EMDR INTENSIVES · CHARLOTTE, NC

Focused Trauma Therapy Intensives

Our therapy intensives condense months of trauma work into a series of longer, purposeful sessions, so you can let go of the past and find a sense of relief in less time, without rebuilding momentum each week.

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—— WHAT IS AN INTENSIVE

An extended and concentrated series of sessions held over the course of multiple hours or days.

An intensive is an extended and concentrated amount of time to do deep, meaningful work, with extra time to process at your own pace, and integration that is personalized to your unique nervous system.

Instead of opening a memory and having to close it again before the work is finished, you stay with it long enough for your brain to complete the process. Everything is built around one focus, chosen together in advance. History-taking and preparation happen before the intensive begins, so the time in the room stays entirely to the work itself.

—— WHY AN INTENSIVE

Sometimes one hour a week just isn’t enough.

Sometimes an hour a week isn’t the ideal pace for your unique nervous system or for your schedule. Intensives provide more time to process, integrate, and settle in the way that you need.
They can also offer the opportunity to have a felt sense of “opening and closing” the memory consolidating process. Our intensives are personalized to you, but also follow a structure that is planned and guided with you before the intensive work begins. We will have a clear target and focus we are aiming for at the end of your intensive work

What’s the research say?

Are intensives actually effective? Research on intensive formats, for conditions such as PTSD, phobias, anxiety and depression have found outcomes to be effective, providing significant improvement of symptoms.

This condensed format can provide the container and psychological safety for meaningful and accelerated relief, due to the lack of “start-stop” pace of weekly therapy.

—— WHO IT'S FOR

You’ve had to be the strong one since you can remember.

Most women who come to Liminal Psych for an intensive are capable, responsible, and quietly depleted. From the outside, everything works. Inside, something set in place years ago is still running the show.

Somewhere early, you learned that love felt safest when you earned it by being good, being easy, reading the room, and needing less. You became the one who holds it all together. That isn't a flaw in you. It's what a young nervous system does to stay safe in relationships that couldn't quite meet it.

That's relational trauma. It rarely looks like "trauma" on paper, but it continues living in your body.

An intensive has the time and space for your nervous system to acclimate and find the sources of the relational ruptures and traumas. The specific moments your system decided you're only safe when you're useful and can begin to reprocess the self limiting beliefs about yourself that were built on protection. Not another strategy for managing the exhaustion, we get to the source of it.

Childhood relational trauma shows up today as:

Overfunctioning: Doing more than your share, everywhere, and calling it normal.
Resentment: You feel guilty forgiving and giving, and quietly running on empty.
Rest that won't come: You can't switch off, even when nothing is actually wrong.
Feeling invisible: Accessible to everyone, and fully known by no one.
Choosing the familiar: Relationships where you continue to give more than you receive.

You’ve had a recent or single event trauma.

Not every intensive is about a lifelong pattern. Sometimes it's one event, either recent or specific, and still with you. These events can be anything where you experienced real, perceived or threatened death or serious injury. Whatever happened, it overwhelmed your system’s ability to cope and process what happened to you, leaving you stuck in survival mode.

EMDR is especially effective for a single, identifiable events like these. EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, helps the brain’s information reprocessing networks “digest” memories that got stored in a raw, unfinished form when survival mode kicked in. Using gentle auditory and tactile bilateral stimulation while you hold a memory in mind, the experience can lose its physical charge and settle into the past, where it belongs.

You don't have to retell every detail, and you don't have to relive it to heal from it. Intensives create an excellent container with extended time for your nervous system to settle and integrate the felt sense of the memory being over.

Single event traumas can be…

A car accident or sudden medical emergency: an event that was sudden, scary that threatened death or serious harm.
A frightening diagnosis or procedure: a moment your body registered as danger.
A sudden loss: a death or ending you're still carrying in your body.
An assault or a frightening event: something that changed how safe the world feels.
Vicarious trauma: witnessing a sudden, scary event that threatened death or serious injury to someone else

—— WHAT IF I TOLD YOU

The overfunctioning isn't a personality trait.
It's a trauma response.

If you grew up having to monitor things like a parent's emotions, a sibling's needs, the household, the peace; your nervous system was trained young. It learned that safety comes from noticing the slightest change first and being useful. That love is something you earn by taking care of others. That your needs come last, if they come at all.

That training worked in a lot of ways. It made you competent, reliable, the person everyone really can count on. It's also why rest feels unsafe, why you overfunction on autopilot, and why you don't quite know how to take up space in your own relationships. It doesn’t occur to your system that you get to be a full person who gets cared for, instead of the one always doing the caring.

You're not failing because you’re exhausted or resentful. Your system is doing exactly what you were trained to do to stay safe, but is now stuck in overdrive. We can work together to bring your nervous system up to date and get you the care you deeply need.

Think about your calendar. Every block belongs to someone else. Work, your kids, your partner, your family, the thousand small things you're the only one who remembers. When does any of it belong to you?

—— TIME THAT IS ACTUALLY YOURS

There's never time set aside for you.
This is.

An intensive is time that's genuinely yours. Not stolen in an hour between obligations. Not squeezed in and paid for with guilt. Reserved, protected time and space to turn toward yourself, with someone whose only job in that room is you.

For a woman who has spent her life making sure everyone else is taken care of, that alone is part of the work. Letting yourself be the priority, even for a few focused hours, is the beginning of the change.

EMDR is one of the most established, well-researched treatments for trauma. The intensive format changes how it's delivered and paced, not what makes it effective.

—— WHY IT WORKS

Same therapy, different delivery.

No weekly reset

In standard therapy, each session ends before deep processing is complete, and the week that follows can undo some of the progress. Longer blocks remove that gap.

Momentum compounds

Staying with the material across consecutive sessions lets one insight build on the last, instead of re-approaching it cold every time.

Space to finish

Uninterrupted hours give your nervous system time to open, process, and settle inside the same session.

—— WHY IT WORKS

Personalized to your fit your needs and your nervous system.

The intensive format allows for the time and space to tailor the course of treatment to your unique experience and system.

Weekly therapy is paced growth speed out over time.

Intensives are a deep and focused pace over a consolidated amount of time.

—— THE PATH

A roadmap to guide our work.

Each intensive is personalized and also follows a basic structure to guide and pace our work with a beginning, middle, end.

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A different approach to therapy.
Personalized, extended, focused.

—— WHAT’S DIFFERENT

Personalized to fit you

Designed to be personalized to each client and their specific needs. Each nervous system has different needs and capacities and the intensive format gives us the room to adapt to just that,

Depth over volume

A focused and personalized intensive with a guided beginning, middle and end. Your intensive includes an intake session so you know how to prepare and what to expect, and a follow up session to bookend your treatment days. I’m with you each step of the way.

A framework you keep

The Liminal Intensive Guide and your regulation tools stay with you. You leave with a map of your own inner world, not just the memory of a good session.

Genuinely integrative

EMDR, IFS, relational, and somatic work used together and paced to your nervous system, not one technique applied to everyone.

Hi, I’m Shaunna! I’m glad you’re here.

WHO I AM

I'm the founder of Liminal Psychotherapy here in Charlotte, a Board Certified and Nationally Certified Counselor specializing in women's mental wellness and maternal mental health. I work with high-achieving women, the capable, responsible ones who are quietly running on empty. I’m passionate about this work because these women are usually the foundation of their family and relationships, and don’t always know they need help and care since they are highly capable.

I hold master's degrees in clinical mental health counseling and in elementary education, with additional training in advanced perinatal psychotherapy and in working with adults who carry childhood trauma. Early in my career, I spent two consecutive years interning with a woman-owned psychiatric practice, learning perinatal and postpartum mental health from multiple clinical perspectives and working closely alongside a psychiatric provider.

The work I'm most drawn to is childhood, attachment, and developmental trauma. I'm an EMDRIA-certified EMDR therapist and work integratively with IFS, attachment, relational, and somatic approaches. This combination has been remarkably powerful for exactly this kind of healing.

Shaunna Rushing, National Certified Counselor (NCC), National Board for Certified Counselors · Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor Associate (LCMHCA), North Carolina · EMDRIA-Certified EMDR Therapist · Advanced training in perinatal psychotherapy and childhood / developmental trauma · MA, Clinical Mental Health Counseling; MEd, Elementary Education.

—— THE INVESTMENT

From the intake to the follow up session: Priced as a complete program.

Each intensive includes your consultation, your 90-minute intake & preparation session, The Liminal Intensive Guide, the intensive itself, and your integration follow-up.

Half Day Intensive

$1,400

A focused half day of deep work over 4 hours.

Free consultation call
90-minute intake & prep session
The Liminal Intensive Guide
4 hours of EMDR/IFS intensive work w/ breaks
Integration follow-up session

Full Day Intensive

$2,200

A focused full day of deep work over 7 hours.

Free consultation call
90-minute intake & prep session
The Liminal Intensive Guide
7 hours of EMDR/IFS intensive work w/ breaks
Integration follow-up session

Private-pay · Payment plans available · In person in Charlotte, NC

—— QUESTIONS

What women ask before they begin

Frequently asked questions about EMDR intensives in Charlotte, NC

An EMDR intensive is a condensed format of trauma therapy that uses extended, focused sessions instead of one hour a week. Research on intensive trauma treatment has found outcomes comparable to weekly therapy in far less calendar time.
Weekly therapy spreads work across months in 50-minute pieces. An intensive sets aside dedicated time to go deep, with enough space to process and return to steady ground — which many busy, high-achieving women find fits their lives and their way of working far better.
No. Many of the women I work with don't think of themselves as traumatized at all. They just know they're exhausted, overextended, and can't figure out why doing everything "right" doesn't feel better. That's exactly who this work is for.
IFS (Internal Family Systems) is an evidence-based approach that helps you understand and work with the different parts of yourself — the inner critic, the overachiever, the exhausted part — so they can soften and you can access a calmer, steadier core.
Safety is built into the process. We spend real time on preparation and nervous-system regulation before any deep processing, so you have grounding tools in place and never go further than your system can handle in the moment.
It begins with a free consultation call. If it's a good fit, we schedule a 90-minute intake and preparation session — and at that session, we choose your intensive dates together. You're never committing to the deep work before you've met me and know exactly what to expect.
I see clients in person in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Intensives are private-pay and priced as a complete program. Half-day intensives start at $1,400 and full-day intensives at $2,200. This includes your intake and preparation session, The Liminal Intensive Guide, the intensive itself, and your integration follow-up session. Payment plans are available.