Individual Intensives: Accelerated Treatment for Personal Growth in Roseville, CA
Are you an anxious overachiever who's tried self-help books, apps, and maybe even traditional counseling, but still feel stuck in patterns of people-pleasing, perfectionism, and internal chaos? If you're tired of the constant mental noise and ready for meaningful change, individual intensives might be the breakthrough you've been seeking.
I am Audrey Schoen, a solo Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Roseville, California, I specialize in helping anxious, high-achieving individuals break free from cycles of self-criticism, emotional reactivity, and relationship struggles through personalized intensive experiences. Unlike conventional weekly sessions, this concentrated approach offers immersive healing that can create profound transformation in a short period rather than months.
What Are Individual Therapy Intensives?
Individual intensives are focused, extended treatment sessions designed to create accelerated healing and deeper insight. Rather than the traditional 50-minute weekly format, this intensive program typically involves longer sessions—often 3-6 hours or half day formats—that allow us to dive deeply into your concerns without the interruption of daily routines pulling you back into old patterns.
Think of an intensive as a therapeutic retreat designed specifically for your unique needs. You'll have dedicated, uninterrupted time to explore the root causes of your struggles, process difficult emotions, and develop new skills for managing anxiety, perfectionism, and relationship challenges. This concentrated approach maximizes your personal growth experience while honoring your busy schedule.
The immersive nature of this work creates unique opportunities for breakthrough moments. When we're not constrained by the clock or waiting a full week between sessions, deeper work becomes possible. Many people describe their experience as transformative, often saying they accomplished more in this focused format than in months of conventional treatment.
Why Anxious Overachievers Benefit from Concentrated Treatment
If you're reading this, you likely recognize yourself as someone who excels externally but struggles with your inner world. You've probably achieved impressive professional success, maintained a polished exterior, and perhaps even tried various self-improvement approaches. Yet underneath, you may feel emotionally disconnected, overwhelmed by perfectionist tendencies, or frustrated by patterns that keep repeating despite your best efforts.
Anxious overachievers often have busy schedules that make weekly appointments challenging to maintain consistently. You may travel frequently for work, have demanding responsibilities, or simply prefer to address challenges efficiently and thoroughly. Individual intensives honor your time constraints while providing the depth of work necessary for lasting change.
Your analytical mind, which serves you well professionally, also benefits from the comprehensive approach that concentrated sessions allow. Rather than processing information in small pieces over many weeks, you can see the full picture of your patterns, understand their origins, and develop integrated solutions all within this focused experience.
Many high-achievers also struggle with vulnerability and the gradual trust-building that traditional weekly therapy requires. The concentrated timeframe allows for deeper connection and trust to develop more quickly, enabling you to move beyond surface-level discussions into the meaningful work that creates real change.
The Science Behind Accelerated Healing
This approach isn't just a matter of convenience—it's grounded in our understanding of how the brain processes information and creates lasting change. When we engage in concentrated, focused work without the typical interruptions of daily routines, we can access and process material that might remain buried in conventional weekly sessions.
The brain's neuroplasticity—its ability to form new neural pathways—is enhanced during periods of focused attention and intense learning. This means that the insights and emotional breakthroughs you experience during this concentrated work are more likely to "stick" and translate into lasting behavioral changes.
This format also allows us to work with your nervous system in a more comprehensive way. Rather than starting from scratch each week and spending time reconnecting to where we left off, we can maintain a consistent therapeutic state that enables deeper processing and integration.
The concentrated format also minimizes the influence of your everyday environment and triggers. During this immersive experience, you're removed from the daily stressors and patterns that typically pull you back into old ways of thinking and behaving. This creates space for new perspectives to emerge and take root.
My Personalized Approach to Individual Intensives
As a Certified Master Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) Practitioner and Certified Brainspotting Therapist, I bring specialized tools to this work that can create rapid, lasting change. These evidence-based approaches work with your brain's natural healing capacity to resolve trauma, reduce anxiety, and shift limiting beliefs at their source.
Accelerated Resolution Treatment (ART)
ART is particularly well-suited for concentrated formats because it can often resolve single-incident trauma or specific phobias in just a few sessions. During this focused work, we might use ART to address performance anxiety, imposter syndrome, or specific traumatic memories that contribute to your current struggles with perfectionism or people-pleasing.
The beauty of ART is that it works without requiring you to talk extensively about painful life experiences. Instead, we use specific eye movements and guided imagery to help your brain process and resolve difficult memories. Many people find this approach less emotionally draining while being remarkably effective.
Brainspotting
Brainspotting is another powerful tool that works exceptionally well in concentrated formats. This approach uses your visual field to locate "brainspots"—eye positions that correlate with stored trauma or emotional activation in your brain. By maintaining focus on these specific spots, your brain can process and release stored emotional material.
For anxious overachievers who often feel disconnected from their emotions, Brainspotting can be revelatory. It bypasses the thinking mind and accesses emotional material directly, often leading to profound insights and emotional release that creates space for new ways of being.
Relational Treatment Principles
Even in individual work, relationship patterns are often central to the healing process. Using Relational Life Treatment principles, we'll explore how your internal narratives and unconscious processes affect your connections with others. This might include examining people-pleasing behaviors, difficulty setting boundaries, or patterns of emotional reactivity that interfere with intimacy.
During this concentrated work, we have the luxury of exploring these patterns in depth and practicing new ways of communicating and relating. You'll learn tools like the feedback wheel for expressing needs and concerns without blame or criticism—skills that can immediately improve your relationships.
The Structure of Individual Intensives
Each experience is carefully customized to address your therapeutic needs and goals. However, most follow a general structure that maximizes healing and integration. This personalized approach ensures that every aspect of our work together aligns with your specific circumstances and desired outcomes.
Pre-Work Preparation
Before beginning, we'll have a comprehensive consultation to understand your background, current challenges, and specific goals. I'll send you a detailed intake packet that includes measures to help us track your progress and inform our treatment plan.
You'll also receive guidance on how to prepare mentally and emotionally for this immersive experience. This might include recommendations for adequate sleep, nutrition, and clearing your schedule to allow for complete focus on the therapeutic work.
Foundation and Assessment
The first portion typically focuses on understanding your unique history and current patterns. We'll explore the contributing factors to your anxiety, perfectionism, or people-pleasing behaviors, often tracing these patterns back to their origins in your family system or early experiences.
Using specialized assessment tools, we'll identify specific areas where you feel stuck and map out the internal narratives that drive your current struggles. This foundation work is essential for targeting our interventions effectively.
Deep Processing and Integration
The heart of the work involves using ART, Brainspotting, and other therapeutic modalities to process difficult emotions and traumatic memories that contribute to your current patterns. This processing often creates significant shifts in how you feel about yourself and your capabilities.
We'll also work on developing new skills for emotional regulation, stress management, and interpersonal communication. Unlike conventional treatment where you might learn one technique per session, this concentrated format allows us to build a comprehensive toolkit that you can immediately begin implementing.
For those dealing with depression alongside anxiety and perfectionism, we'll address how these conditions intersect and develop integrated strategies for managing both.
Integration and Planning
The final portion focuses on integrating your insights and new skills into daily routines. We'll develop specific strategies for maintaining your progress, handling potential setbacks, and continuing your growth beyond this concentrated experience.
You'll leave with a personalized plan that includes specific practices, resources, and follow-up recommendations. Many people choose to schedule booster sessions periodically to maintain their gains and address new challenges as they arise.
What Makes My Approach Unique
Working with a solo practitioner offers distinct advantages for this type of work. You'll receive my undivided focused attention and won't have to adjust to different therapists or therapeutic styles. This consistency is particularly valuable during the vulnerable work that concentrated sessions often involve.
My background working with entrepreneurs and high-achievers means I understand the unique pressures you face. I know how perfectionism can masquerade as motivation, how people-pleasing can feel like professional necessity, and how success can sometimes feel hollow when your inner world is chaotic.
I take an active, engaged approach to treatment. You won't find me sitting silently while you do all the talking. Instead, I'll be actively collaborating with you, offering insights, challenging limiting beliefs, and guiding you toward breakthrough moments. This direct style often resonates well with high-achievers who prefer efficiency and concrete results.
The comprehensive intake process I use ensures that no important factors are overlooked. I look at you as a whole person within the context of your family, work, culture, and other systems that influence your experience. This holistic perspective allows us to address root causes rather than just symptoms.
Measuring Progress in Concentrated Treatment
One of the advantages of this format is the ability to see and measure changes in real-time. Throughout our work together, we'll use various assessment tools to track your progress and ensure that our approach is creating the desired changes.
I use detailed measurements to track improvements in areas like emotional regulation, self-criticism, anxiety levels, and relationship satisfaction. These objective measures complement your subjective experience and provide concrete evidence of your growth.
Many people find it incredibly motivating to see measurable improvements in their emotional wellbeing during the experience itself. This immediate feedback can boost confidence and motivation to continue implementing new skills and perspectives.
We'll also establish clear goals at the beginning and regularly check in on your progress toward these objectives. This goal-oriented approach ensures that your experience is both meaningful and practical.
Who Benefits Most from Individual Intensives
This concentrated approach is particularly well-suited for certain types of people and situations. You might be an ideal candidate if you're dealing with specific issues that feel urgent or if you've been working on the same patterns for years without significant breakthrough.
Busy professionals and entrepreneurs often find this format more manageable than conventional weekly appointments. Rather than trying to maintain consistent sessions over many months, you can invest a concentrated period in your healing and growth.
If you're facing a significant transition—such as a career change, relationship ending, or major move—this approach can provide the personalized support and clarity you need to navigate these changes successfully. The concentrated format allows us to address multiple aspects of the transition comprehensively.
People who have tried conventional treatment before but felt like progress was slow often benefit greatly from the accelerated approach this format provides. The deeper work possible can create breakthroughs that felt elusive in traditional weekly therapy.
Individual Intensives vs. Traditional Weekly Therapy
Both approaches have their place in mental health care. Understanding the differences can help you determine which might be best for your current needs and circumstances.
Traditional weekly therapy provides consistent support over time and allows for gradual processing of difficult material. It's often ideal for ongoing maintenance, complex trauma that requires longer-term work, or when you prefer a more gradual approach to change.
This concentrated approach offers focused healing that can create rapid progress on specific issues. It's particularly effective for addressing performance blocks, specific phobias, recent traumatic events, or when you want to make significant changes quickly.
Many people find that combining approaches works best—using this format to create initial breakthrough and momentum, then transitioning to less frequent sessions for ongoing support and maintenance.
The choice isn't always an either-or decision. As your therapist, I'll help you determine which approach best fits your current needs, goals, and circumstances.
The Investment in Your Wellbeing
Choosing this concentrated treatment represents a significant investment in your mental and emotional wellbeing. While the financial commitment may be larger upfront compared to single sessions, many people find that this format provides exceptional value when considering the accelerated progress and lasting results it often produces.
The concentrated nature of the work means you're likely to see meaningful changes more quickly than with conventional weekly sessions. This can translate to faster relief from symptoms, quicker development of new skills, and sooner implementation of positive changes in your daily routines.
Beyond the therapeutic benefits, this approach can also be more cost-effective in the long run. Rather than attending weekly sessions for many months, you might accomplish your primary goals in a much shorter timeframe through concentrated work.
For busy professionals, the time efficiency can be invaluable. Instead of carving out time every week for many months, you invest a concentrated period and then maintain your gains with less frequent follow-up sessions.
Preparing for Your Individual Intensive
Proper preparation can significantly enhance your experience. In the weeks leading up to your scheduled time, focus on taking good care of your physical health through adequate sleep, nutrition, and exercise. This foundation supports your brain's ability to process and integrate new information.
Consider reducing your commitments and clearing your schedule around the dates. You'll want to be fully present for the work and have time afterward for rest and integration. Many people find it helpful to arrange for support from friends or family during this period.
Reflect on your goals and intentions. What specific changes do you hope to see? What patterns are you most ready to release? Having clarity about your objectives helps focus our work together.
Gather any relevant materials that might inform our work—journals, previous treatment notes, or specific situations you'd like to address. This preparation helps us make the most of our time together.
Some formats can be structured over consecutive days to provide continuous treatment and maximize progress, while others might be scheduled as half day sessions to accommodate your schedule.
After Your Individual Intensive
The end of your concentrated work marks the beginning of a new chapter in your personal growth experience. Most people leave feeling energized, hopeful, and equipped with new tools for navigating challenges.
The weeks following are crucial for integration. This is when the insights and skills you've developed begin to take root in your daily routines. You'll likely notice yourself responding differently to familiar triggers and feeling more confident in your ability to handle stress and difficult emotions.
I provide detailed aftercare recommendations to support your continued growth. This might include specific practices to maintain your progress, resources for ongoing learning, and strategies for handling potential setbacks.
Many people choose to schedule follow-up sessions periodically—perhaps monthly or quarterly—to check in on their progress and address new challenges. These booster sessions help maintain the gains from your concentrated work and provide ongoing support for your continued growth.
Taking the Next Step
If you're tired of feeling stuck in patterns of anxiety, perfectionism, and people-pleasing, individual intensives might be the catalyst for change you've been seeking. As someone who understands both the drive to achieve and the internal struggles that often accompany success, I'm here to guide you toward greater emotional freedom and authentic connection.
This concentrated approach offers a unique opportunity to create meaningful change in a focused timeframe. Whether you're dealing with specific performance blocks, relationship challenges, or simply ready to break free from limiting patterns, this format can provide the breakthrough you've been looking for.
My practice in Roseville, California, serves people both in person and online throughout California and Texas. I work exclusively with out-of-network benefits, allowing us to focus entirely on your growth without the constraints of insurance limitations.
If you're curious about whether this approach might be right for you, I encourage you to reach out for a consultation. Together, we can explore your goals, discuss the format, and determine whether this approach aligns with your needs and circumstances.
The journey toward greater emotional wellbeing and authentic living doesn't have to be a long, drawn-out process. With the right personalized approach and commitment, significant change is possible sooner than you might expect. Your future self—calmer, more confident, and genuinely connected—is waiting for you to take this important step.