Marc Pimsler

An intensive is a 1-4 day therapeutic experience facilitated by a mental health professional and co-created with you, the participant, to meet your needs. This is not designed to be treatment or therapy. This is a personal growth workshop.

This intensive experience is an opportunity to take a deep look into yourself, your coupleship, team or a situation that has been problematic or traumatic. Intensives can be done as an individual, couple, family, or team.

An individual intensive is a wonderful opportunity to work with an expert clinician to focus on your unique and specific roadblocks in a private and personal setting curated specifically for you. Individual intensives give you a safe space to process deep issues in an extended format that is not always possible with weekly sessions.

This deep laser-focused work can often help you uncover patterns and root causes that prevent you from living the life you desire.

In a relationship, it is easy to allow past traumas, unspoken needs, fear, and patterns of conflict to cast a shadow over a relationship. In this shadow, we miss our partner and the cues for connection become cues of danger.

During a couple’s intensive, you will meet with a clinician who specializes in relationships and co-create an experience that will help you authentically connect, break patterns that keep you stuck, and learn how to communicate in a way where both partners feel seen and heard.

Families often find extended time away from their day-to-day grind a welcomed breath of fresh air. During a Family Intensive, this intentional time away can be used to explore dynamics unique to your family unit by learning practical tools and resources that can improve communication and help to resolve conflicts.

Through this effective work, families will leave having a deeper understanding of each other and a plan of how to continue this work after returning home.

Working as a team can be challenging, especially when strong personalities bring up past relational challenges. A team is at its best when communication flows freely, creativity is supported by culture, and expectations are clearly defined.

A Team Intensive is a co-creation between the clinician and the participants focusing on the team as a unit. Using a large toolbox, the clinician meets the participants where they are and guides the process towards where they want to go.

Think of an intensive as the “surgery” of your personal growth journey due to the laser focus. Going to therapy weekly has profound benefits, much like getting a weekly massage. After a stressful week, it is usually time to make another massage appointment.

But what if you need a tumor removed, then no matter how many massages you get, you will never get the results you are looking for. That is where an intensive comes in; an intensive is the mental health equivalent to getting a tumor removed. This is because of the extended duration and increased intention focused on the challenges at hand.

Marc will begin your intensive with learning about your goals for this particular experience and together decide what particular modalities and activities would best serve you. You and Marc will co-create the experience together.

Each intensive is a unique experience and Marc’s sole focus is to support you as you move toward your goals and getting unstuck. Marc’s focus is not to teach you coping skills because the intention is not to help you cope with your suffering, but rather set you free from it. Coping is not healing. The focus is to help you find freedom from what is holding you back from living the life you desire.

Marc has a large toolbox and brings almost two decades of experience of working with clients. He is highly intuitive in knowing what tools or modalities to use to best support you.

He is intensely trained in a wide range of experiential techniques and methods such as Psychodrama, RRT, Brain Spotting, Adventure Therapy, Expressive Arts, Sound Healing, Yoga, and Meditation.

Anyone who has a desire to heal their past, honestly look at their present, and learn to create the future they have always wanted. This is not designed to be treatment or therapy. This is a personal growth workshop.

The goal of an intensive is to eliminate or resolve the obstacles that bind you to the conflict in your life. Often the ties that bind us to our conflict have roots in the past. The root causes of problems are pinpointed and cleared so that positive changes endure.

Negative preoccupations and destructive behavioral patterns are addressed so that you can fully and freely step into the power of the present.

Shame * Post-traumatic Stress * Failure-to-Launch * Generational Trauma * Communication issues * Nightmares/Insomnia * Anxiety * Panic Attacks * Depression * Grief * Heartbreak * Low Self-esteem * Relationship Issues * Sexual Issues * Substance Addiction/Dependency * Obsessions/Compulsions * Self-destructive Behaviors * Anger/Resentment * Guilt/Shame * Jealousy * Cravings to use

The intensive fee for Marc’s services is $2,500/day. Most first-time intensives are 3-4 days. The location can be one of your choosing such as your home or desired retreat space or one we find for you.

Additional fees will occur if we find the location and/or travel to you. Also, if you want any adjunctive services such as a sound bath, massage, or bodywork, additional fees would apply. We can help walk you through the logistics of planning your intensive.

Talk therapy is designed to impact the 20% of the brain that is known as conscious awareness. The bottom 80% is outside of conscious awareness. This top 20% is controlled by the bottom 80%, which is out of reach from the impact of talk therapy.

Therefore, you cannot talk yourself out of a trauma response and tell yourself to be different. The bottom 80% of our brain, which is outside our conscious awareness (including our central nervous system), controls our thoughts, feelings, reactions, perceptions, sensations, and how we move in the world. Experiential therapy impacts the bottom 80% of our brain (where you live) as well as the top 20% (where you think), and even has the ability to impact muscle memory (how the body holds our experiences).

The subconscious controls emotions, desires, memory, habits, thoughts, dreams, and automatic responses. You may consciously understand the value of eliminating problematic emotions, thoughts, or behaviors, but unless the subconscious mind is reached, enduring change is very unlikely. By engaging the subconscious mind and eliminating the ongoing influence from troubling past events, blocked energy is released, healing takes place, and change is automatic. Negative habits and painful emotions are replaced by positive actions and feelings of well-being and freedom.

In a nutshell…

Blocked energy is released.

Healing takes place.

Desired change is automatic and lasting.

Experiential Therapy is the umbrella term used for any action-oriented, multi-level co-created therapeutic intervention. This definition covers a wide range of methods and techniques. An experiential activity can include art, music, games, horses, scarves, props, or none of these items. It can take place in a therapy office, workshop, classroom, boardroom, ropes course, forest, or field. It can be done individually, as a couple, group, family, team, class, corporation, community, or a workshop with over 500 people.

Let’s unpack our definition of Experiential being any action oriented, multi-level, co-created therapeutic intervention. The action-oriented aspect means that the participant and or the facilitator is doing something. The action can include the whole body in the case of dance and yoga or the action can include just the eye such as with brain spotting. The action might include something being made such as the case with art and music therapy. The action might be working on a challenge such as with an adventure initiative. The action might be dramatic such as the case with psychodrama. The action can be with an individual, as a couple, family, team, or community. Action-oriented means something is being done by somebody.

The second component of the definition is the multi-level nature of any experiential approach. The brain can be separated into 2 simplified parts; aspects that are inside our conscious awareness and aspects that are outside our conscious awareness. Dr. Jon Connelly says, the level that we are aware of our thoughts, feelings, and sensations are not the same level that they are created. The metaphor that we use with our clients are the difference between a Bluetooth speaker and the phone playing the song. Our conscious awareness is the level of the Bluetooth speaker and the unconscious is the level that the song is being played. We all know that if you don’t like what is being played the change needs to happen at the level that the song is being played rather than the Bluetooth speaker.

Thoughts, feelings, and sensations are created way below the level of consciousness or the level that we are aware of them. Experiential methods work at both the aspects of mind that we are aware of as well as the aspects of mind that are outside of our conscious awareness. Trauma, shame, addiction are all experiences, thus we cannot talk our way into a new experience; however, we can have a new corrective experience. In neurological terms this is referred to as the difference between top-down processing versus bottom-up processing.

A co-created therapeutic experience means that the participant(s) and facilitator work in conjunction with each other to bring the experience into fruition. The facilitator acts as the midwife for the participant’s experience. The facilitator follows the participant and helps create a container optimized for growth, healing, or whatever else the target might be. Marc often refers to this as the experiential feedback loop. The facilitator put something out there such as a suggested activity or concept to try on. The participant(s) receive this and it has an impact on them. The facilitator must then be tuned in to the impact on the participant(s) in order to inform the next step on behalf of the facilitator.

The therapeutic aspect is that there is a level of change that occurs. The change can be resolution of trauma, increased skills, emotional regulation, increased cohesion, decreased conflict, increased awareness or thousands of other targets. The experience itself becomes the encounter for change. The encounter was famously discussed and written about in a poem by Jacob Moreno, in which he says an encounter is “A meeting of two: eye-to-eye, face-to-face”.