Couples
Therapy
Intensives in Marin County

A couples therapy intensive is a multi-day, concentrated block of relationship work designed to do months of therapy in a few days. Instead of fifty-minute weekly sessions, you and your partner spend full days in one room with a specialized couples therapist, going deep into the patterns that have been keeping you stuck.

At Kodo, our standard intensive is a two-day program in our Novato, Marin County office. We integrate Relational Life Therapy (RLT), Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), and EMDR depending on what your relationship needs. The intensive format is designed for couples who are in real distress, who have hit a structural impasse, who are recovering from betrayal, or who simply don't have the bandwidth to drag couples work out over a year of weekly sessions.

Two days. Each day runs roughly 9am to 4pm with a one-hour lunch break; three hours of clinical work in the morning and three in the afternoon, for six clinical hours per day and twelve hours total.

Couples typically schedule the two days back-to-back, but consecutive-weekend scheduling is available if your nervous system or logistics require it. We've found that back-to-back days create the deepest momentum and most of the real shifts happen on day two, when the protective layer has come down and the underlying material is finally accessible. If you split the days, we factor that into how we sequence the work.

The two-day couples intensive is $3,980. This is a flat investment that includes:

• A 60-minute pre-intensive consultation with your assigned therapist

• A pre-intensive intake assessment for both partners to complete

• Two full days of in-person therapy in our Marin County office

• A tailored couples workbook with exercises, reflection prompts, and integration tools

• A 60-minute follow-up integration session approximately 30 days after the intensive

We are a private-pay practice and don't bill insurance. Please see the insurance question below for the rationale and out-of-network options.

Our office is at 7250 Redwood Blvd, Suite 300, Novato, CA 94945, in southern Marin County, about 30 minutes north of San Francisco.

We see couples who travel in from across the Bay Area: San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Rafael, Mill Valley, Tiburon, Sausalito, Petaluma, Santa Rosa, the Peninsula, and the East Bay. We also often get couples from Southern California or out of state. Couples coming from further away often book a hotel in Marin or Sonoma for the duration of the intensive. Many find the protected travel-time itself becomes part of the work, removing them from the daily context that's been reinforcing the stuck dynamic.

No. It’s a different way of working.
Weekly therapy often resets each session and moves in pieces. In an intensive, we stay with the pattern as it unfolds and work through it in real time, without interruption. That continuity is what allows deeper shifts to happen.

Yes, and the intensive format is especially powerful in the aftermath of betrayal.

The standard weekly model often leaves the wounded partner to carry seven days of pain, intrusion, and unanswered questions between sessions, while the participating partner gets seven days to retreat into defensiveness or avoidance. The wounded partner often arrives at the next session more activated, not less.

An intensive contains the early acute work in a window where you're both fully present. It gives the wounded partner sustained access to the answers they need to begin to make sense of what happened. And it gets the participating partner past surface-level apology into the deeper accountability the relationship needs to survive — what RLT calls full disclosure done right and what EFT frames as moving from cycle into earned security.

If the affair is very recent and the system is acutely destabilized, we may recommend a brief stabilization period before the intensive. We'll discuss this on the consultation call.

Each two-day intensive includes:

• A 60-minute pre-intensive consultation with your assigned therapist

• A pre-intensive assessment for each partner to complete in advance, which we review before your first day

• Two full days of in-person therapy in our Novato, Marin County office

• A tailored couples workbook with structured exercises, reflection prompts, and tools you'll continue to use after the intensive

• A 60-minute follow-up integration session approximately 30 days after the intensive

We send the workbook and assessment to you after your consultation so you can arrive on day one with the prep work done.

No. Kodo is a private-pay practice and does not bill insurance for any of our services, including intensives.

The longer answer: most couples therapy is not adequately covered by managed care to begin with. Insurance plans require an individual diagnosis on one partner — which misframes the work, since couples therapy treats the relationship, not an individual disorder. It also creates a mental health record on that partner that follows them for years. Depth, somatic, and trauma-integrated couples work isn't well-aligned with insurance-driven session limits or reimbursement rates either.

We can provide a superbill if your plan offers out-of-network reimbursement for couples therapy (some PPO plans do). Most couples who choose intensive work elect to pay out of pocket.

We periodically offer limited sliding-scale spots. Please ask during the consultation if cost is a barrier and we'll let you know what's available. For couples who can carry the investment but want to spread it over time, we can discuss payment plan options before booking.