When the teachings that shaped you also left a mark
A focused therapy intensive for religious and spiritual trauma
You may have left the community, or you may still be in it. Either way, something from that world — a teaching, a rejection, a fear, a version of yourself you had to bury — still lives in your body. It shows up as shame that arrives without a source, fear that doesn't match the present, or a grief for a self you weren't allowed to be. An intensive creates the protected time to work with those specific experiences directly.
What This Can Look Like
Religious and spiritual trauma can be subtle or severe. Some of what brings people here:
Clinical readiness and stability are assessed before any processing work begins. This work is not anti-faith; it is about processing harm, not about anyone's beliefs.
Why Doesn't It Feel Resolved?
You may already understand why these experiences affect you. 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 religious 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 teaching, experience, rejection, or identity wound — rather than trying to address your entire spiritual history at once.
EMDR
Reprocessing specific moments of shame, fear, rejection, or spiritual terror
Internal Family Systems
Working with the parts still holding the old messages, and the parts trying to protect you from them
Somatic approaches
Helping your nervous system release the bracing, smallness, or collapse these experiences created
Attachment-focused work
Exploring the bond to the community, the leader, or the version of God you were given
Nervous-system regulation
Building capacity to hold doubt, grief, and new identity without the old fear taking over
Psychoeducation & resourcing
Understanding religious trauma and building tools for identity, boundaries, and belonging
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 spiritual identity wound.
What Might We Focus On?
You don't have to process your entire religious upbringing. An intensive might focus on:
The specific moment of rejection, shunning, or being told you were wrong or lost
A particular teaching that still triggers shame or fear in your body
The moment you realized you couldn't stay, and what it cost you
The belief "something is fundamentally wrong with me"
The fear of punishment or condemnation that still arrives uninvited
The grief of losing your community, your meaning, or the person you were supposed to be
The conflict between who you are and who you were told to be
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 complex trauma, shame, and trauma-focused treatment
1 in 6
Adults report a history of religious or spiritual abuse
Survey research on adverse childhood experiences and spiritual harm suggests that a meaningful proportion of adults report experiences of religious or spiritual abuse, though research in this specific area remains emerging and prevalence estimates vary.
Walker et al. (2018)63.9%
Report at least one adverse childhood experience
Data from a major CDC survey found that 63.9% of adults reported at least one adverse childhood experience, and these experiences are strongly associated with lifelong health and mental health outcomes — including the kinds of emotional and relational harm that can occur in high-control religious environments.
Merrick et al. (2019)87.7%
No longer met Complex PTSD criteria after intensive treatment
In a study of 308 patients in an 8-day intensive trauma-focused program, 87.7% of those who met criteria for Complex PTSD no longer met those criteria following treatment — relevant because religious and spiritual trauma often involves complex, repeated harm.
Voorendonk et al. (2020)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 approaches like EMDR for trauma-related distress that can accompany religious and spiritual harm.
Bisson et al. (2013)Research specifically examining religious and spiritual trauma in a therapy-intensive format is still emerging. The studies cited here address complex trauma prevalence, intensive trauma-treatment outcomes for PTSD, and general trauma-focused therapy effectiveness — not religious-trauma-specific outcomes. Findings describe group-level results and should not be interpreted as predicted outcomes for SOULFLO clients.
Research References
Walker, D. F., Osa, D. E., Hirsch, L. K., & Lucchetti, A. L. (2018). Changes in religious belief and the psychological impact of religious/spiritual abuse. Journal of Religion & Spirituality in Social Work, 37(4), 423–441.
Merrick, M. T., Ford, D. C., Ports, K. A., & Guinn, A. S. (2019). Vital signs: Estimated proportion of adult health problems attributable to adverse childhood experiences and implications for prevention. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 68(44), 999–1005.
Voorendonk, E. M., De Jongh, A., Rozendaal, L., & van Minnen, A. (2020). Trauma-focused treatment outcome for Complex PTSD patients: Results of an intensive treatment programme. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 11(1), 1783955.
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 MoreBetrayal & Relationship Wounds
Infidelity, abandonment, painful breakups, rejection, or experiences that changed how safe it feels to trust.
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