Conflict Repair Intensives for ADHD Couples
For couples who need more than weekly sessions can provide, concentrated, focused work to break entrenched conflict cycles and rebuild connection faster.
When Weekly Therapy Isn’t Moving Fast Enough
Some couples are in a level of conflict or disconnection where waiting a week between sessions means losing ground. The session happens, the cycle escalates, and by the next appointment the same patterns have played out several more times. Progress stalls. The sense of hopelessness builds. And the next week’s session has to start by undoing the damage rather than moving forward.
Conflict Repair Intensives are designed for exactly this situation. Instead of 50-minute weekly sessions, an intensive concentrates the work into extended time, typically 3 to 6 hours across one or two days, providing enough depth and continuity to interrupt the cycle, not just manage it for another week.
For ADHD couples, intensives carry a particular clinical advantage. The ADHD brain often struggles to retain insight across a full week, new understandings fade, patterns reassert themselves, and the emotional momentum from a breakthrough session dissipates before it can consolidate into actual change. Concentrated work keeps the momentum alive long enough to make it stick.
What an Intensive Includes
Pre-Intensive Assessment
Individual sessions with each partner before the intensive to understand each person’s experience, history, and goals, so the concentrated work is targeted from the start rather than general.
Cycle Mapping
A detailed, ADHD-informed map of your specific conflict cycle, the triggers, the escalation pattern, each partner’s role in maintaining it, and the underlying needs driving the whole thing.
Deep Emotion Work
EFT-based work that reaches the attachment needs beneath the anger or withdrawal, creating the moments of genuine vulnerability and responsiveness that actually rebuild trust.
Schema Work
Identifying the early maladaptive schemas activated in both partners by conflict, and beginning the work of healing those wounds at their source rather than managing their symptoms.
Practical Agreements
Leaving with concrete, ADHD-compatible agreements and tools, not vague intentions to “communicate better,” but specific plans for the situations that have been most destructive.
Post-Intensive Support
Follow-up sessions to consolidate what the intensive created, adjust what isn’t working in real-life application, and maintain the momentum rather than letting it fade.
Is an Intensive Right for Us?
An intensive may be worth considering if you’re in a high-conflict cycle that weekly therapy hasn’t broken through, if one or both partners travels and consistent weekly sessions are difficult to maintain, if you’re facing a specific crisis, infidelity, a significant betrayal, a decision point about the future of the relationship, or if you want to make faster progress than weekly sessions allow.
Intensives are conducted online via secure video, accessible throughout New York State. To discuss whether an intensive fits your situation, start with a free 15-minute telephone consultation.
Inquire About an Intensive
Start with a free 15-minute telephone consultation. We’ll talk through your situation and whether an intensive is the right for