Why This Training

Beyond the Hour is built for clinicians who want a thorough, trauma informed, and clinically honest framework for this work. The training brings together the foundational considerations that make intensives ethical and sustainable and the advanced skills that make them genuinely transformative for clients.

This training assumes you already know how to do good trauma therapy.

The goal is to help you bring that work into an extended format with confidence, flexibility, and clear clinical judgment.

Course Overview

Beyond the Hour offers 5 continuing education contact hours of integrated instruction on designing, structuring, and facilitating trauma therapy intensives. The course weaves together foundational considerations such as client readiness, pacing, safety, and ethics with advanced clinical skills for working with trauma material as it unfolds inside an intensive format.

Participants will learn how to design different types of intensives, prepare clients for deeper work, facilitate trauma processing within extended sessions, and support integration and follow up care. Emphasis is placed on nervous system awareness, attunement, pacing, ethical decision making, and clinical judgment rather than rigid protocols.

What You Will Learn

Foundations of Trauma Therapy Intensives

• What differentiates trauma therapy intensives from weekly therapy
• Assessing client readiness and appropriateness for intensive work
• Structuring half day, full day, and multi session intensives
• Ethical considerations, informed consent, and scope of practice
• Preparing clients before an intensive and planning follow up care

Advanced Clinical Skills for Trauma Intensives

• Tracking nervous system activation and regulation over extended sessions
• Pacing, titration, and containment in intensive trauma work
• Facilitating trauma processing within longer session formats
• Working with dissociation, shutdown, and heightened activation
• Integrating modalities such as EMDR, Brainspotting, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Ketamine Assisted Therapy (KAP) and somatic approaches
• Responding to relational dynamics, rupture, and repair during intensives
• Supporting integration and stabilization after trauma processing

Who This Training Is For

This continuing education workshop is designed for:

• Licensed mental health professionals interested in offering trauma therapy intensives
• Therapists currently providing intensives who want a stronger trauma informed framework
• Clinicians trained in trauma modalities, including EMDR, Brainspotting, Parts Work, KAP and somatic approaches, who want guidance on using them in extended sessions
• Therapists seeking a structured yet flexible approach to intensive trauma work

Learning Objectives

By the end of this training, participants will be able to:

1. Identify criteria for assessing client readiness for trauma therapy intensives.
2. Describe key components of structuring and pacing trauma therapy intensives.
3. Apply nervous system informed strategies to guide trauma processing within extended sessions.
4. Explain how to respond to dissociation, activation, and relational dynamics during intensive work.
5. Integrate trauma modalities ethically and flexibly within an intensive therapy framework.
6. Outline best practices for post intensive integration, documentation, and follow up care.

Instructional Level

Intermediate to advanced. This training is most appropriate for clinicians with foundational training in trauma therapy and at least one trauma focused modality (for example EMDR, Brainspotting, IFS, Somatic Experiencing, or Sensorimotor Psychotherapy).

Continuing Education Credit

This training offers 6 continuing education contact hours. 

About the Instructor

Melanie Reese, LMFT, CCTP, is the founder of Groundwork Trauma Education. She is a licensed marriage and family therapist and Certified Clinical Trauma Professional with extensive experience providing trauma therapy intensives and training clinicians in trauma informed care. Her work centers nervous system awareness, attachment, and clinical judgment as the through line of effective trauma treatment.

Important Note

This is an educational training. It is not a certification program. Completion of this course does not authorize participants to practice beyond their scope of licensure or training.