the mental health field.
So when a therapist breaks out of this mold, they decolonize therapy. They refuse to let capitalism and broken systems set the bar for what healing looks like, and they design how you can truly heal instead. It’s a beautiful thing!
Charity’s training covered the ethics of intensive therapy, safety in intensive therapy, marketing intensive therapy, and more. It’s one of her passions, and she can’t wait to train more therapists this year, including at the Therapist Evolution Summit in Seattle in August 2027 (use code Charity123 for $250 off!) and of course on her private island retreat in Panama in November 2027! If you want Charity to come train a group of therapists about intensives, you can check our her Training and Consultation page here.
