What's the First Session Like?

Think of the first session as simply a conversation with a focus. In that conversation, I'll ask you to describe the problem you'd like to solve in therapy with some additional follow up questions, such as:

1. the extent of the problem

2. when it first began

3. why you want to address the issue now

4. several examples of how the problem shows up in your life

Sometimes the problem can be vague and we will work to clarify what the issue is.

In the end, it's just an honest conversation.

After we are clear on the issue, I'll begin to ask questions about your emotional response to the issue and I will monitor how you answer both verbally and non-verbally. This will help me understand how you manage your internal emotional life, and as I notice, I will typically reflect that back to you as well, so that we are both seeing and agreeing on what is happening. This begins a back-and-forth process where we take the issue, become more specific with it, explore your emotional response to it, help you see how your response is connected to the problem you wanted to solve, and continue to deepen this work throughout the hour.

If you've been in therapy before, this will be different than usual. You may have been accustomed to the first session being a lot of questions about medical, legal, family, social, mental health and education history, and so on. However, in our sessions, the work will stay very focused on the problem you want to get help with, and other less relevant history being taken over the course of other sessions as it fits in to the conversation.

This style is what leads to the intensive and short-term component of this type of psychotherapy. We don't wait to do the treatment, we begin immediately. After all, you'd probably like to begin feeling better sooner than later.

At the end of the session, we summarize what we have learned and discuss whether you have a clear idea about the issue, the path forward and that we both agree on how we want to proceed. The treatment has to make sense to you and feel like it will take you where you want to go. Even if it feels emotionally uncomfortable, you should have a sense that we're really getting to the bottom of it. This is also a time for you to ask me questions about the process or the therapy itself. While it's very normal for people to be nervous in the first session, the end of the session usually brings a great deal of relief that we have a clear agreement on what we're planning to do, and comes with feelings of gratitude and hopefulness for future sessions.