Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 7: How to Book More Individual Therapy Intensives (& not just EMDR)

Released: 01/02/2026

Show Notes:

Note: This episode is a replay of a popular training I’ve done. Feel free to check out my YouTube channel, linked here, to watch more trainings.

In this conversation, Amanda discusses the concept of therapy intensives, addressing common misconceptions and exploring various modalities that can be utilized beyond EMDR and couples therapy. She emphasizes the importance of marketing strategies, creative naming, and understanding client needs to effectively promote therapy intensives. Amanda encourages therapists to leverage their existing skills and client relationships to offer extended sessions, ultimately aiming for faster transformation in therapy.

3 Key Takeaways:

1. You don’t need to offer EMDR or couples therapy to book intensives—any modality can become an extended or accelerated session when you focus on time and transformation.
2. The key to selling non-EMDR intensives is marketing the outcome (faster progress, deeper work, breakthrough moments), not the modality itself.
3. You can start confidently by offering extended sessions to current clients, refining your messaging, and intentionally funneling website and social traffic toward your intensive offerings.

Connect with Amanda:

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

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Sponsors:

• This episode is sponsored by Jane – use code: AMANDA2MO for a 2-month grace period

Resources & Links:

SEO for Therapists Membership

Therapy Intensives Academy

Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Mastermind

Free Training: 3 Steps to Booking Your First Therapy Intensive

Free Guide: 3 Steps to Double Your Income

SEO Freebie

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 (00:11)
Hey, hello. Hi, everyone. Happy Wednesday. I am pulling up the live on my phone because I tend to get notifications and comments better there than on the computer for whatever reason. So hi. So good to see everyone if you’re here live. For those of you who are catching the recording, I know this is ⁓ a on the half hour training. So some people might be.

in sessions if you don’t do sessions on half hour or you maybe aren’t even started yet for the day. But I wanted to come on because I’ve gotten so many people both in this group ask about what kind of intensives I can do. And then the therapist who go through my therapy intensives Academy or who I coach still ask similar questions around. It feels like the only way or the best way to book intensives is with EMDR.

or with couples. So if I don’t do those two, what can I do? And that is just a myth I want to dispel ASAP because you can do so many different things in Intensive. So I’m going to talk you through some points of considerations, ⁓ marketing things, and even just some creative idea generation in terms of, you don’t see couples, you don’t do EMDR. What can you do? So let’s even start there.

Right? Because at the end of the day, a therapy intensive, depending on how it works for your schedule, depending on how it works for your ideal client population, it is an extended session, whether that is 90 minutes, two hours, six hours across two days, whatever it is, that is all it is. You do not need to do EMDR in an intensive. You do not need to do couples work in an intensive.

The clients you are already seeing, if they are seeing you for self-esteem, if they’re seeing you for OCD, if they’re coming in because they just had a breakup and they’re incredibly distressed about that. All of those different presenting concerns, basically presenting concern. Clients who are neurodivergent and need more time to like focus in on things as opposed to dipping their toes in and then like getting out before their brain actually has a chance to settle.

All of that is a good fit for longer therapy sessions. So when we think about what is it that you’re doing in your sessions, so you may not do couples, you may not do EMDR, but what modalities are you already using? Brainspotting, for example, it’s kind of similar to EMDR. So some people feel maybe still similarly about that. I’m like, but I don’t do brain spotting, so can’t do intensives. That’s not true either. But you need to do brain spotting intensives. I’ve seen people put together

Even just like psychodynamic intensives, right? We just talk for 90 minutes to 120 minutes, two hours. I’ve seen people do like psychoeducational based intensives. You have a lot of different options, right? If you are using ACT approaches, CBT, DBT, whatever it is, you do not have to learn a new modality or work with a client type that you don’t love working with in order to make intensives work. You just have to know.

what it is you do and then essentially the marketing side of the job is how do I talk about it just a little bit differently because what you’re not saying probably a lot of us have looked at a lot of therapist websites over the past few years a lot of us talk about like you know come in and each week we’ll dive into and we’ll talk about and we’ll figure out la da da really the only difference is you’re saying like

Yes, we can do that. And we can also do it this way too. Like if you are the person who just wants to deep dive into things, you just need to like brain dump. You want to learn all the skills you can ASAP. This is why an intensive is the right fit for you. So literally whatever you are doing right now, you can extend it into 90 minutes. A great way to test that.

is go to your current client caseload. Now, if you are in network versus private pay, this will look a little bit different because if you are in network, you probably know to expect the max you’re gonna bill is that 90837, the max you’re gonna get reimbursed for is that 90837. The tiny caveat is some insurance companies in some states based on some tiers of the plan, double check yours, because obviously I can’t give any professional guidance on that, because I don’t know all the things out there.

Some will pay you and or reimburse the client for two units of 90834 or two units of 90837 in a day. Confirm that though, because what you don’t want to do is bill two and then none of them get reimbursed or paid out. you know, worst case scenario that I’ve had some therapists tell me is that they’ve billed for two or three and only gotten one paid for and reimbursed. Obviously.

It reimbursing the company, reimbursing the client is one thing. You not getting paid for two hours of your work is a whole other thing. So if you’re in network, there’s some things to consider around how you want to manage that. If you do offer your current clients, like, Hey, what do you think about next week? I know we’ve been really stuck and running up against time and you’re, you’ve been asking for like, is there any way we can go over? And traditionally that hasn’t been the case, but now I am offering this opportunity for us to have.

some longer time so that we can really settle in and actually get to some of the work that you’re really wanting to get into. How about we schedule the next session for 90 minutes? So if you do that with your clients and you’re in that work, you just want to have a plan for what does that mean? Most insurance companies that I’ve heard have rules against what’s called balance billing. There are ways other people have formed agreements with their clients to make that kind of thing work. So again, no legal advice that I’m providing here, but lots of people are.

doing some kind of hybrid approach in that way. ⁓ If you are private pay, obviously that’s just a little bit different. You’re having a conversation with the client around. So normally we ⁓ meet for this length of time and your fee is this much. For this session, it would be this much because we’re meeting for this length of time. So you’re just letting them know the fee differential. You may want to consider including that in a good faith estimate because as you know, we have to give that. There can’t be all these like,

Surprise billing charges as we know the GFE is kind of problematic for mental health providers anyway, it wasn’t really meant for us. So whether you have them sign an official form or just, you know, document that they verbally agree to the additional charge, then that’s that. But seriously, just like going to your current clients who already trust you, they already like working with you, they already know what it’s like to work with you. It’s kind of almost like a

an easier way to step into the intensive world to say like, how about we try 90 minutes next time? Or what do you think about two hours or even three or whatever that might be? So go to your current clients and see if they are interested. You would be surprised how many will be like, yeah, that sounds great. I didn’t even know we could do that. So that is one way to get more individual intensives booked is just think about what am I already doing? Who’s struggling a little bit with

you know, not having enough time that they want to do their processing or their schedule has been chaotic and we’ve only been able to meet like once a month when we’re supposed to be meeting weekly. Go to some of those clients first and see what they think about trying out one extended session and then if they want to do more, fantastic. A lot of clients can convert into like doing intensive work by default. A lot of people like doing 90 minutes by default. I do anywhere between 75 and 90 minutes with my therapist. So

Everyone ask your current clients. Number two, when it comes to the marketing of your individual intensives, when it comes to EMDR, for example, right? We’re saying, what if I don’t do EMDR? So how do I market that? The therapists who do EMDR intensives are really highly relying on the EMDR part as like what’s selling the intensive. And for those people who know what EMDR is, someone’s recommended it to them. So they think they want to try it out.

they’ve done it before but they didn’t like the shorter sessions, that’s like an easier jump for them, right? They’re like, okay, well, I’m sold on EMDR already, more time and I can get through stuff great, faster, great, sign me up for it. So it’s an easier jump in that way, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be the equivalent for therapists who are not doing EMDR. It again just means for you, your approach, what you do, if that’s again CBT or

interpersonal process therapy or what else is there out there? There’s so many things out there. Whatever you practice, it’s just a matter of thinking about, wow, if we had more time, what could we accomplish? If I had 30 more minutes, if I had 60 more minutes with this individual person, where do I think we could go? Thinking about that transformation both in the individual extended session as well as

What is the longer term potential for that? Like if we kept doing this, here’s how that could help you. That is ultimately going to be what you are marketing, right? You are marketing that transformation because either way, the whole point of intensives is about faster transformation. Again, those who do EMDR, those who do couples work, they’re kind of leaning on the modality.

because the modality already kind of has clout of like, okay, EMDR is about transformation, couples’ therapy is about transformation, but so is every other modality out there, right? And so you may not market your individual intensives as a, what would it be called? Like a modality specific intensive. You may not say it’s a CBT intensive, it’s an act intensive, but also because this is where offering this kind of model of therapy,

This is where it is so customizable because you may not like the word intensive. Your clients may not like the word intensive. They may be put off by this idea of like, wow, do I need an intensive? Am I that bad? Do I need that much work? And so maybe you do not use the word intensive in your marketing, right? Because number one, a lot of clients do not know what the heck that is to begin with. The one

The two that I have seen perform as SEO keywords are EMDR intensives and couples intensives because therapists have known about that for a longer time than, hey, you can do an intensive anywhere. So yes, if you do those two, you can use those as keywords, but otherwise there’s no point in using intensive from like a marketing perspective of like, it’s going to help you get so much more traffic. It’s more about that transformation point. All right, what are they going to get?

And so therapists I’ve worked with have used more creative language around, you know, it’s not an intensive session, it’s an accelerated session, or it’s just straight up an extended session, or it’s a breakthrough session, an immersive session. There are so many different terms that you can coin this. And then you just think about how to market that, where you do your marketing, if that’s on your website, if that’s on social media, if you do networking, but you have to think about what are you calling it and how.

what you’re calling it reflects that transformation. Right? So the immersive session, right? Like the whole aspect of that is like, wow, I get to like really be in something I get to immerse. I get to go deeper. Perfect. Sounds great. The breakthrough session. Okay. Like I’m going to overcome some of those time limited barriers that I’ve been experiencing in my weekly 45 minute sessions. And it could lead through a breakthrough. Right? These accelerated sessions.

The whole point is to accelerate your therapy progress because you are doing more work in. It’s not that it’s less time literally on the clock because obviously two hours is two hours and you know your two hours, whether it’s in one day or in two weeks, it’s still two hours, but it’s the condensed time, right? It’s the fact that they did that work in half a day as opposed to a whole month or something like that. So.

Really, the people I see who are successful with booking more individual intensives that are not EMDR focused are the ones who can really put at the forefront of their marketing the transformation and why this is the most helpful thing compared to the alternative, which is weekly therapy, right? So if there’s someone who hardly has time for weekly therapy, if there’s someone who

They always get comfortable by minute 45 and they still have so much more to talk about, but their therapist is starting to wrap them up. If they, you know, just simply prefer, like I’d rather just go into all of this in one sitting compared to do a little bit and then pop out and then do a little bit and pop out. Like there’s a, there is a market for therapy intensives and you do not have to call them therapy intensives.

The one thing you will want to consider in your marketing, if that’s on your website, if that’s on social media, again, wherever you’re sharing the word about it, whatever you call it, number one, do not overthink it. We are always going to care so much more about what we name something than our clients will. But what we have to do is essentially funnel any traffic to those pages that talk about your intensive offerings. So your homepage of your website needs to offer it. It should probably be in your navigation bar at the top.

of your homepage, your social media posts should talk about again the pain points and here’s this alternative solution with hooks that explore that pain point or that transformation because if you just say like what’s a therapy intensive that kind of content isn’t like it’s not social media sexy people are either gonna be like I don’t know and keep scrolling or maybe someone will be like ⁓ what what is this thing I haven’t heard about it let me let me hear about it.

but either way, the marketing of it, you need to show why you feel confident that the problem in therapy is not that the client is beyond help. It’s not that you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re not confident in it. The problem is the time constriction. And if we just had more time, imagine what could be possible. Or while someone is waiting weeks or months to be on a wait list,

for a specific therapist and a network therapist, they could make momentum in half a day, in a weekend, whatever that is. So it’s really just understanding what the power of an intensive is and what your ideal client needs to hear. Because each of our individual clients, they need to hear something a little bit differently. They need to hear a different point of view. Maybe they want to hear the financial breakdown in comparison if they’re more of an analytical person.

or the emotional might work better for them, right? Of like how painful it is to try and work through something and it take weeks and months and what if they could make more of that progress sooner, right? Or coming back to the analytical, the financial side, like how many times do you feel like you wasted a therapy session or you don’t even know what you were doing and you kind of feel like not that it was a waste of money, but you wish you spent your session time better or something like that.

When you know your ideal client, you know what’s going to speak to them about why extended sessions are the answer for their problems. So that is really the biggest difference between someone who’s marketing an EMDR intensive and a couples therapy intensive. They truly by and large can be successful based on the modality because the modality again already has the clout behind it. Like this is the answer and this is why you want to do it.

In the sense of couples therapy, right? Like 50 minutes is definitely not enough for two people to share a therapeutic space. So like, I don’t want to say it’s easier to book intensives when you, when you offer those two, because I’ve seen therapists who offer those two and still don’t get booked because they are still missing that piece around, here’s why it’s the perfect fit and here’s the transformation from it. So regardless of what kind of intensives you want to be booking, that has to be.

like the foundation of your marketing and you can’t be afraid to market it. I’ve seen some people kind of like hide it on their website or barely talk about it on social media, even if they’re very active on social media. We have to push all traffic there if that’s what we want to book more of. So my website, for example, it has an announcement banner at the top that talks about my upcoming availability for intensives. There’s a pop-up that talks about the pain points of weekly therapy and

they should consider an intensive. There are buttons under my specialties on each of my service pages. It says, and if we did an extended session, here’s what you can get out of that. Click here to learn more. So we have to push as many people to it as possible, especially when people like the general public still does not really know the term intensive therapy, therapy intensive. The only thing people might know if they’re a little bit more like psychologically minded and they’ve been in therapy before.

is an intensive outpatient program. And if that’s what they think that button is, they’re not going to click that unless they need that, right? But then that’s probably not what you’re offering. But that’s where we have to think about, again, you can name this something totally different. You can give psychoeducation on it as much as possible. But you can absolutely book more one-to-one intensives that are not EMDR when you get really, really clear on what it is you offer.

who you’re offering it to and why that is the perfect fit for your ideal client. So that’s really all that I have to say on that today. If you are here live, feel free to put any questions, comments in the chat and I’ll answer them before I sign off in a few minutes. If you are catching the recording, feel free to do the same thing because again, I know a lot of people who, I’ve seen some people say they wanna offer like self-esteem intensives, parenting coaching intensives.

Somatic based intensives are not EMDR. Like you all have such great ideas when we are really niched into our area and doing the things that we love. We can do really cool things. Do not let the barrier of I don’t have EMDR. I’m not doing couples stop you from offering intensives. And again, remember you probably already have a good solid current client caseload and you can ask some of your current clients.

if this is something that they would be interested in. That helps you test it a little bit, that helps you get a little bit more confident in it, that confidence will show up in how you market it on your website and anywhere else you do your marketing. So remember you have options here, you can absolutely book more individual intensives. I’ve seen, I’ve gotten a lot of questions around, you know, if someone is like all virtual or they do hybrid or in-person only, my split,

genuinely and generally of my intensives is couples prefer to do in-person intensives. My individuals, most of them have honestly done virtual. I would say like 75 to 80 percent have been totally fine with virtual either because I didn’t have an office at the time, they didn’t want to travel to me for it or whatever it is, but especially you can do this virtually. You just might want to talk with them and consider, you know,

A three hour intensive might be great, but because of screen fatigue, we might do 90 minutes and then 90 minutes after like a 20 minute break in between or something like that. But again, it can be so helpful to put the word out there more and just trust yourself that with these skills and the training you currently have, you can make this work. You do not need more trainings. You especially do not need like, I’ve actually seen out there EMDR intensive training, couples intensive training.

Brainspotting intensive training. The people I know who have taken those trainings have said it didn’t teach them anything outside of, here’s how to do a longer session, which again, like you know how to do. If you’re like me, you’ve had situations where the session accidentally runs 10 minutes over, 20 minutes over. If something really like, you know, crisis-y is happening, you’ve probably gone 30 to 60 minutes over. So you know how to do intensive work. It’s just a matter of…

how you market it at this point, right? There’s a difference between accidentally doing an intensive and doing it with purpose and being able to share that purpose with your current clients or your potential new clients. So that is it for this topic today. Again, let me know if you have any questions. Please tag me in the comments so that I can make sure that I see your comments and questions. And otherwise, next week I am doing another live training. I’m going to pull up the exact title of it.

Um, a lot of people, generally I teach therapists on therapy intensive, but I also teach SEO search engine optimization. So a lot of people have been asking about SEO and now the role of AI optimization. AIO. So I’m to talk a little bit more about how to leverage both so that you can book not just more therapy clients, but also more therapy intensives. So I’m super excited to talk about that one because I know the tech part of that can go.

way over our heads. It went over my head the first time I was learning it and now I know it so well that it’s like very easy to teach other people and that’s my goal here is to like teach you how to book clients more easily. So I’m excited for that one next week. That one is 9 30 a.m pacific. You all should get reminders in the group for next Wednesday the 29th. But thank you so much for being here today live. Thanks for catching the recording if that’s where you are and I will look forward to talking to you all soon. Bye!