Weekly therapy is wonderful for moving with paced intention over time. But sometimes, you find yourself facing a specific pattern, relationship shift, or life challenge that calls for a more concentrated focus. An 8-Week Intensive gives us the time and space to look deeply at root causes and work toward your specific goals without the weekly stop-and-start.
Deep Focus When You Need It Most
An 8-week psychotherapy intensive condenses therapeutic focus into a dedicated topic and timeframe. Instead of spreading sessions out over many months—an intensive creates a quiet, uninterrupted space to focus on what matters most.
By working alongside how the brain and nervous system naturally process stress, this format lets us stay connected to core issues without hitting the pause button every 50 minutes. It's a practical, structured way to address personal, emotional, or relational challenges when you want to make steady, focused progress.
The Clinical Framework:
An 8-week psychotherapy intensive is a clinical framework designed to focus deeply on a single area—such as burnout, targeted trauma, or relational stress. Led by Marina Barbosa, LPC, this approach integrates Brainspotting, IFS-informed care, and somatic processing to help clients in Washington, DC and Virginia work toward specific therapeutic goals within a focused 8-week container.
Every intensive is shaped around your unique history, personal goals, and nervous system capacity, using one of three targeted focus areas:
Built for professionals, caregivers, and leaders dealing with chronic exhaustion or high-functioning stress.
Focus: Understanding nervous system overstimulation and identifying what is driving your stress underneath the surface.
What We Address: Physical tension, over-functioning, perfectionism, people pleasing and boundary struggles.
The Goal: To help regulate your nervous system, build energy awareness, and create realistic, sustainable boundaries for your daily life.
Built for individuals working through single-event trauma, attachment stress, or persistent emotional triggers.
Focus: Processing lingering traumatic stress and emotional blocks using Somatic therapies such as Brainspotting and IFS-informed care.
What We Address: Hyper-vigilance, emotional reactivity, troubling memories, and core feelings of being unsafe or overwhelmed.
The Goal: To support somatic processing, make room for emotional regulation, and help you feel more grounded in your own body.
Built for individuals or partners wanting to understand repetitive dynamics or navigate major life transitions.
Focus: Uncovering relationship patterns, communication roadblocks, and underlying attachment styles.
What We Address: Recurring conflict loops, boundary difficulty, fear of opening up, and feeling emotionally distant.
The Goal: To gain clear insight into your relationship patterns, learn practical communication tools, and map out your next best step.
I’ve spent 25 years in the field of psychology—first, within educational psychology studying how we learn, adapt, and grow, and later as a licensed mental health therapist.
Think of me as a master pattern finder: someone who helps you look under the surface to see the subconscious loops and relationship dynamics holding you back. My intensive framework brings together three distinct ways of working:
Both approaches offer wonderful therapeutic value. The right choice simply depends on your current season of life, your schedule, and what you want to focus on.
Brainspotting helps us connect directly to where traumatic memories and stress live in the body. In an intensive format, having extended, focused time gives your brain and body the space to locate brainspots and process emotional blocks without feeling rushed by a traditional 50-minute clock.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) gives us a language for the different parts of you that step up when life gets hard—like perfectionism or emotional checking out. By pairing IFS principles with Brainspotting, we can help those protective parts relax so you can access real healing and self-compassion.
At the end of your intensive, we’ll sit down, look at your progress, and figure out your next best step. You might feel ready to conclude care, step into weekly therapy for ongoing relational work, or simply reach out for periodic check-ins whenever you need them.
If you feel ready to give a specific pattern or challenge your dedicated focus, let’s talk. Schedule an initial consultation to see if an 8-Week Intensive is the right fit for where you are today.
Marina Barbosa, LPC is a Licensed Professional Counselor in Washington, DC and Virginia. Clinical psychotherapy services, including 8-Week Intensives and Weekly Therapy, are available to clients located within DC and VA at the time of service. Individual therapeutic experiences and outcomes naturally vary based on clinical factors.