If you’ve ever felt stuck—struggling with stress, burnout, or repeating the same unhelpful patterns over and over again—you’re not alone. You know you need support but hesitate to start therapy because you worry it will take too long, it won’t fit into your schedule, or it won’t provide the results you want or need. Or maybe you’re in therapy, but the traditional model doesn’t feel like it’s working for you, and you want to do more intensive work? What if change didn’t have to take months or years?

That’s where intensive therapy comes in. This accelerated approach allows you to dedicate focused time to your healing, helping you break through challenges and experience transformation faster. Whether you’ve never tried therapy before or you’ve felt frustrated with the slow pace of weekly/fortnightly/monthly sessions, intensive therapy can offer a powerful alternative. In this blog, we’ll explore what intensive therapy is, how it works, and why it might be the right solution for you.

What Is Intensive Therapy?

Intensive therapy is an accelerated, immersive approach to therapy that allows for deep, focused work in a shorter time frame. Instead of attending regular 50-minute sessions, clients engage in extended sessions over a single day, multiple days or weekends. This uninterrupted time provides the space for breakthroughs, making it easier to get to the root of challenges and create lasting change.

Unlike traditional therapy, which often gets interrupted by daily life in between sessions, intensive therapy can keep you fully engaged in the process so that you can move through challenges and experience relief more quickly.

Why Traditional Therapy Doesn’t Work for Everyone

While traditional therapy is highly effective for many, it has limitations. Who decided that an hour of therapy was the most effective time to create healing and change anyway? Some reasons that people might struggle with the traditional model are:

• Time Constraints: We’re all busy and carving out time for therapy to fit into your busy life can be difficult, and it often takes months to see progress. Sometimes it can be easier to create more dedicated time on one day (or over multiple days), and commit to fitting this into your schedule.

• Stop-and-Start Progress: It can feel like, just as you begin to explore deeper emotions, the session ends. And by the next week, life has pulled your attention elsewhere. My experience has sometimes seen people coming back each session discussing different situations that they struggled with, but essentially these different situations are all dealing with the same underlying theme that isn’t being resolved each week, due to time constraints.

• Lack of Immediate Relief: For those dealing with burnout, anxiety, or unresolved trauma, waiting for change to unfold over months or years can feel overwhelming. But committing to spending more time initially to work on the issues that you’re dealing with might be a welcome change.

Essentially, Intensive Therapy provides an alternative that can remove these barriers, offering a way to move forward without months of waiting.

The Benefits of Intensive Therapy

1. Faster Results

Because intensive therapy allows for sustained, deeper work, clients often experience shifts in days instead of months. By staying in the process, they can resolve issues faster without the delays, and find themselves further along the healing journey than they would have been before.

2. Deeper Healing

Extended sessions give space to process emotions more fully, leading to more insights and longer-term transformation. This can be especially helpful for those struggling with perfectionism, self-criticism, or recurring patterns they can’t seem to break.

3. Increased Momentum

Weekly therapy can sometimes feel like starting and stopping, making it difficult to sustain change. With intensive therapy, the immersive format keeps the work flowing, creating real momentum toward healing.

4. Flexibility for Busy Lives

For professionals, business owners, and parents (and really anyone who has a busy life), committing to ongoing regular sessions can be challenging. Intensive therapy allows for focused work in a shorter time frame, making it easier to fit into a demanding schedule.

5. A Personalised, Tailored Approach

With an intensive therapy package, the therapy experience can be customised based on the client’s needs and goals, ensuring that the time is spent in the most effective way possible.

Who Is Intensive Therapy For?

Intensive therapy is ideal for people who are ready to dive deep and make meaningful changes quickly. It can be effective for:

• High-achieving professionals and perfectionists who feel stuck and want faster results.

• People experiencing burnout, anxiety, or chronic stress who need relief without waiting months.

• Those navigating major life transitions who want clarity and support in a short time frame.

• Clients who have tried traditional therapy but still feel like they’re not making enough progress. It can also be used as an adjunct to regular therapy, where a client can be referred from another therapist for intensive therapy to address 1-2 specific issues, and then go back to seeing their regular therapist for ongoing sessions and support.

Who Might Not Be a Fit for Intensive Therapy?

While intensive therapy is powerful, it’s not for everyone. Those who may be better suited for traditional therapy include:

• Individuals in acute crisis who need more ongoing resgular support. Often when we are in a crisis it can be difficult to go deeper and address underlying patterns of behaviour. It can be too much.

• Those struggling with more severe mental health conditions that require longer-term care in conjunction with therapy.

• People who prefer a slower-paced, long-term therapeutic relationship.

• Some people love the traditional model, and find it really useful.

Remember that we are all different, and we all have different circumstances, so it is good to have options, and to know what might be the right fit for you.

How to Get Started

If you’re curious about whether intensive therapy is right for you, the best way to start is with a conversation. I offer a free 15-minute consultation so you can ask questions, and we can explore if this approach aligns with your goals.

Ready to experience transformation in less time? Contact me today to learn more about how intensive therapy can help you move forward with confidence, clarity, and ease.

📍 Melbourne, Australia | Online & In-Person Sessions Available

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Final Thoughts

Therapy doesn’t have to take years to be effective. Intensive therapy is an evidence-based, structured way to help you create deep change without waiting months or years to get further along your healing journey. If you’ve felt stuck or frustrated with traditional therapy, this could be the alternative you’ve been looking for.

2020 has been an extremely challenging year (to put it mildly). Are you one of the people counting down the weeks, months, days until the year is over, so that you can start again when the year resets and January 1st comes around?

What has 2020 been like for you? The Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) conducted a poll (1), which found that although there were some silver linings in 2020, with parents being able to spend more time with their children, they also found that children spent more time on screens, were less physically active, and ate more unhealthy food. I would imagine that these habits were not restricted to only the children.

Maybe you’re starting to think of resolutions for next year to change your behaviours around your health? Eating better food, eating less junk food, losing weight or exercising more? These goals are all common resolutions that people set in the new year, but why do we wait for the new year to set these intentions?

Why wait?!?

What is it about the arbitrary date of the 1st of January that we wait for to make change? Why do we wait to start eating well? Why do we wait to start exercising more? Why do we wait to cut down on the plastic we use? Why do we wait to start to save more money or update your finances? Why don’t we start now?

We wait for many reasons, which include:

We are not ready to change
We don’t really want to change
We don’t know why we want to make the changes
The goals and intentions we set are too hard or not specific enough
And we don’t know how to make the changes that stick

We don’t need to wait – Benjamin Franklin said it well, when he said “Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today”. But maybe what we need is a better plan and strategy around setting goals and resolutions.

Setting yourself up for success

As mentioned, the new year is traditionally the time that people will set new year’s resolutions and goals for the year ahead, and look forward, with hope and longing, to the improvements that will eventuate. Unfortunately, the majority of these often fail due to:

The goals not being clear
The change is too big and takes too much effort to maintain
People feel overwhelmed and do not know what steps to take
The person isn’t ready to change (2)

So what can we do?

1. Firstly, get clear about what you want to change and why

Start to think about the changes you want to make, and why your life would be different (better) if you made these changes. It will be important to come back to your motivation and your ‘why’ when you reflect on and adjust the changes that you’ve put in place.

2. Start small and build on this

Start small and don’t bite off more than you can chew. Behavioural change science shows that if you start with small changes that don’t take too much time, or changes that are ‘stacked’ (done at the same time) on other things that you do on a daily basis, is the gateway to impacting bigger changes. This way you can be more consistent – a five minute walk you do every day has more impact that the 10k run that you never do.

3. Celebrate your success

Celebrate your success, no matter how small this is. We are more likely to continue to engage in behaviours that give us some form of positive feedback. Learning to celebrate can help us with this.

4. Don’t wait.

Don’t wait until the 1st of January to make the changes that you want to! Identify what changes you want to make and why, and start now!

If you need more help and support to get started, please visit the Courses section on my website and register your interest to be part of a new program to help you create the habits you want. Or if you are someone who likes to explore and learn information for yourself, then I would recommend the following books:

Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything by BJ Fogg
Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results: An easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones by James Clear

Good luck with creating the life that you want in this year full of challenges and uncertainty. I would love to hear how you go.

References
1. https://www.rchpoll.org.au/polls/covid-19-pandemic-effects-on-the-lives-of-australian-children-and-families/
2. https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/modern-mentality/201812/why-new-years-resolutions-fail

The Power of Intensive Therapy: A Faster Path to Lasting Change