When the hardest moments came surrounded by what should have been joyful
A focused therapy intensive for perinatal and reproductive trauma
You may have a healthy child now, or you may not. You may still be trying, or you may have stopped. Either way, there are moments — in a hospital room, on a bathroom floor, in a waiting room, on an ultrasound table — that your body hasn't let go of. The world moved on. Your nervous system didn't. An intensive creates the protected time to go to those specific moments directly.
What This Can Look Like
Perinatal and reproductive trauma can occur at any point in the journey. Some of what brings people here:
Clinical readiness and stability are assessed before any processing work begins. If you are currently pregnant and in acute distress, we will discuss whether this is the right time.
Why Doesn't It Feel Resolved?
You may already understand what happened and why it was hard. 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 perinatal 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 moment — a birth, a loss, a procedure, a diagnosis — rather than trying to address your entire reproductive journey at once.
EMDR
Reprocessing specific distressing moments — the delivery, the ultrasound, the phone call
Internal Family Systems
Working with the parts holding grief, guilt, or the belief that your body failed
Somatic approaches
Helping your nervous system release the holding, bracing, or collapse from those moments
Attachment-focused work
Exploring the bond, the loss, and what it means to carry it forward
Nervous-system regulation
Building capacity to hold the grief and the hope at the same time
Psychoeducation & resourcing
Understanding perinatal trauma and building tools for medical settings and milestones
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 perinatal loss or trauma.
What Might We Focus On?
You don't have to process your entire reproductive journey. An intensive might focus on:
The specific moment in the delivery room — the alarm, the rush, the feeling of losing control
The ultrasound where you learned the news, and the silence that followed
The phone call with the test results, and how your body received it
The NICU — watching through glass, unable to hold your baby
The belief "my body failed" or "I should have done something differently"
The fear of trying again, and what it would take to feel safe enough
The moment everyone else moved on, and you didn't
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 birth trauma, perinatal PTSD, and trauma-focused treatment
~34%
Experience childbirth as traumatic
Research suggests that approximately one-third of women experience childbirth as traumatic, though not all go on to develop PTSD — highlighting how common distressing birth experiences are.
Ayers (2004)3.1%
Meet full PTSD criteria after childbirth
A meta-analysis found a pooled prevalence of 3.1% for PTSD following childbirth, rising to 15.7% in women who experienced traumatic births or pregnancy complications.
Grekin & O'Hara (2014)0.9%
Prevalence of PTSD in pregnancy
A systematic review found a pooled prevalence of 0.9% for PTSD during pregnancy, increasing to 4.2% in high-risk groups — underscoring that perinatal trauma is a significant clinical concern.
Yildiz et al. (2017)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)Research findings describe group-level outcomes from structured studies and should not be interpreted as predicted results for SOULFLO clients. Perinatal PTSD research and intensive trauma-treatment research are distinct bodies of evidence; the intensive studies cited here evaluated PTSD outcomes in structured programs, not perinatal-specific outcomes.
Research References
Ayers, S. (2004). Delivery as a traumatic event: Prevalence, risk factors, and treatment. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 17(4), 325–334.
Grekin, R., & O'Hara, M. W. (2014). Prevalence and risk factors of postpartum posttraumatic stress disorder: A meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 34(5), 389–401.
Yildiz, P. D., Ayers, S., & Phillips, L. (2017). The prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder in the perinatal period: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Affective Disorders, 208, 634–645.
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.
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 MoreBetrayal & 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 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