Intensives for Individuals
Therapy intensives for people who want to heal themselves and their relationships
Trauma therapist California | Therapy Intensives can help you heal
You are tired of feeling like you are always bracing for something. From the outside, your life may look pretty put together. You have a career, responsibilities, people who count on you. You get things done. You have learned how to keep going even when things are hard.
But inside, it feels different.
You are anxious more often than you would like to admit. Your mind rarely stops. You replay conversations, question yourself, anticipate what might go wrong, or find yourself reacting strongly to things you wish did not affect you so much.
It shows up most in your relationships.
Some small thing happens and suddenly you are right back in a familiar cycle. You get angry. You shut down. You over-explain. You try harder. You people-please. You pull away before someone else can hurt you. You find yourself desperate to be understood—or convincing yourself that you do not need anyone at all.
And somewhere inside, you know this is about more than what is happening right now.
You already understand where some of these patterns came from. You grew up having to be responsible too early, learned to keep the peace, lived with unpredictability, experienced abuse or neglect, and went through things that changed the way you see yourself and the world.
Or maybe there is one particular experience you still cannot seem to move beyond.
You know what happened. You may have talked about it before. You can explain your patterns and understand why you do what you do. But understanding it has not necessarily changed what happens inside your body when something touches the wound.
Your nervous system still reacts as though the past is happening now.
Part of you is scared to say it out loud, but you are ready to do something different. You do not want to spend years talking around the edges of what hurts. You want the time and space to go deeper—to understand what your mind and body have been carrying, tend to the parts of you that learned how to survive, and begin changing the patterns that are keeping you stuck.
Trauma Therapy Intensives in California for Deeper Healing
Trauma does not always look like flashbacks or memories you cannot escape. Sometimes it looks like being highly successful while quietly feeling anxious all the time. It looks like over-functioning, perfectionism, people-pleasing, difficulty trusting, constantly questioning yourself, or feeling responsible for everyone around you.
And very often, trauma shows up in relationships.
You might notice the cycle starting but still feel powerless to stop it. You promise yourself you will not react, and then your body is flooded and old protective parts of you jump in. Maybe you go numb and quiet. Maybe you get louder because you are desperate to be heard. Maybe you shapeshift into the version of yourself you think someone else needs so they will not leave.
Later, you replay what happened and wonder why you keep doing this when you know better.
This is one of the painful realities of unresolved trauma: insight alone does not always change the patterns your nervous system learned in order to survive.
Trauma therapy intensives create more uninterrupted time to work with what is happening underneath those patterns. Instead of spending a few minutes each week getting reacquainted with the problem and stopping just as you begin to get somewhere, we have several hours to slow down, listen to what your body is communicating, work with the protective parts of you, and process experiences that may still be shaping the way you feel, react, connect, and move through your life.
For some people, that work centers around a romantic relationship. You may be trying to understand why you keep choosing the same kinds of partners, why conflict feels so threatening, why you look outside of your relationship for connection, why you lose yourself in relationships, or what belongs to you when your partner is unwilling to do their own work.
For others, the relationship they most need to repair is the one they have with themselves.
Either way, the goal is not simply to make your symptoms disappear or teach you how to react “better.” It is to tend to the parts of you that have been hurting for a long time and working incredibly hard to keep you safe—so you no longer have to organize your life around wounds from the past.
Hi, I’m Alicia, a Trauma Therapist in California
I’m Alicia Taverner, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Rancho Cucamonga, CA. I work with people who are tired of understanding their patterns intellectually but still finding themselves caught in the same reactions, relationships, fears, and ways of protecting themselves.
Often, those patterns have roots in experiences that happened long before you had the ability to understand what was happening. You learned how to adapt, how to stay safe, how to keep the peace, how to perform, or how to disconnect from what you were feeling so you could keep moving forward.
Those adaptations may have helped you survive. But somewhere along the way, they may have also disconnected you from yourself.
My work as a trauma therapist is informed not only by my clinical training, but by my own years of healing and my experiences in psychedelic healing spaces. That work has profoundly changed the way I understand what it means to sit with another human being in pain. I have learned that I do not need to pull someone away from a difficult emotion, rush to make meaning of it, or try to make it more comfortable. I can stay with you there.
Sometimes healing requires having another person willing to sit beside you while you feel what you may have spent a lifetime learning not to feel. To allow anger, grief, fear, shame, longing, or whatever else has been held inside of you to finally have somewhere to go. Because constantly running from it can keep you disconnected from the parts of yourself that most need your attention.
My approach draws from Brainspotting, Internal Family Systems (IFS), somatic and nervous system work, psychedelic integration, and, when appropriate and clinically indicated, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy in collaboration with medical providers. I also draw from healing traditions that have taught me to listen to the body, heart, and spirit—not only the thinking mind.
I do not believe healing is simply about understanding what happened to you.
I believe it is about coming home to yourself.
Trauma can require us to leave parts of ourselves behind in order to survive. We learn not to feel too much, need too much, trust too much, speak too loudly, or take up too much space. We shapeshift. We perform. We become who we needed to become.
Healing is not about creating a better version of you. It is about gently returning to the places you learned to abandon, listening to what has been there all along, and remembering who you were before survival asked you to disconnect from yourself.
For some people, that journey begins because of a relationship. You may be losing yourself in love, repeating painful patterns, over-functioning, people-pleasing, shutting down, or desperately trying to get someone else to understand you.
For others, there is a specific trauma, loss, childhood experience, or chapter of life that they know they are ready to finally tend to.
You do not have to come into an intensive knowing exactly what needs to be healed. My job is to create enough safety and space for us to listen together—to your mind, your body, your protective parts, and the deeper wisdom inside of you that trauma may have taught you not to trust.
My clients often experience me as direct but deeply compassionate. I am not interested in analyzing you from across the room or shaming you for the ways you learned to survive. I am interested in helping you understand those parts of yourself, experience what has been waiting to be felt, and begin finding your way back home to you.
The Therapy Intensive Process
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Pre-Intensive Interview
It all begins with an planning and preparation session. During this 50-minute pre-intensive meeting we will determine the goals for your intensive. We will look at your patterns, habits and cycles and get clear on what you want to heal.
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Your First Intensive
Sessions take place at my office in Rancho Cucamonga, CA, or virtually and are scheduled for 1-2 days for 4 hours each day, using tools such as IFS and brainspotting to help you create safety in your nervous system so you can dive deep and shift patterns that are hurting you.
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Continued Healing
After your first intensive, you will continue the healing with one monthly intensive of 4 hours or two 100-minute sessions per month. We do this method, not only because it is more affordable, but it is more accessible and leads to much better outcomes. Generally people work with me for a year.
What To expect in your Trauma Therapy Intensive
In our work together, we slow things down in a way that can be difficult to do in everyday life. Instead of immediately trying to change what you are feeling, we get curious about what is happening underneath it.
We notice what happens in your body when you talk about the thing that still hurts. Maybe your chest tightens, your stomach drops, your jaw clenches, or you suddenly feel far away. We pay attention to the moments when you want to change the subject, intellectualize what happened, make a joke, minimize your experience, or convince yourself that you should be over it by now.
These responses are information.
They tell us something about how your mind and body learned to protect you.
Using Brainspotting, we can access deeper layers of the brain and nervous system where experiences may still be held in ways that talking alone has not been able to reach. Rather than simply telling the story of what happened again, we pay attention to what happens inside of you as you remember it. The fear. The grief. The anger. The shame. The beliefs you formed about yourself because of what you experienced.
“I am not safe.”
“I am not enough.”
“I have to take care of everything myself.”
“I am too much.”
“I cannot trust anyone.”
“I have to make sure everyone is happy.”
This is where healing can begin to become something you feel, rather than something you only understand.
With IFS-informed work, we also get curious about the different parts of you that developed along the way. The part that keeps everyone happy. The part that never wants to need anyone. The part that works relentlessly. The part that shuts down when things become overwhelming. The part that is still angry. The part that wants desperately to be loved. The part that looks outside of your relationship for attention and connection.
Rather than fighting with these parts or trying to make them disappear, we begin to understand why they are there and what they have been protecting.
As you develop a different relationship with these parts of yourself, something begins to shift. You have more space between what happens to you and how you respond. You have more agency. You begin to recognize when the past has entered the present—and you can respond from who you are today rather than automatically reacting from an old wound.
For many people, relationships are where this becomes especially visible. Conflict, intimacy, rejection, abandonment, criticism, or simply feeling unseen can activate wounds that are much older than the relationship itself. We can slow those moments down and begin untangling what belongs to the person in front of you from what your nervous system remembers from long ago.
When appropriate and when you are interested, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy can also support this work. Ketamine can sometimes soften rigid defenses and create space to experience yourself, your emotions, and your story differently. If this is something you want to explore, we will talk carefully about safety, medical collaboration, preparation, and whether it is clinically appropriate for you. There is never pressure to incorporate ketamine into our work.
Throughout the intensive, we are not working toward some predetermined version of who you should become. We are building your capacity to stay present with yourself—to notice what you feel, listen to what your body is communicating, understand your protective patterns, set boundaries, and begin trusting your own knowing again.
You may come to therapy because of your marriage. You may come because something happened years ago that you know you have never fully processed. You may be grieving, questioning who you are, repeating patterns you cannot seem to stop, or simply exhausted from carrying something you no longer want to carry alone.
You do not have to arrive knowing exactly where the work will take you.
The intensive gives us the time to listen—to your body, your emotions, your history, and the parts of yourself you may have learned to silence. The goal is not to force an answer or fix you.
It is to help you become connected enough to yourself that you can hear what has been there all along.
How I use Brainspotting in Therapy:
This is more than just regular talk therapy - Brainspotting is a cutting edge technique that creates new neural pathways in the brain that leave you feeling like you can finally let go and move on from your past. Brainspotting is a focused processing technique used to help you identify, process, and release core nuero-physiological sources of emotional and physical pain, and unhealthy coping mechanisms associated with PTSD, anxiety, depression, addiction, chronic pain, chronic illness, and more.
Brainspotting is used in all of my intensives as a way to reduce anxiety, depression, panic attacks, or trauma responses.
Working through trauma and other difficult issues can stir up many emotions and people often find themselves triggered by memories or intrusive thoughts, but working with a trained Brainspotting therapist like myself can reduce those triggers significantly.
As a brainspotting therapist, I am able to help you be more present and feel less overwhelmed by your emotions and experiences.
Options and Investment
1 Day
$1,950
5 hour program
Pre-intensive interview (50 mins)
4 face-to-face hours
Resources, assessments and personalized treatment
Each intensive following your initial intensive is $1600 for 4 hours or $1400 for two 100 minute sessions per month
2 Days
$3,550
9 hour program
Pre-intensive interview (50 mins)
2 days of intensive sessions (total of 8 hours)
Resources, assessments and personalized treatment
Each intensive following your initial intensive is $1600 for 4 hours or $1400 for two 100 minute sessions per month
Cost comparison - Traditional Weekly Therapy vs Intensive Therapy
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Traditional Weekly Therapy (2 months)
8 weekly sessions (50 minutes each)
$250-$350 per session
Total cost: $2,000 - $2,800
~30 minutes of deep work per session → ~4 hours total
Stop–start rhythm slows progress
Momentum resets every week
Total Deep-Work Hours: ~4 Hours
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Two-Day Intensive + Prep Sessions
8-hour intensive (4 hours each day)
Three 50-minute prep sessions (2.5 hours)
Total cost: $4,250
8+ hours of uninterrupted deep work
Faster breakthroughs, deeper repair
Results in days, not months
Total Deep-Work Hours: 8+ Hours
You get double the deep work and significantly faster results with a two-day intensive.
It’s an investment in you — in your healing, your peace, and your freedom from the patterns that have kept you disconnected from yourself for far too long.
What if Healing Didn’t Have to Wait?
What If Healing Could Begin Now?
Imagine spending a full day — or two — not brushing the surface, not tiptoeing around your pain, not stopping the moment you finally start to feel something…
but diving in, gently, safely, deeply.
Imagine having the space to follow the threads of your story all the way through, to understand how you got here, to release what’s been weighing on your heart for so long.
Imagine the relief of not carrying this alone.
An intensive gives you:
uninterrupted time
steady support
deep therapeutic momentum
direction
clarity
emotional grounding
and space to actually finish the work you came to do
Instead of stretching four hours of deep work over two months…
You receive eight hours of healing in one concentrated, transformative experience, plus a grounding prep session that helps you begin healing before you even walk in.
It’s not rushed.
It’s not chaotic.
It’s not overwhelming.
It’s focused, compassionate, intentional, and deeply held.
It’s the kind of healing your heart has been asking for.