When trust broke, something in you started bracing — and hasn't fully stopped
A focused therapy intensive for betrayal and relationship wounds
You understand what happened. You can explain the betrayal, the abandonment, the rejection. But your body still scans for the next blow, still flinches at a tone of voice, still holds a specific moment — a discovery, a conversation, a door closing — that hasn't loosened its grip. An intensive creates the protected time to work with that moment directly, at the pace your nervous system can actually meet.
What This Can Look Like
Betrayal and relationship wounds take many forms. Some of what brings people here:
Clinical readiness and stability are assessed before any processing work begins. If you are in an active crisis or unsafe relationship, a higher level of care may be more appropriate.
Why Doesn't It Feel Resolved?
You may already understand why this affects you the way it does. The question is whether your mind, body, emotions, and protective responses have had an opportunity to process what happened.
Insight was never meant to be the finish line — it's the doorway.
Unresolved experiences may continue to show up through:
This doesn't mean every painful relationship experience is stored trauma. It means some experiences may still be held by the nervous system in a way that hasn't yet had room to complete.
How Can a Therapy Intensive Help?
Extended, protected time for focused work
An intensive provides extended, protected therapeutic time to work with a specific betrayal, moment, or pattern — rather than trying to address your entire relational history at once.
EMDR
Reprocessing the specific moments of discovery, confrontation, or abandonment that remain charged
Internal Family Systems
Working with the parts of you that protect, the parts that still hope, and the parts carrying the wound
Somatic approaches
Helping your nervous system release the vigilance, bracing, or collapse it has been holding
Attachment-focused work
Understanding how early relationship patterns shape what gets activated now
Nervous-system regulation
Building capacity to feel the hurt without being consumed by it
Psychoeducation & resourcing
Understanding betrayal trauma and building tools for trust, boundaries, and safety
The exact approach is individualized based on your story, your nervous system, and clinical appropriateness. Not every intensive will include every modality, and no single intensive will fully resolve a relational wound.
What Might We Focus On?
You don't have to process every relationship you've ever been in. An intensive might focus on:
The specific moment of discovery — the text, the confession, the thing you saw
The conversation where everything shifted, or the conversation that never happened
The moment of being left, and how your body received it
The belief "I should have known" or "It was my fault"
The image that replays — their face, the room, the silence
The protective pattern that formed afterward — the wall, the scanning, the exit plan
The fear of trusting again, and what it would take to feel safe enough to try
Format & Logistics
What this actually looks like.
Intensives are available in three formats, shaped around your capacity and what you're working through — not a fixed program.
Half-Day
3–4 hours
A focused entry point — one contained piece of work, typically a single memory, pattern, or stuck point. Good for those newer to intensive work or wanting to test the format.
Full Day
5–6 hours
The most common format. Enough time to go somewhere, get through it, and begin landing it. Includes built-in breaks for grounding, movement, and integration throughout.
Multi-Day
2–3 consecutive or spaced days
For deeper or more complex trauma histories, or for clients who have previously done intensive work and are ready for another layer. Days can be consecutive or spaced a few days apart.
The Cost
A lot of the questions I get are about cost — and that makes sense, because it's an important one. I have a part of me that gets activated when pricing isn't listed, too. So here it is.
That said, intensives are genuinely customized. The length, the pacing, the modalities — all of it is shaped around what your system actually needs. Healing doesn't happen on a fixed schedule, and neither does the time and space this work requires. Think of the rates below as a starting point, not a fixed menu.
Standard Rate
$230 / hour
Ongoing individual sessions.
Intake Session
$280
90 minutes — clinical assessment and treatment planning.
Extended sessions are designed for deeper, more focused work than a standard weekly hour allows. Intensives can be scheduled on consecutive days or spaced out over time, based on what works best for your goals. Each intensive is individualized, typically ranging from a half-day to several consecutive days, and integrates modalities such as EMDR, IFS, and Brainspotting.
An intensive isn't more expensive per hour than weekly therapy — it's the same investment, concentrated.
Instead of 15 sessions spread across 4 months, each one fragmented by the week's stress, you get those same hours in 3 uninterrupted days: full presence, no restarting from scratch each time, no losing momentum to life in between.
You're not paying a premium for my attention. You're paying to have all of it, at once, when it counts.
Before we begin
A 90-minute pre-intensive call to assess your readiness, understand your nervous system, and co-create the shape of your intensive. You'll leave the call knowing exactly what to expect.
During the intensive
Grounding and orienting, followed by focused EMDR, IFS, and/or Brainspotting reprocessing. Breaks are built in throughout — this is not a marathon, it's a rhythm. Nothing gets forced.
After the intensive
Fatigue is normal — like a hard emotional workout. You'll have a 60-minute post-intensive integration session to land what moved. If you're in weekly therapy, we'll also create a plan you can bring back to your therapist.
Where it happens
In person at our San Diego office, or virtually throughout California, Oregon, and Florida. Both formats are fully supported.
Who leads the work
All intensives are led by Nancy Phung-Smith, LMFT — founder, EMDRIA Approved Consultant, and PhD candidate with a background in community mental health and psychiatric hospital settings.
What makes this different from weekly therapy?
Weekly therapy moves in 50-minute windows. An intensive removes the clock entirely. Without the session-end pressure, the nervous system has time to actually open — and the work has room to complete rather than stopping at the edge of something real. You don't spend the first 20 minutes warming back up, and you don't leave mid-process every week. The depth available in one intensive day can represent months of weekly work.
Sliding Scale & Reduced Fee
A limited number of reduced-fee intensive openings are available.
If the standard rate doesn't fit your circumstances right now, reduced-fee intensive spots are periodically available. Reach out to check current availability.
Learn moreNot Ready to Book?
Take your time.
This is a big decision and investment. Leave your info and we'll send you more to look over — no pressure, no obligation. It'll be here if this is something you want to revisit down the road.
Your information will not be shared.
What the Research Shows
What the Research Shows
From published research on betrayal, infidelity, and trauma-focused treatment
~20%
Lifetime prevalence of infidelity in married relationships
Research on community samples estimates that approximately 20% of married individuals and a higher proportion of unmarried couples report infidelity during their relationship, making betrayal a widespread relational stressor.
Mark et al. (2011)70.8%
Experienced betrayal trauma before adulthood
In a large community sample, 70.8% of respondents reported at least one betrayal trauma — harm by someone they trusted or depended on — before age 18, highlighting how common these experiences are.
Freyd et al. (2007)82.9%
Clinically meaningful response in intensive trauma-focused treatment
In a study of 347 adults with severe PTSD in an 8-day intensive trauma-focused program, 82.9% showed a clinically meaningful treatment response — illustrating the potential of massed, focused treatment for trauma-related distress.
Van Woudenberg et al. (2018)0.84
Large effect of trauma-focused therapy on PTSD symptoms
A meta-analysis found a large overall effect size (g = 0.84) for trauma-focused therapy on PTSD symptoms, supporting the effectiveness of approaches like EMDR and prolonged exposure for trauma-related conditions.
Bisson et al. (2013)Research findings describe group-level outcomes from structured studies and should not be interpreted as predicted results for SOULFLO clients. Betrayal trauma research and intensive trauma-treatment research are distinct bodies of evidence; the intensive studies cited here evaluated PTSD outcomes in structured programs, not relationship-specific outcomes.
Research References
Mark, K. P., Janssen, E., & Milhausen, R. R. (2011). Infidelity in heterosexual couples: Demographic, interpersonal, and personality-related predictors of extradyadic sex. Journal of Sex Research, 48(6), 535–545.
Freyd, J. J., Klest, B., & Allard, C. B. (2007). Betrayal trauma: Relationship to physical health, psychological distress, and a written disclosure intervention. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 6(3), 83–104.
Van Woudenberg, C., Voorendonk, E. M., Bongaerts, H., Zoet, H. A., Verhagen, M., Lee, C. W., van Minnen, A., & De Jongh, A. (2018). Effectiveness of an intensive treatment programme combining prolonged exposure and EMDR for severe PTSD. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 9(1), 1487225.
Related Focus Areas
Some experiences overlap. You may also want to explore:
Explore Other Intensive Focus Areas
What else can we work on?
Grief & Traumatic Loss
A sudden death, complicated loss, or painful moments surrounding someone you lost.
Learn MoreReligious & Spiritual Trauma
Experiences involving shame, fear, control, rejection, identity, or loss of belonging within a religious or spiritual community.
Learn MorePerinatal & Reproductive Trauma
Birth trauma, pregnancy loss, infertility, NICU experiences, reproductive procedures, or other painful experiences surrounding pregnancy and parenthood.
Learn MoreSubstance Use & Recovery-Related Trauma
When clinically appropriate, intensive therapy may help address underlying trauma, shame, triggers, or painful experiences connected to substance use and recovery.
Learn MoreComplicated Relationships with a Parent
Estrangement, ongoing conflict, difficult boundaries, or the grief of not having the relationship you hoped for. An intensive can help process what happened and work toward greater clarity and emotional freedom.
Learn More