When the loss is understood but not yet held by your body
A focused therapy intensive for grief and traumatic loss
You know what happened. You can name it, explain it, even talk about it with composure. But something in you is still standing at the moment it happened — replaying a final image, a phone call, a hospital room, a conversation that never finished. An intensive creates the protected time to go to that moment with your whole system, not just your words.
What This Can Look Like
Grief and traumatic loss don't always look the way people expect. Some of what brings people here:
Not every painful loss becomes stuck in this way, and not every grief response is trauma. Clinical readiness is assessed before any processing work begins.
Why Doesn't It Feel Resolved?
You may already understand why this loss 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 difficult grief 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 experience, memory, or cluster of moments connected to your loss — rather than trying to address your entire grief story at once.
EMDR
Reprocessing specific distressing memories or images connected to the loss
Internal Family Systems
Working with the parts of you carrying guilt, anger, or the unfinished conversation
Somatic approaches
Helping your nervous system release the holding, bracing, or collapse it has been maintaining
Attachment-focused work
Exploring the bond, the meaning of the relationship, and what it means to carry it forward
Nervous-system regulation
Building capacity to feel the grief without being overwhelmed by it
Psychoeducation & resourcing
Understanding how grief and trauma interact, and building tools for the hard moments
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 loss — grief is not something to be "finished."
What Might We Focus On?
You don't have to process your entire relationship or every moment of the loss. An intensive might focus on:
The specific image or moment that replays most — the phone call, the discovery, the last conversation
The guilt around what you did or didn't do, or what you wish you had said
The moment you learned the news, and how your body received it
A distressing memory from the hospital, funeral, or final hours
The belief "I should have been able to do something"
The unfinished conversation — what still needs to be said
The fear of forgetting, or the fear of never being able to let go
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 grief, prolonged grief, and trauma-focused treatment
~10%
Meet criteria for prolonged grief disorder
A meta-analysis of 14 studies found that approximately 10% of bereaved adults meet criteria for prolonged grief disorder, in which grief remains intense and disabling well beyond what is expected.
Lundorff et al. (2017)51%
Showed clinically significant improvement with specialized grief treatment
In a randomized controlled trial, 51% of participants receiving complicated grief therapy showed clinically significant improvement, compared to 28% receiving standard interpersonal therapy.
Shear et al. (2016)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.
Van Woudenberg et al. (2018)4×
Higher PTSD risk after traumatic loss
Bereavement following a violent or sudden loss is associated with approximately four times the risk of developing PTSD compared to loss through natural causes, highlighting the overlap between grief and trauma.
Kristensen et al. (2012)Research findings describe group-level outcomes from structured studies and should not be interpreted as predicted results for SOULFLO clients. Grief treatment research and intensive trauma-treatment research are distinct bodies of evidence; the intensive studies cited here evaluated PTSD outcomes, not grief-specific outcomes.
Research References
Lundorff, M., Holmgren, H., Zachariae, R., Farver-Vestergaard, I., & O'Connor, M. (2017). Prevalence of prolonged grief disorder in adult bereavement: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Affective Disorders, 212, 138–148.
Shear, M. K., Reynolds, C. F., Simon, N. M., Zisook, S., Wang, Y., Song, J., ... & Skodol, A. E. (2016). Optimizing treatment of complicated grief: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA Psychiatry, 73(7), 685–694.
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?
Betrayal & Relationship Wounds
Infidelity, abandonment, painful breakups, rejection, or experiences that changed how safe it feels to trust.
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