Single-Session Therapy

What is Single Session Therapy (SST)?

Not interested in longer-term therapy?  Single Session Therapy might be the right fit for you.

Single Session Therapy (SST) is just what it sounds like – you and a therapist meet for a single, focused one-off session designed to identify the problem and offer practical solutions.  If you and the clinician decide that you would like to continue working together beyond that single session, great!  You can always transition to continued work in individual therapy.  However, we wanted to offer SST to clients who are primarily interested in getting rapid, short-term solutions to their challenges.

Read on to learn more about SST, or contact us today to sign up.

Does Single Session Therapy Work?

Decades of psychotherapy research have led scholars to one important conclusion: psychotherapy works. To better meet the needs of a diverse society, scientist-practitioners have developed a myriad of approaches to support the healing of mental health struggles and aid clients in making important and adaptive changes to their behaviors. In spite of such evidence, various barriers impede one’s ability to pursue the necessary services needed to make important changes. 

Whether barriers relate to time constraints, untenable costs, or long waitlists, what we know is that many people do not have the option to attend ongoing therapy. Although this reality may seem despairing, there is good news: individuals may not need ongoing therapy to begin making the necessary changes to disrupt maladaptive patterns of behavior. 

Research has found that approximately 20 to 40 percent of psychotherapy clients stop after a single session. Although these statistics may seem alarming, scholars have found that these psychotherapy clients report experiencing substantial benefits from utilizing one or two sessions with a therapist. This evidence suggests that a single session may be a useful tool to support the change process. 

How Single Session Therapy Can Help

Single Session Therapy can help in four main ways:

#1 – Zero-in on the Main Problem 

Sometimes, individuals are most interested in addressing a specific problem, rather than combing through their history, and early experiences. SST offers client’s the opportunity to engage in direct, problem-focused work. If this resonates with you, SST may be a good alternative to ongoing therapy. 

#2 – Identify Individuals’ Natural Capacities for Change

Whether or not we recognize it, we all have strengths, and SST offers clients the opportunity to recognize and explore how those innate strengths can help support their efforts to initiate the change process. 

#3 – Utilize Strengths and Past Difficulties to Create New Solutions 

Although we can feel hopeless amidst the throes of mental health struggles, many people have likely encountered similar struggles in their past. Given people’s innate capacity for change, individuals have likely experienced some degree of resolution or respite from those struggles. Although such change capacities can be hard to identify in the midst of suffering, SST offers clients the opportunity to directly reflect on and explore such experiences to identify strategies that are most effective for immediate change. 

#4 – Create a Plan for Future Change 

It is hard to make changes without a plan of action, and coming up with such plans can feel daunting without support. SST can provide clients with a space to identify small, manageable changes and to develop plans to enact such changes. 

Of course, no matter how productive a single session of psychotherapy is, one 60-minute session is not enough to begin addressing all the struggles that an individual may face. However, many clients may be unaware of their innate capacity to heal and change. What single-session therapy can offer is the opportunity to explore these innate capacities and develop strategies to access them. Additionally, many people may not need long-term, individual therapy to enact their desired changes. An SST model offers a time and cost-effective alternative to ongoing therapy to evaluate one’s needs and the most appropriate next steps to achieve their desired change. 

Interested?  Contact Us Today!

You don’t have to do this alone.  Whether you are interested in a single session or a lifetime of connection with a therapist, our clinicians are here to help.

Contact us today to get started. 

Article by Dr. Michael Azarani