Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 53: Weekly Sessions or Intensives? Choose on Purpose.

Released: 8/21/2026

Show Notes:

At some point, if you add therapy intensives and they actually start working, you hit a decision point nobody prepares you for. Your intensive calendar is filling up, your weekly caseload is still full of people you genuinely care about, and a new consult request just landed in your inbox. What do you do? Amanda gets into the three separate decisions most therapists are trying to answer all at once, why a weekly wait list is not always the compassionate move it feels like, and how to know whether a hybrid practice is your actual destination or just a holding pattern you never examined. The through line in all of it: stop letting a full calendar make the decision for you.

3 Key Takeaways:

1. The decision to stop taking new weekly clients is not one giant permanent choice but at least three smaller decisions stacked on top of each other, and most therapists feel stuck because they are trying to answer all of them at once.
2. A wait list is not automatically the compassionate or ethical move; an intensive wait list can give you useful demand data, but a weekly wait list often just parks your guilt while leaving people who need consistent support in a holding pattern that doesn’t actually serve them.
3. A hybrid practice is not a lesser version of a real intensive practice or a phase you’re supposed to graduate out of; it is a legitimate destination when built deliberately with a set number of weekly clients and clear boundaries instead of an endless string of guilty yeses.

Connect with Amanda:

• Follow on Instagram: @amandakbcoaching
• Check out the Amanda KB

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Resources & Links:

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Transcript:

Amanda Buduris (00:00)
Right now, somewhere, one of you is staring at a console request that just came through on your website. It’s a new client and they’re wanting weekly therapy. Your intensives are full for the next six weeks. Your weekly case sold is already beyond capacity, and your finger is hovering over the reply button, not because you don’t know what to say, but because you don’t know what you’re actually building anymore. Do you take the call? Do you put them on a list?

Do you tell them about intensives instead, even though that’s not what they asked for? That is the question we’re going to answer in today’s episode. Not whether intensives work. If you do them, you already know that they do. Today is about the harder question that shows up after they start working, which is, when do you stop taking new weekly clients altogether? And what do you do instead? So let’s get into it.

Welcome back to the show. I am Amanda. I’m a trauma and couples therapist in private practice in Seattle. And I also do business coaching and consulting all about intensives and making more money as a therapist or expanding beyond your role as a therapist. I run a mostly virtual practice. I do some in-person work still primarily intensives, but I have a couple. No, at this point I have one weekly client.

actually they’re bi-weekly that I do see in person just because I like variety. It’s the ADHD in me. And I get a version of this question constantly around, you know, what does what does your schedule look like when you’re managing everything? And how many weekly clients should I have versus how many intensives should I have? And usually these questions start coming up either when therapists are at the very beginning of their journey. They know that it’s

They want to add intensives. They don’t want to see 25 to 30 plus clients a week. But okay, now they start marketing intensives and their intensive calendar starts filling up faster than they expected. Meanwhile, their weekly caseload is still full of people that they truly care about, maybe people that they’ve been working with for years or even decades. And if you’re one of those therapists, essentially you’re finding yourself standing at this fork in the road, not really sure.

If the answer is okay, do I start a wait list and I don’t really know how to give people a timeline for when I’ll get back to them? Do I maintain a hybrid practice where I keep seeing clients weekly and bi-weekly and as needed, as well as do therapy intensives? Or do I go all in on intensives and never take another weekly consult again? There is not one right answer here, but there is a wrong way to make this decision, and that

Is by accident or guilt or anything that feels related to those. But it’s one exhausted yes at a time until all of a sudden you kind of look up at your calendar weeks, months, maybe a year later, and you’re still doing the exact thing you built intensives to get away from, right? That overly packed calendar and feeling like you kind of just built a different private practice cage. So today I want to walk you through.

the actual decision of wait list or no wait list, hybrid or all and on intensives, and how to know which one is yours. So what I want you to think about and notice first is, you know, most therapists don’t consciously decide to stop taking weekly consults. That is something that comes up on the coaching calls inside the Therapy Intensives Academy. But usually it that decision actually comes from just kind of like default. It’s the gaps of an already full calendar, like

You get a consult request and you’re super tired. You say yes anyway because no still feels like it means something bad is gonna happen, like all of a sudden you’re not gonna make money and it’s not safe to turn clients away. Or you kind of go in the opposite direction and just stop replying to those requests for a while. And I know we all feel bad about that. That voicemail we forgot to respond to, the email that we meant to respond to, and now it’s like two weeks later, and should we even do it?

It’s not really because you decided something. It’s just like you ran out of hours in the week and you only have so much time. Both of those are the same problem though. The decision is happening to you instead of being being made by you. Right. And this is something that I felt in 2023, I added intensos to my website in I was working on the webpage in January. I think I posted it in February. Booked my first console in March.

Booked that first intensive for April. And at this point, I was still seeing anywhere between 15 and 20 weekly clients. So not a ton, but a lot to then do intensives on the weekend. I’m not ashamed to admit it, because in a lot of ways, I was proud of the money I was making. I was proud of how hard I was working. I was proud of the fact that I could say I had a really freaking successful practice.

But there were times where I would work like 10 days in a row because I would see my clients Monday through Friday and then do an intensive Saturday and Sunday and then go right back into work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. And I was like, I gotta stop doing this. So if you obviously I don’t want anyone to get to that point, that’s what we all left our agencies for, or maybe you’re considering considering leaving your agency. And nobody should be working that many days in a row. So

If you start offering intensives and then at some point they are working and you know you’re booking out and you’re loving them, you are going to hit a moment where you cannot say yes to both a new weekly client and the pace of intensives you want to run. Right. That is just math. A weekly caseload of 15 clients takes up 15 recurring hours a week every week, kind of indefinitely.

Two intensives a week can replace a huge amount of that income in a fraction of the hours, but only if you have the calendar space to actually run them, prep for them, and recover from them. So something has to give. We cannot do all the things all the time. And trust me, that is a pain I know and resonate with so strongly because I love everything I do. I always wish I had.

minimum like eight versions of me, so that some versions can do this thing and some versions can do the other thing. And that’s just work-related. I still need a version of me to like clean and cook and be a cat bomb and all of that stuff. So I get that it is hard to I don’t even want to say give it up because it’s not that you’re giving up. It’s just it is about being intentional in your decision making and how you’re spending your time. And the mistake I see therapists make most often is kind of treating this like a

Well, should I stop taking weekly consults, or should I, you know, put some kind of notice up on my website about only taking consults for intensives? They kind of see this as this giant permanent all-or-nothing decision, and it’s not. It is actually at least, it’s no less than three smaller decisions stacked on top of each other. And most of you are probably trying to answer all three at once, which is why it feels so overwhelming. So let me break down what those little decision points are. Decision one.

Are you closing your practice to new weekly clients while still seeing your current weekly caseload? That’s different from decision two, which is what do you do with the people who reach out wanting weekly once you’ve closed? Do you turn them away entirely? Do you hold space for them somehow? And decision three is a big one, which is are you eventually planning to stop weekly altogether, current clients included, or are you comfortable?

holding a smaller weekly caseload permanently alongside intensives. I at this rate have have a couple of clients who like are weekly and then, you know, the ADHD in them and, you know, the travel schedule associated with the summer. Like I have I have a weekly client I’ve not seen in like six weeks, but I’m counting them as a weekly client because we just got to get back on the books and back into our routine. But

I see between my weekly and bi-weekly people maybe three to six clients a week. And it’s a really nice balance because I am doing these weekly sessions. I’m doing intensive sessions. I’m doing my coaching work. And I’m still in less than on a very busy week, I have 15 meetings across coaching sessions, therapy sessions. if I do therapy intensives, then it’s a little bit more in a week, but it’s not my norm.

Anymore, which is great, and that all works for me. So again, with all of these different decisions you might be needing to make, which is, am I closing my practice to new weekly clients? What am I doing with people who are reaching out for weekly? And do I eventually want to stop seeing weekly clients altogether? Just notice that you can answer, you know, one of those questions without having to answer the other one.

You do not need to know your five-year plan to close your intake form to new weekly clients right now this week if your calendar is already telling you that that might be what you need to do. That is the piece I want you to take away from this segment of today’s episode, which is you do not have to solve the whole thing today, but you do have to make the next decision that works for you, which is again usually smaller and less scary than the one you’ve been avoiding.

And I wanna name the guilt that shows up here because it’s real and it is loud. There is a version of you that hears stop taking weekly clients and immediately thinks, but what about the people who need help and can’t afford a three-hour intensive or aren’t ready for that pace or genuinely just do better with weekly support? That is a legit clinical consideration. It’s not something to just brush past, but

That’s a totally different question than should I personally be the one providing it forever? You can believe weekly therapy matters and still decide your practice isn’t the vehicle for everyone who wants it, right? Those two things are allowed to be true at the same time. As we know, it’s the dialectic, it’s the it depends, it’s the both and. So once you’ve decided you are closing to some or all new weekly intakes.

The next question is what do you do with the people who still reach out? And this is where the wait list question lives. And I want to be honest with you, a wait list is not automatically like the most compassionate or the ethical choice. Sometimes it actually just keeps you more stuck. Because here’s what a wait list does well. It does capture real demand. So you’re not guessing whether people want what you offer. It is giving you data. If 40 people join your

Intensive wait list in two months, that’s information you can use to raise your rate, add a second intensive day, or finally believe the thing that you’ve been afraid to believe, which is that people will pay what you are worth, what you demand, what you want. A wait list can also feel reassuring to a prospective client. Instead of kind of giving them this flat no, I don’t have space, they get up, mm, not yet. And for some people, that genuinely is the right amount of hope. But here’s what a wait list can also do.

And this is the part that we don’t think too much about when we hear this wait list word. It can also become a second job, right? Like every person on that list is someone you now feel some level of obligation to update, manage, and eventually serve, even after your actual capacity and maybe interest have moved on. And I have talked to therapists who have built a weekly wait list 30 people deep and then felt kind of trapped by it. Like they made

40 implicit promises that now they had to keep long after they’d realized that weekly wasn’t the direction they wanted to go anymore. And like that’s not good. So here’s the distinction I want you to make, because I think it can solve most of the confusion here. Really ask yourself what the wait list is actually for. If it is an intensive wait list, meaning people who want the exact thing you’re currently offering and are simply waiting for the next open slot, you know, that’s usually pretty healthy.

Intensives have a start date. They might be waiting two or three weeks for one. You know, it may not change the nature of what they’re going to receive. That’s a completely reasonable ask of a prospective client. But a weekly wait list is a totally different beast because weekly therapy is time sensitive in a way. Intensives usually aren’t. Someone reaching out for ongoing weekly support is often reaching out because they need consistent contact now.

Not in six weeks once a slot opens. Like that is what people are looking for support with. They want to get started. And that’s that is the same as intensives too, but in a very different way. Like the people who reach out for intensives, they want to get started ASAP because they’re excited about the work. They’re not reaching out. Usually, this is at least the case for my practice and a lot of the therapists that I work with inside the Therapy Intensive Academy program. Usually intensives reach out because they’re just so excited to get started in the work.

Whereas weekly clients reach out because they’ve been putting therapy off forever and they’re realizing it’s finally time to get in and they might have waited a little bit too long. So there’s a different kind of urgency that each client type has. So those clients reaching out for weekly support, putting them on a list can genuinely leave them feeling under-supported during the exact window when they really need help. And in that situation,

A warm referral to another therapist is often the more clinically sound move than a wait list, even though it feels less, you know, personally satisfying because you don’t get to be the one that helps them. So my honest answer if you’re trying to decide whether to hold a wait list as you shift towards intensives, is you know, build a wait list for intensives if you want one. Again, it can be useful, it’s kind of low stakes, and it can tell you a lot about your own pricing and demand.

But really think hard before building a weekly wait list and ask yourself what it’s actually buying you back. If the answer is, you know, it’s giving me some peace of mind and useful data, great. I love data. I love numbers. I love looking at what’s working and what’s not working. But if the answer is that it lets you avoid saying a clean no, right, that’s really worth

Sitting with and considering and maybe bringing it up with your own therapist or your coach if you’re working with one. Because the people on your wait list, they deserve more than a place for you to kind of just like park your guilt. There’s a lot of reasons why I have chosen to never hold a wait list because outside of some of the concerns people have around, you know, like liability and not wanting to give false hope in a different way. Again, I just don’t want the admin of it. And honestly, I

My ADHD brain would forget that I have a wait list and I’d probably have 17 different wait lists in Google Sheets. So a wait list is not just this like magical answer. And again, just really, really be intentional about why you would be doing it and who is it most serving because it has to serve, you know, you ultimately and especially these people who are reaching out for support.

So now let’s talk about the option of, you know, a lot of you are secretly hoping, you know, there’s maybe a right answer when it comes to if you want a hybrid practice, to kind of having some weekly clients, some intensive clients, and again, doing this kind of indefinitely, maybe as long as you have your practice. So just to start off by validating something, hybrid is not a lesser version of a quote unquote real intensive practice.

I’ve heard a lot of therapists out there being like, I run an intensives only practice. And I think some other therapists perceive that as like, ooh, like that is fancy to some degree. Like, how do you fill your practice with all intensives? And it is, it’s a different marketing strategy in a lot of ways. It’s something that I help therapists inside the Therapy Intensives Academy do if that’s what they want. If what they genuinely want is I want all intensives, whether that’s

Everyone works with me for at least 90 minutes, or I do weeklong intensives, whatever it is. But again, just because you still also see some weekly clients, that doesn’t make you less of a real intensive practice. I just wanted to name that because I feel like I’ve heard a little bit of a buzz around it. And it’s also not automatically a stepping stone you’re supposed to graduate out of. Right? The goal is not go to hybrid and then go to intensives only. It’s just, hey, here’s a way that you could.

replace some of the weekly sessions that you’re doing. So for a meaningful number of therapists, myself included, a deliberately built hybrid practice is the actual destination, not some kind of phase. And the reasons a hybrid practice might be best for you is, you know, you might love the relational depth that comes with seeing a handful of clients weekly.

watching their story unfold over months and years, and you’d feel a real loss giving that up entirely, even if it was for a much bigger paycheck, right? That is information that makes your work feel meaningful to you and that’s worth protecting. Like if you, if the thought of leaving all of your clients, right, there’s a difference between they’ve graduated and are leaving us, versus, hey, I’m moving in another direction and I’m not doing this work this way anymore. If that feels

There’s a difference between scary because it’s a risk and just like not like what you want, right? Then don’t do it. And some of you want the income predictability that a small, steady, weekly case will provides while the intensives are ramping up. I know exactly again, that’s what I did. I kept my 15 to 20, and then I went down to like 10 to 15, and then eight to ten. And again, now I’m in this space where it’s like some weeks. I see like one client, one therapy client.

For 50 minutes, right? So I get wanting the income predictability because intensives can be, I’ve heard some people say feast or famine. And I don’t know that I’ve quite felt it that intensely. I think there are busier seasons for intensives for sure, but especially in your first year, as you’re getting ready to offer them and market them, and you’re learning what you actually like doing or not.

Yeah, they might feel a little more feast or famine, like, I got like three that booked in one month, and then I went two or three months with no one booking. And if you’re really looking at the intensive model, like a great month might net you more than a full month of weekly clients used to. And a slow month can feel pretty unsettling if the intensives are your only source of income. So having a handful of weekly clients can be kind of the floor.

That keeps the unpredictability from feeling really scary while you build confidence and referral flow on the intensive side. It has, it gives you more of that leverage and that ability for all the SEO work that you’re doing and some of the AI optimization work to really get you found more easily by your ideal clients. so it is like if income predictability is truly something that you need, hybrid practice is, you know, fantastic for you. And that’s not.

Okay, you just have too much scarcity mindset. You don’t believe all the intensives are coming to you because again, weekly and intensives meet different needs, not just for clients, but also for therapists too. And some of you have clients whose clinical presentation genuinely benefits from consistent weekly contact, at least for now. And maybe you’re not willing to hand off every single one of them just to simplify your calendar, right? That’s just running a values-based business. And that’s great. We love values-based decisions, right?

And some of you simply aren’t ready emotionally to let go of the identity of being a weekly therapist. And obviously, that is totally allowed. You do not owe anyone a fast transition. You are allowed to keep three or five or ten weekly long term clients as an intentional part of your practice for as long as that serves you. As long as it’s a choice you’re making on purpose and not just a

Habit that you never really slowed down to examine in question. The key word in all of this is deliberate. A hybrid practice works when you’ve actually decided the shape of it, right? Picking a number of, you know, I’m gonna hold a maximum of five weekly clients and the rest of my clinical hours go to intensives. Close your intake form to new weekly clients once you hit that number, the same way you’d close intensive slots once your calendar’s full.

That way, hybrid is a structure you built on purpose with real boundaries instead of an accidental holding pattern where you never quite stop saying yes to weekly requests because it’s easier than deciding. So what about going all in? Fully intensives, no more weekly consults, no hybrid safety net. How do you know that’s actually where you’re headed instead of just where you’re hoping to be someday?

Here are the signs I look for both in my own practice and with the therapist that I coach. First, your intensive calendar has real, consistent demand, not just one lucky month. I’m talking about intensives booking out four to maybe eight weeks plus in advance. I know I’ve worked with some therapists who are like, this person booked for four or five months out, because if they know you’re the one, number one, you’ve done an amazing job marketing, but they’re willing to wait for you. And that’s great, and that does happen.

So if you’re getting that consistently more than once across different months, not just a busy single, a single busy season, great. Because one great month doesn’t prove a model, a repeated pattern does. Second, if you do networking, if you have referral relationships and you do have a referral pipeline that doesn’t depend on you holding a weekly caseload to generate it, that’s really important because.

Some therapists get most of their weekly referrals from past or weekly clients or, you know, like a doctor who is familiar with weekly therapy. And if that’s you, walking away from weekly can cut off without warning the pipeline that was feeding your intensives to. So before you go all in, make sure your intensive marketing, your website, your SEO, whatever’s actually bringing people to you can stand on its own without weekly clients feeding it via word of mouth.

Third, you can actually survive a slow month financially. And this one is not really like glamorous, but it still does matter because going all in on intensives means your income is concentrated instead of spread across dozens of weekly small payments. And that is the whole point, right? Fewer moving pieces, but it also means a slower month hits differently, whether it’s like really freaking scary or just like, ooh, that was a that was little lower than I would like.

And if you don’t have some kind of buffer, whether that’s savings or if you have a partner whose income can help with the shared bills, or simply just a rate that’s high enough to even, you know, have a light month still cover your bills, going all in can feel like less freedom and more like free fall. And obviously that’s scary and nobody wants that. And fourth, here’s the test I actually trust the most, more than any spreadsheet, even though y’all know I love my spreadsheets. Picture the next weekly consult requests landing in your inbox.

picture typing out a clear, kind no, one that redirects them to an intensive or to another therapist entirely with no wait list, no maybe, no, well, let me see what I can do. I don’t need to eat lunch today, right? Who has been there? I know I have. If picturing that gives you a wave of guilt and dread, you’re probably not ready yet. And that is useful information to know too. If, on the other hand, picturing it gives you relief, even just a little bit,

usually that is the real answer showing up before your data does. And one more thing I really want to say clearly is that going all in doesn’t have to mean forever and it doesn’t have to mean tomorrow. You are allowed to pilot it. You can close weekly intakes for a single month or a quarter and see how it feels in your body, how it’s affecting your bank account before you decide that it’s permanent. And you can always reopen weekly intake

If the trial tells you that hybrid was the right call. This is not a decision with only one door and no way back through it. Like, treat it like an experiment. There have been times where I have put up on my website only accepting clients for therapy intensives, and then I’ve taken it off, and then I’ve put it back on, and then I’ve taken it off. Right now, with how my schedule is, how I do like to travel, how I like to, you know, have a whole second business.

Weekly sessions actually kind of work better for my schedule, but I still love to do intensives. And so I don’t want to cut off weekly sessions because I want some of the longer term relationships. I want some of the income predictability for my therapy practice side. And I still offer intensives. But that’s why I have a very, very, very small weekly caseload. And at my rate for $350 an hour, you know.

People do genuinely come in more slowly anyway. I’m not getting, you know, like one to two consults a day, but I don’t need one to two consults a day. I need maybe one person a month or two, usually every two months, because most of my people actually still do work fairly long term with me, even at the 350 rate. I’ve worked with multiple people for longer than a year or two. So all of this, this decision making, this

How do I know when I’m ready? How do I know when it’s working? What do I do when I’m terrified? This is exactly the kind of decision I walk therapists through inside the Therapy Intensive Academy because it is rarely a clinical question. It is usually something that is a structural question, it’s a mindset question, it’s a really think about you question, right? We are so often putting our clients first and not ourselves enough. And I think it can be really powerful to.

think about what you want and prioritize that and trust the process that it is going to work out exactly how you want and need it to. So what does your calendar actually need to look like? What wait list or referral system supports that structure without becoming its own burden? And how do you price and market intensive so that going all in or staying hybrid on purpose is a decision you’re making from data and confidence instead of guesswork and guilt. Those are all the like legit super fun

questions that I cover inside TIA. So here’s what I want you to do this week. Don’t try to answer the five year question. Just answer the next one, which is are you closing, you know, new weekly intake appointments? Yes or no. If someone reaches out wanting weekly and you’re full, do you have a real answer ready? Do you have a referral? Do you have an intensive wait list, a clean no? Don’t just scramble in the moment, right? Be intentional, be deliberate.

And if you are building hybrid on purpose, what’s your actual number of weekly clients? The one that makes it a structure instead of an accident so you don’t go about overbooking yourself, which some people can feel like, well, that’s a good problem. I’m I’ve got all this, all these clients and I’m making all this money. And then they’re the ones who are exhausted. And again, that’s what we’re trying to avoid. So if you want help building the calendar, the pricing and the marketing that makes all these three pathways actually sustainable, that’s exactly what my Therapy Intensives Academy program is for.

I will drop the link in the show notes for you. But again, just remember, you don’t have to choose anything forever, right now, or even today, but you do have to stop letting a full inbox and a full calendar make the decision for you. So this week, just name where you actually are, still taking every consult that comes in, building towards a deliberate hybrid, or ready to say the clean no. Whichever one it is, make it a decision you made, not the one that happened to you.

Thanks so much for being here today. Appreciate you all for listening as always. And I will see you in the next episode.