Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 26: What Therapists are Really Afraid of When Offering Intensives

Released: 04/24/2026

Show Notes:

In this episode, Amanda dives into one of the biggest fears therapists have about offering therapy intensives: what if clients invest a significant amount of money and nothing changes? She explores the guilt, pressure, and responsibility therapists often carry to “guarantee” outcomes, and how these beliefs are shaped by conditioning around money, ethics, and what it means to be a “good” therapist. Amanda breaks down why this expectation is unrealistic, how it differs from how we view weekly therapy, and the ways therapists unintentionally take on responsibility that isn’t theirs to carry. She shares a powerful reframe around client responsibility, informed consent, and sustainable care, helping therapists release perfectionism, trust their clinical skills, and approach intensives with more confidence and clarity.

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3 Key Takeaways:

1. The fear that therapy intensives won’t “work” comes from therapists taking responsibility for outcomes that were never fully theirs to carry, since no therapy format guarantees results.
2. Clients who invest in intensives are making informed, intentional choices and often show up more committed, meaning the issue is not the price but how therapists hold and communicate value.
3. Sustainable success with intensives requires both strategy and mindset shifts, unlearning perfectionism, releasing outcome control, and building confidence through support, structure, and real-world evidence.rkload.

Connect with Amanda:

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

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Just a quick heads up, everything I share in this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It’s not legal advice, financial advice, or tax advice. Every practice and every state has its own rules. So if you’re wondering how something applies to your situation, make sure to check in with an attorney, accountant, or another qualified professional who can give you guidance based on your specific circumstances.

Transcript:

Amanda (00:01)
Hello, hello, my fellow therapists. Thanks so much for tuning into a second episode that is dropping this week. Generally when I started my podcast, I thought it was gonna be really hard to find what am I gonna talk about each week. And now there are some weeks where I’m like, these two episodes are pretty related, let’s release two at once. And so it’s been really fun for me to grow in this podcast. And I’m so thankful to those of you who have been supporting it since the beginning and those of you who are recently finding it.

So I wanna start this part two by really naming very explicitly a thought I have had, and I’ve talked with so many therapists about the live trainings I’ve done in the free Facebook group that I used to run, as well as people who are in my Therapy Intensive Academy program. And it’s not that we don’t say it out loud, I think it’s actually…

It seems like such the obvious question that some people don’t even think they have to ask it. They just kind of feel it and then it dictates what they do next, which is this. So what if I’m offering therapy intensives and I have clients paying all this money and nothing changes? What if they didn’t, you know, complete their goal? What if I’m a trauma therapist and I haven’t completely resolved their trauma? What if I’m an anxiety therapist and they still struggle with anxiety? Like,

What if we meet for a longer period of time, but it still doesn’t resolve them of all their problems? And right, like you’re probably asking that and I’ve questioned it myself because we’re ethical therapists and we really care. Like, yes, we are so excited about the financial opportunities that come with intensives of being able to charge premium rates and working less and avoiding burnout, but you don’t want to do it at the sake and at the cost of, you know, forget if I’m doing good clinical work anymore.

And so we’re trying to do this ethical marketing by saying intensives can be transformative. Intensives can change your life. Intensives can accelerate, you know, your therapeutic journey. But yeah, okay. So what if they pay all this money and nothing changes? So what if someone does pay you thousands of dollars for an intensive? I, for example, my highest. My two highest packages are 4,500 for a three day, nine hour intensive.

or a two-day nine-hour intensive for individuals, for couples, actually, that second one. So someone might pay thousands of dollars. I apologize if you hear my cat meowing in the background. He just got home from a dental and he is in a mood coming off of his anesthesia. So what if someone pays you thousands of dollars for an intensive? They block off their time, they emotionally prepare, they show up ready.

And again, right, what if it doesn’t change their life? They have these really high expectations that didn’t come to fruition. And that fear, that is one of the biggest things that almost stopped me from ever offering intensives. And it’s something I hear from the therapists I work with all the time too. It’s not just a matter of, you know, can I sell this? Am I gonna book them? Am I gonna be successful with them? But it’s also this question of, what if I can’t deliver?

What if I can’t deliver results? What if it’s again, it’s not enough time or I’m not good enough for this. I don’t have enough training for it. And underneath this question is something I think that’s even deeper of what if I hurt someone by charging this much and it doesn’t work. And that’s what I want to talk more about today because I think that that’s super important. And I think that’s more of the conversation that

you know, in social media clips or in a short email newsletter, I don’t have enough time to talk about myself, which is just, you know, what are these expectations we’re setting and how do we also address the expectations we ourselves are setting as therapists offering these. So if you have been feeling that kind of barrier to why you’re not offering intensive, I want you to know there’s nothing wrong with you for that. You are just a therapist who cares deeply.

And also this fear is exactly the thing that is keeping you stuck. And honestly, this is something we spend a lot of time working through inside my therapy intensives Academy program, both on strategy calls with me, times when people bring up mindset concerns with me, we also have a mindset coach. And there’s a copywriting coach who is helping to, you know, how do we address the hopeful marketing point without over delivering and without promising something that we can’t deliver on, right? Cause it’s a multi-step process.

Because everything, when it comes to being successful with intensives, it is so much more than just learning how to structure it. It’s also learning how to hold this level of work and the emotional stuff that comes up with it. So let’s talk about the guilt. Because for me, it wasn’t just fear of, I’ve never done this before. Is it going to work out? It was this guilt of, if I’m charging this much, it needs to work and not just

kind of help, I felt like it needed to change their life, create a breakthrough, justify every single dollar you spent. I’m sure you can resonate with all of those things. And that pressure was super heavy because what that actually meant and looked like was I was taking responsibility for something that was never fully mine to carry. And this is where I see so many therapists get stuck because we are conditioned to believe

that good therapists sacrifice, good therapists don’t care about money, good therapists should be accessible at all costs. And when you layer that on top of a higher ticket service like therapy intensives, of course your nervous system and your brain is like, this is dangerous, this is too much, this is not okay. So what I really had to sit with when I launched therapy intensives on my website back in 2023 was, you know, there is

There is aspiration, there is hope in this modality. I have seen it as a client, I’ve experienced it as a client. I have seen it in the clients that I’ve worked with where amazing things can happen. People can move through an incredible amount of work in a condensed focus period of time. But when we combine or when we’re kind of like comparing an intensive to weekly therapy,

I don’t know where we started to get this idea for intensives. I mean, again, it’s probably about the financial piece, but somehow we got the idea of like, we’re trying to guarantee outcomes in a therapy intensive, but we don’t guarantee outcomes with weekly therapy either. We just don’t think about it the same way because the investment is more spread out, right? Someone is paying weekly or every other week instead of all at once. Or because the format feels more normal, like, well, this is what therapy is supposed to look like. This is how everyone does it.

But again, therapy has never been and will never be a guaranteed outcome. You all probably read the same research as I did in grad school around like it works for about 80 % of the population. It’s not a guarantee and it all depends on how it’s measured and it all depends on stage of life, stage of motivation. There are so many things that dictate.

whether therapy at a given period of time with a specific therapist works. So there’s never been a guaranteed outcome when it comes to I’m going to go to therapy and I’m going to feel better. So intensives didn’t create that pressure, right? They just kind of made it louder of, well now I’m charging X hundred or X thousand dollars for this, so I must really need this to work. I must really be able to create.

some kind of guarantee that someone’s investment in me is going to be worth it. And that’s why this work of being successful with therapy intensives, it’s not just about strategy. It’s about what are we unlearning, right? That pressure that we take to do all the fixing and to give our all in every single session. yes, it’s good to give your all in every single session, but we can never work more than the client. We can never even follow a evidence-based protocol

and do something perfectly and successfully and guarantee again that the client is never going to struggle with X, Y, Z again. So that unlearning process is a huge part of what we do inside the Therapy Intensive Academy because it’s not just strategy. You will learn a lot of strategy and those of you who are in it listening to this know that we talk a lot about the marketing and the copywriting and the mindset work and the SEO and the AIO stuff, but so much of it is this mindset of.

what can I let go of and how can I be successful and still produce amazing clinical results. So just like you, I had so many fears before I booked my first therapy intensive, like so many. It was only up on my website about a month before I got my first consultation for it was a couple’s two day therapy intensive. was completely virtual. And of course, like

What I want to do is I want to name a few of those fears because I know you probably had them too. So I want to say what my fears were and kind of what I did to work through them. So fear number one, what if it doesn’t work? I’d have already been talking about this. I remember thinking, well, what if they walk away and they feel like they wasted their money? What if they got mad at me? What if, you know, it doesn’t go perfectly? And like spoiler alert, it did not go perfectly. There was

Stuff that came up, stuff that I’ve never experienced before, never had to deal with before, and overall it was fine. And the thing that really helped me with this question of what if they feel like it was a waste is that risk exists in every form of therapy. It is not just intensives. How many times have you been working with someone for a few weeks and a few months and all of a sudden they just stopped? They stopped coming because they felt like they weren’t getting anywhere or…

They feel stuck and you’re spending multiple sessions spiraling over how they get stuck or they’re still doing their same patterns and they don’t have a motivation to change or they’re too depressed to do, you know, the behavioral activation plan that you’ve put in place. So there is always risk of someone walking away and feeling like they wasted their money, whether you’re an in-network therapist or an out-of-network therapist. So again, yes, it makes sense that we really feel that with the intensives because of the

price we’re kind of asking for them. But that risk again is not just for intensives. Someone’s transformation depends on their readiness, the therapeutic relationship, timing, fit. It is not just format. So yes, when I was really worried about my first intensive and it being successful, what I had to remind myself over and over again is I am just doing the same thing in a longer period of time.

all the times that they, that we wish we had a session where, oh, if we just had 15 more minutes, oh, if we just had another hour, like that is what an intensive is. It’s giving you more time to do those things that you would already do. So if you’re a number two, what if they regret paying me, right? What I hear from a lot of therapists I work with is what if they ask for a refund for what it’s worth? No one has ever asked me for a refund, but I remember feeling that sense of, you know, I don’t want someone to regret paying me.

And so this is big and it’s also me projecting my own money stories, like my own financial trauma onto my clients because I’m sitting here thinking I would be so scared to spend this much. And so I assumed that they would feel the same way. But what I started to see was clients who chose intensives were ready to do the work. They’re not being forced. They’re not confused. They’re making a

informed decision after they read my webpage and have a consultation with me. And when people invest at that level, they show up differently. I know that when I do therapy intensives with my therapist, I show up differently. I am very much about, know, here’s my focus, here’s what I want to get out of the session. Whereas our every other week sessions, which are still 75 to 90 minutes, I’m like, you know, if we don’t get to something today, like, it’s fine, we’ll try again in a couple weeks. So.

It’s important to really remember like what is actual legitimate concern and something that we can strategize around versus what are our own money stories and how is that, you know, showing up in how we’re setting our fees or what we’re offering or not offering. I had a therapist ask me once, you know, they’re like, I heard the advice of if you wouldn’t pay your own fee, don’t charge that fee. And

I think that’s bullshit because why? Right? Like everyone’s financial situation is different. Could I afford comfortably to pay my own therapist my own fees? Technically, yes, like I could put it on a credit card, but I already have credit card debt that I’m trying to pay down. And so I actually don’t want to spend the same amount of fees that I, that my therapy clients spend with me.

But that doesn’t mean no one’s going to pay my fees. That doesn’t mean someone out there doesn’t have a better financial situation than I do. And they can make it work comfortably in their budget. Whether your therapy fees are in the 200, 300, $400 range, or whether your fee is $125, there’s always going to be someone who your fee is too much for. So I don’t agree with this advice of…

charge the fee that you would pay because your fee should take care of you. And so that’s just a helpful thing to remember is to think about like, what is it that is you and your fears and how you would spend money and how do we disentangle that from what clients are going to be willing to spend on themselves. Right, I’ve also made assumptions. I will fully admit I’ve made assumptions about people’s financial situations and

even had some guilt at times of like, you’ve talked to me about what your financial situation looks like. Should you be paying this fee? But that’s not my choice, right? My job, my ethical duty as a therapist is to present the options available. And if someone wanted to make a more quote unquote budget friendly option, then I can refer them to someone else or they can start with me weekly instead of doing an intensive, which I have different fees for my weekly sessions versus my intensive sessions. But if someone is choosing

I am willing to take on this debt to do this work, then our job is to not, you know, like, what is the word? To not coddle them, to not ⁓ play parent, to not just like treat them, to treat them like a child instead of the adult that they are making these decisions. Obviously, if you work with kids, that’s very different, but it’s probably the parent who is making that decision for the kitten. So fear number three, I felt this.

Sometimes I still do, and I hear this a lot from therapists. What if I’m not good enough for this? And this is major imposter syndrome talking. Because again, suddenly there’s something about therapy intensives that feel like this is bigger, this is higher stakes. But again, in reality, I was already doing this type of work. I already spilled over 10 to 15 minutes with my clients. I already said like, well, okay, like what if we did meet for a little bit longer today?

When I was working at a university counseling center, there were times where we did single session clinics where your job was to meet with the person for as long as it took for them to feel better so that they didn’t become a weekly client because we didn’t have space for weekly clients. And so sometimes you would meet with a student for two or three hours, but they felt good. They had talked things out. They learned their skills and they were already on their way. And so again, what you

do in a therapy intensive, the actual interventions you use, they’re probably not going to be very, very different. There’s going to be more focus. There’s going to be maybe a little more fine tuning of goals. Like, what are we working on for this three hour session? What are we working on for this weekend, if you offer a weekend intensive or multi-day intensive? So the only thing that is changing is the container of how you are offering this work. You are not.

you’re ⁓ not doing something drastically drastically different and I think that’s really important to remember.

Fear number four, what if I burn out doing this? I thought intensives would drain me. I thought I’d be exhausted because, like, as I’m talking about my two-day, nine-hour intensive or my three-day, nine-hour intensive, like, that’s a lot of work. ⁓ And I thought it would be exhausting, but honestly, I really felt and I really feel the opposite because I feel so much more focused.

I feel so much more present. I’m less scattered because I’m not jumping between three to five plus clients in a given day, right? Where there’s a different presenting concern, there’s a different relationship. Some of them are doing brain spotting, some of them are doing like act work, some of them were doing just kind of interpersonal processing. And that actually is really helpful for me because as someone with ADHD, like I, it is easy for me to bounce around and to take on again the emotional load.

very strongly, but when I’m now working with one person or one couple for an extended period of time, it is actually energizing for me. I actually really, really like it. And don’t get me wrong, I’m tired at the end of it, but not the same kind of tired as I just saw six clients in one day, even if I worked for six hours in that day. And this is something a lot of the therapists I work with inside the Therapy Intensive’s Academy are seeing too, as well as the people who

graduated from the TIA program and into my mastermind. These therapists are not burning out. They’re actually creating more space and usually that’s kind of surprising for them. And it was surprising for me too to feel like these days I see maybe three to five clients in the hour long model because I do still enjoy that. I don’t want an intensives only practice. That’s the beauty of this is it can look however you want. I like having these longer term relationships. I like seeing more growth with time too.

And I really like being able to work with someone in a time limited fashion on a very specific goal. And what that helps with is, well, if I’m only seeing three to five clients in a given week, and then once or twice a month, I have a two day intensive, like I’m making the same salary that I would if I were, I’m working way more than I was when I was working at an agency, and I’m working the same amount, if not more, depending on what I’m booking.

And then I would have if I was seeing 15 to 20 plus weekly clients. And so it can feel honestly a little dysregulating at first to, wow, I was seeing 22 people and now I’m seeing two people. There are some weeks where I see zero people, not because I’m traveling, but because if they’re bi-weekly or they’re out of town or whatever it is, honestly, it is kind of weird, but it’s also really nice to have more of a break, right? Like this is the stuff that helps me personally.

with not being burnt out. It’s what helps me have this whole other coaching business that I’m scaling because I have more time and I have more capacity. So those are some of the most common fears that I’ve heard from other therapists and the ones that I’ve resonated with. You might also have some of your own that you’re thinking about. But what actually helped me move through all of this imposter syndrome and fear and kind of like preemptive guilt, it wasn’t just any of this.

kind of cheesy advice around like believe in yourself more because as someone with CPTSD, I don’t just inherently believe in myself. That is not a core belief that was instilled in me from a young age. Instead, it was having support. It was having some kind of structure and it was having some evidence. So I really needed to put myself out there. I needed to get, I got a lot of coaching support either in group coaching programs or one-to-one coaching.

I needed someone to provide me with, let’s try this out, let’s test how this works, let’s see how it goes. And from all of that process, the evidence I got from it was, wow, this is great for my clients, but also it’s great for me and I can do this. It helped me to trust myself more. So what I really needed, and what a lot of therapists I work with need, is a clear way to structure.

intensives and the funny thing is like there’s no one right way you get to be so creative with it but coming up with your way and clearly articulating that and planning for it in your schedule because I guarantee you once you start offering them people are going to want them. Having that clear structure, having a way to price them that feels really grounded in something this isn’t about just picking some random number and hoping someone books because that would be an exciting number to make.

having a language to talk about them of what they are, what they aren’t, who they’re a good fit for, who they may not yet be a good fit for, and other examples of other therapists doing it. Because again, my confidence did not come first. I wasn’t just like, I got this, I can do it. I was like, I’m gonna see if I can do it. I think this would be really exciting. But the confidence came after I started seeing.

⁓ this actually works and clients actually want this and this is actually helping people. And that’s exactly why I created my therapy intensive Academy program to begin with because other people, other therapists wanted to do this too, right? Whether it was because of their own burnout or financial concerns, whether it was because they want more for their clients too and they wanted to learn a way how to do that.

And ultimately what none of us therapists want to do is try to figure it out alone, right? Like if we get stuck in this fear loop of it’s not gonna work, I don’t know how to do it, it’s not gonna be successful. If we’re stuck in that for way too long, then yeah, we never make the momentum that we are capable of. So support, structure, and just evidence. And I think it’s important to have someone to believe in you, by helping you to believe in yourself from

what I talking about earlier of what can we unlearn and what can we test? How do we take, I call them calculated risks of how to actually make this successful? And I wanna zoom out for a second in this conversation because it’s very, very timely. Something really interesting is happening right now. There was another therapist who went through my TIA program, shared this article with me of a well-known singer who recently shared publicly.

that she engaged in an extended therapy session. It was 27 hours over three days. So nine hours a day, that’s even more than I do. And I remember seeing this and thinking like, ⁓ my God, this is it. This is something we’ve seen before. Whether you are in the EMDR community or not, you probably all remember Prince Harry showing up on, I think it was Oprah, and talking about his experience with EMDR. And what happened was, huh, people see.

this person talking about it and they see what it actually looks like and then they start asking questions about it and people start seeking it out and more therapists are getting trained in it and EMDR really exploded, right? Like the more people who have influence put out there in the public atmosphere, like, this is something that worked for me. That’s what inspires people to also try something new.

And so when this article came out about this therapy intensive that someone famous engaged in, again, I just got super excited because I think we’re in a very similar moment right now with therapy intensives. Because once people know something exists, they start looking for it. I’ve already seen this in my practice in the three full years I’ve been offering intensives. Summer is actually consistently one of the busiest seasons for intensives because people’s schedules change around and

They have a little bit more time and a little bit more flexibility, but in a different way, right? Because they might be going on vacations, but they still want to get their therapy in. So why not do a condensed therapy session? So there’s a willingness to go deeper. And I think with summer coming up and with this article that’s just going to continue to pick up steam around, wow, this extended therapy session format exists. Now is literally the perfect time if you do not offer intensives to start learning about them and start offering them because people.

are going to want them. This is not just a nice idea of, you know, what if I offered intensives? This is all about, there’s a growing demand for it, right? More and more people are asking about intensives these days. And this is also, know, most therapists aren’t actually positioned to offer this yet. And that’s really a great opportunity because again, you can’t just slap up a page on intensives on your website and be like, cool, it’s all good.

because there’s probably a lot of other strategies you have to work through specifically when it comes to if people are looking for intensives, how do you know they’re going to find you and not someone else offering intensives? That’s where I teach a lot of therapists about SEO, search engine optimization, and now these days, AIO, AI optimization. So there’s a lot of opportunity for this. It’s just a matter of taking advantage of the opportunities that are out there in terms of how to learn this and how to do this effectively.

so that you can give your clients amazing results, so that you do not have to worry about the summer slump, so that you really never have to worry about how busy your practice is or isn’t, right? Like you can trust the ebbs and flows of therapy intensives and how those help your income. You can trust what your SEO and AIO marketing is doing to keep you full. So there is really no time like the present to dive into the therapy intensives poll.

Yes, more people are gonna get trained in them, more people are gonna offer them, but this is something that I always remind myself and I’m always reminding the therapists I work with too, is you are gonna resonate with the client you’re gonna resonate with and a client is not gonna resonate with another therapist. You might offer literally exactly the same intensive offering and someone’s gonna choose you over another therapist because they like your style, your personality, your specific take on something. So it’s not a saturated market, there’s still plenty of time to get into this work.

So I wanna come back to the original fear. What if I offer therapy intensives and it doesn’t change someone’s life? And here’s where I’ve landed with that. It was never my job to guarantee transformation. My job is to create a safe intentional space, bring my full clinical skillset and support the process. But I’m not responsible for controlling the outcome.

And really when I integrated that and I’ve had to do a ton of therapy work on that, everything did change, not just in my business, but in how I showed up as a therapist. And so if you have been feeling this fear, if you’ve been sitting on the idea of intensives, but guilt, doubt, or uncertainty have been holding you back, you do not have to navigate that alone. That’s exactly what I walk therapists through inside the Therapy Intensives Academy, is not just the logistics like structure, pricing, marketing, but also the mindset.

and the emotional side of this work. I had a therapist joke with me in the past. My TIA program has changed a lot over the past few years that I’ve been offering it. And at one point I had named it the Intensive Growth Blueprint. And someone was like, you know, it’s more than just growing your intensives. It’s also the intensive growth you as a therapist go through as a part of this work. And it’s beautiful work to see and hold space for the therapists who do this.

mindset and emotional growth work. And really, again, that’s the part that actually keeps people stuck. It’s not the strategy. You can know all the strategy in the world. And especially right now, more awareness around intensives growing, this is a really powerful time to step into this. And again, it’s more than just strategy. This is also, what are you doing to support yourself with the mindset and emotional side of this work?

So I’m gonna drop the link to that article I mentioned in the show notes. So go ahead and check it out. Let me know your thoughts on this. And just remember, just because you might have fears or hesitations around intensives, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do this. It means you care, right? You are an ethical therapist and you wanna do a good job. With the right support, like my Therapy Intensive Academy, you truly can move through it.

If you are listening to this episode when it drops, you know, you probably know that the Therapy Intensive Academy program is on a huge sale right now. So I would love to have you inside and support you in this work. Please reach out if you have any questions about it.