Individual Therapy Intensives
When you’re ready to heal, reconnect with your self, and move on but you don’t have time for weeks and weeks of therapy.
You've read the books. You understand your patterns. You can trace them back to your childhood. And still, something hasn't moved.
That's not failure. That's a nervous system that hasn't had what it actually needs: sustained, uninterrupted, deeply attuned time to work through the junk and move on with your life.
An individual therapy intensive isn't more therapy. It's better therapy, designed for the kind of deep-rooted change that weekly 50-minute sessions simply don't have room to create.
It’s finally time to heal and move on
Why an Intensive?
Think Quality Over Quantity.
One Focused Day Can Do What Months of Weekly Sessions Cannot
Traditional weekly therapy is valuable. But it has a structural limitation that most people never name out loud: by the time you get warmed up, it's over.
You spend the first ten minutes arriving. The next twenty settling into the material. Then, just as something real begins to surface, the session ends. You close it back down, drive home, and spend the next six days either avoiding it or holding it alone. Then you start all over again the following week.
An individual therapy intensive removes that ceiling entirely.
With extended, uninterrupted time, a half-day, a full day, or several consecutive days your nervous system doesn't have to keep starting over. You can move past the surface. You can stay with something long enough for it to actually shift. And you can integrate what emerges before you leave, rather than carrying it home unfinished.
This is the difference between scratching the surface and doing the actual work.
Who is this for?
You Function Well in the World.
Something Still Feels Off Inside.
Individual therapy intensives at Grounded Growth Counseling are designed for high-functioning adults who are ready for something more than maintenance.
You might be a good fit if:
You feel like you’ve lost touch with yourself, and you really to reconnect with that person.
You've had therapy before and gained real insight, but the patterns haven't changed
You feel reactive in ways that don't match who you want to be
Something happened and you just can’t move past it
You grew up with a parent who was emotionally unavailable, inconsistent, immature, or absent — and you can still feel that history running in the background of your adult life
You value depth, efficiency, and meaningful progress over open-ended processing
Your schedule makes weekly therapy difficult, but you're willing to commit to focused, intensive work
You're at a turning point, a life transition, a relationship shift, a growing sense that something has to change
If you recognize yourself here, an intensive may be exactly what you've been looking for.
So, what are we doing?
What a typical one-day intensive looks like.
First things first, what’s your coffee order? Before we go anywhere deep, we spend time settling in, getting grounded in the space, in your body, and in a shared understanding of what you are carrying and where you want to go. This opening work matters more than it might seem. The quality of what becomes possible later in the day depends entirely on the safety and presence we build at the start.
Ok, let’s get started. From there, we begin to explore. Using an IFS-informed lens, we turn toward the parts of you that have shaped your experience, the protectors that learned to keep you safe, the younger parts still carrying old pain, and the deeper Self that has always existed beneath all of it. This is not analysis from a distance. It is a lived, felt experience of meeting yourself with curiosity and compassion, often for the first time.
Now for the good stuff! As the morning unfolds and safety deepens, we move into Brainspotting and EMDR as needed, dropping beneath the level of conscious thought and into the places where old experiences are stored in the body and the brain. This is where the real unburdening happens. Not through talking about what happened, but through processing it at the level where it actually lives.
Midday brings a natural pause. It’s time to eat, breathe, and let the morning integrate. This rest is not a gap in the work. It is part of the work. Your nervous system needs space to absorb what has shifted, and honoring that is as important as anything we do in session.
Pulling it all together and moving forward - The afternoon builds on what the morning opened. With defenses lower and trust established, this is often where the most unexpected and meaningful movement happens, where something that has felt permanently fixed begins to loosen, where a new understanding of yourself begins to take shape, where the person you have been trying to become starts to feel genuinely within reach. You will leave not just with insight but with a felt sense of having actually moved forward, inward, and into a version of yourself that feels more spacious, more whole, and more fully your own.
What You’ll Take Away
An intensive isn't just an extended therapy session. It's a structured, contained experience with a clear arc, and real, concrete results you can feel when you leave.
Clients who complete an individual therapy intensive at Grounded Growth Counseling typically walk away with:
Nervous system regulation you can actually feel. Not just strategies on a worksheet, a lived, embodied sense of what it feels like when your system is no longer running old threat responses. Many clients describe leaving with a settledness they haven't experienced before.
Clarity about your core patterns and where they came from. Not abstract insight, but a specific, grounded understanding of how your early relational experiences shaped the way you move through the world today, and why your reactions have made sense, even when they've cost you.
Processed experiences that were previously stuck. Through EMDR or Brainspotting, material that has been held in the body, sometimes for decades, can shift in a way that talk therapy alone rarely reaches. Clients often describe this as feeling lighter, less reactive, or as if something that felt very close finally has some distance.
A different relationship with your most self-critical parts. IFS-informed work helps you meet the parts of yourself that have been driving perfectionism, over-responsibility, and self-doubt, not to fight them, but to understand them. Clients leave with more compassion for themselves and more choice in how they respond.
A clear sense of what comes next. Every intensive ends with integration and a forward-looking plan, whether that means a maintenance schedule, follow-up sessions, or simply a grounded sense of direction. You don't leave open-ended or unfinished.
Momentum that continues after the work. Because intensive work addresses the nervous system directly, not just the cognitive understanding of patterns, the changes tend to hold. Clients consistently report that the shifts they made in an intensive continue to deepen in the weeks and months that follow.
The Real Cost of Waiting Isn't the Intensive.
It's the Alternative.
Think about the math: if meaningful progress in weekly therapy takes six to twelve months, that's 24 to 48 sessions of 50 minutes each , the equivalent of multiple full days of therapy, spread across nearly a year, with all the start-stop friction in between.
An intensive compresses that time without compressing the depth. You get the quality of that work in a fraction of the time , without waiting, without carrying unfinished material home each week, and without losing momentum between sessions.
For adults with demanding careers, caregiving responsibilities, or schedules that make consistent weekly therapy difficult, an intensive isn't a luxury. It's often the most practical and effective path to real change.
Pricing & Scheduling
Intensive sessions are offered at $225 per hour. This rate reflects the depth of the work, the preparation involved, and the dedicated time set aside to support meaningful, lasting change.
When insurance is involved, I’ll work collaboratively with you to explore coverage and practical options for care.
Together, we can design a full-day intensive, several consecutive days, or a retreat-style experience, whatever best supports the work you want to do. This format allows you to step out of weekly surface-level conversations and into deeper understanding, repair, and connection.
Intensives are customized to fit your goals, readiness, and schedule.
Me & My Approach
The work I do with individuals is about more than symptom relief. It is about helping you understand yourself at a deeper level, where your patterns come from, what has been driving your choices, and what becomes possible when the weight of old wounds is no longer running the show.
I work at the intersection of three powerful, evidence-based approaches, IFS (Internal Family Systems), Brainspotting, and EMDR. Each of these modalities is profound in its own right. Together, they give me a comprehensive and layered toolkit for helping people move through what has felt stuck, unmovable, or simply too painful to look at directly.
IFS provides the map, a compassionate framework for understanding the different parts of you that developed to protect you, and the deeper Self that has always been whole beneath them. Brainspotting works at the level of the body and the brain, accessing and processing trauma and emotion stored beneath conscious awareness. EMDR brings its own powerful mechanism for releasing the grip of painful memories and experiences so they no longer define how you see yourself or the world.
What this work creates is not just healing. It is expansion, a growing sense of who you are beyond your history, your wounds, and the stories you have been carrying. People leave individual intensives not just feeling better, but feeling more like themselves than they have in years.
I bring the same commitment to attunement and care here that I bring to every intensive I facilitate. The pace is yours. The environment is warm and intentional. And you will never be pushed into territory faster than you are ready to enter it. This is your process, am simply honored to guide it.
—Leana Sykes M.Ed, LPC, ACS
Your Questions, Answered
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Weekly therapy is valuable, but its 50-minute structure limits how deeply the work can go in any given session. An intensive removes that ceiling, giving your nervous system the sustained, uninterrupted time it needs to actually reorganize. Less starting and stopping. More depth. Faster, lasting results.
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Not necessarily, though most clients who seek intensives have had some prior therapy experience. If you're new to therapy, a consultation will help us determine whether an intensive is the right starting point for you.
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Some insurers do cover intensive therapy. We'll work with you to explore your coverage and options before scheduling.
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Yes. Virtual intensives are available throughout New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware for clients who prefer or require remote care.
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Every intensive concludes with an integration session and a clear forward-looking plan. Many clients continue with periodic individual sessions or return for follow-up intensives. You won't leave without a sense of what's next.
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The best way to find out is through a free consultation. We'll talk about what's brought you here, what you're hoping to change, and whether an intensive is the right fit for where you are right now.
You Don't Have to Keep Waiting to Feel Different.
The gap between understanding your patterns and actually feeling free of them isn't permanent. It's a nervous system waiting for the right conditions , sustained time, genuine attunement, and work that reaches deeper than insight.
That's what an individual therapy intensive is built for.