What is Single Session Therapy (SST)?

Understanding Single Session Therapy, what it involves, and how it might help you

What if a single hour of focused work helped you to shift your perspective, and achieve change with something that’s troubling you? You might be surprised to learn that therapy doesn't always need to involve a series of appointments over several months or years. Sometimes, one focused session can offer a useful opportunity to explore a problem, gain a fresh perspective and consider what might help you move forward. This is the idea at the heart of the form of counselling known as SST or “Single Session Therapy”. 

Single Session Therapy

A therapeutic approach of one focused session to address what would help for now with a particular issue

In this blog, we'll explore what Single Session Therapy (SST) is, how it works and what you might expect if you decide to give it a try. I'll be drawing particularly on the work of Professor Windy Dryden, who has developed an approach to SST that places considerable emphasis on collaboration, client strengths and making the most of the time available. I’ll explain how I utilise this approach in my own psychotherapy practice, here is Preston and via online Single Session Therapy appointments. We’ll address questions that include:

• What’s the difference between an SST and traditional counselling?

• How do I know if an SST is right for me?

• What happens in an SST?

• Is a Single Session Therapy appointment a one-off thing?

And, if you are interested in giving the Single Session Therapy approach a try for yourself, please do get in touch and I can share my availability with you. 

What is Single Session Therapy?

Single Session Therapy (SST) is a model of talking therapy that developed in the 1990s. In the SST appointment, the therapist and client work together in a collaborative way to support the client to get what they want from that one session – be it to help make a decision, find practical ways to cope with a challenge, to explore other forms of support or to feel less stuck. At its heart, SST is an approach to counselling and psychotherapy in which the intention is to make the most of a single therapeutic hour.

How is Single Session Therapy different from traditional counselling?

With traditional counselling, you might expect to attend weekly or fortnightly appointments over an extended period. In contrast, the SST approach starts with the possibility that one session may be all you need at this point in your life. The focus can be on what would help for now, or what strategies or sense of direction do you want to adopt to feel a greater sense of ownership and autonomy of your own life, moving forwards.

In traditional counselling, you might begin by exploring what has brought you to therapy, gradually developing an understanding of your experiences and working towards longer-term goals. The work of traditional counselling takes place over several sessions, typically 6 or more sessions - sometimes, many more in the case of longer term psychotherapy. This can be particularly valuable if you're dealing with complex difficulties, longstanding emotional pain or the effects of childhood experiences and trauma. Single Session Therapy, on the other hand, has a more immediate focus. With the SST approach, you identify what you would like to focus on in this one single session, and what you’d like to gain from this single session. Two potentially useful questions here are:

• What’s the one issue I want to focus in on?

• What would help for now? 

What would help for now?

This question is at the heart of an SST appointment? Rather than delving into the past, we consider you needs moving forwards and what supports you have / can enlist with the difficulty you face.

Examples of scenarios where the Single Session Therapy approach my be helpful

There are many scenarios and situations where the SST approach can be helpful. An SST can provide therapeutic support if you are:

• Struggling with a particular decision and wanting some space to think it through.

• Experiencing anxiety about an upcoming event.

• Feeling stuck in a situation and wanting to explore your options.

• Dealing with a difficult conversation or relationship issue.

• Wanting to understand a particular emotional reaction.

• Looking for some clarity about a problem you've been thinking about for a while.

What happens in a Single Session Therapy appointment?

1.       Reflection prior to the session

In my own therapeutic work offering SSTs, I place real importance on collaboration between therapist and client. This means that, prior to the session, there is an invitation to reflect on some questions to help you get the most from the Single Session Therapy and to support with articulating how I can best help you towards your goals.

Before the appointment, there is an invitation to utilise some reflection prompts to help you get the most from the SST

You can take your time to consider your thoughts and feelings in response to the prompts in the days before the session.

I usually email these questions over in advance. One of the questions I would typically include here is:

What help do you hope I can best provide you in the session? Please choose one of these options:

• Help me to develop greater understanding of the issue

• Help me by just listening while I talk about the issue

• Help me to express my feelings about the issue

• Help me to solve an emotional or behavioral problem; help me get unstuck

• Help me to make a decision

• Help me to resolve a dilemma

• Help me by signposting me to the most appropriate service for my situation

• Other

I find that this pre-session reflection opportunity can support collaboration.  My intention is to support you to reflect on and articulate what you would find helpful, rather than impose any agenda onto you.

The pre-session reflection resources may also invite reflection on what has prompted you to book the session, and what your own strengths and resources are. In the SST session itself, we’ll check in with your thoughts and responses prompted by this pre-session reflection. I'll be interested in understanding what matters to you and what you'd like to get from our time together. However, you don't need to arrive with a perfectly formulated problem or a clear idea of what you want to achieve. Part of our work together can be figuring that out.

As well as the reflection prompts, I’ll also provide information for you about the ways in which I work, and what I can offer you in terms of confidentiality and how I use your data. This gives you chance to read over ahead of the session.

2. Agreeing on a focus

In my own practice offering SSTs in person or online, we will have an hour for the SST itself. We will begin by checking you understand the process, and are giving informed consent to working together. In the early stages of the session, we will also seek to collaborate on and agree a focus for the session. This is an important part of Single Session Therapy because so that we can make thoughtful use of the hour. If you’re struggling to name a specific focus, I can offer support with clarifying and prioritizing what feels the most pressing, or most useful thing for you at this time. If you been able to benefit from pre-session reflection, using the reflection questions, you may well find that it’s easier to articulate what you most need from the session.

For example, if you're feeling overwhelmed by a difficult relationship, we might decide to focus on understanding a particular interaction, exploring your feelings about it, or considering how you'd like to respond. Perhaps we could identify the one next step you want to take in relation to the situation. The aim isn't to resolve every aspect of a complicated situation in one sitting. Instead, it's to identify something meaningful and manageable to work on, and to support you to feel resourced and equipped to then continue to make choices in your own life in line with what would help for now. 

Collaborating on a specific single focus for the session is important within the SST approach

I’ll be working to support you to name and articulate which direction you want to head within our SST to help you get the most from the session.

3. Working collaboratively and actively together on the agreed focus.

Once we’ve agreed a focus, and are both clear on how I can best help you towards your goals, the invitation will be to explore the issue, or challenge you’ve brought to the session.  If you’ve recognised that you are seeking greater understanding of the issue, through our speaking together, we will seek to join the dots and make meaning of the issue. If you are seeking to make a decision, we can talk through what your options are, and how you feel about different choices open to you. We can consider your own wants, needs and preferences in the situation and what might be getting in the way of your decision making process. I’ll ask questions, as well as reflect back what I notice and hear from you. I may well offer to share my thoughts, ideas or feelings I have in response to our work if I think they may be of use and service to you and your goals. .

4. Exploring your existing strengths and resources

My Single Session Therapy work is built on the belief that, deep down, you already have strengths, abilities and resources that may help you deal with the difficulties you're facing. When we're struggling, it can be easy to lose sight of these. In our SST, I’ll remain curious about the inner resources you have available to you. Perhaps you've dealt with similar situations in the past? Maybe there are people in your life who can offer support, or you've already tried things that have helped, even if only a little. Rather than assume you need a therapist to provide all the answers, the SST approach encourages us to explore what you already know, what you've tried and what might be useful to draw upon. This can help you reconnect with your own capacity to manage difficult situations.

An SST session can help you to identify the inner and external resources you have available to you in your life.

What are the coping skills you carry around with you in your daily life? How can you bring them to the “top of the rucksack” in this situation you face, so your resources are more easily to hand?

5. Exploring possible ways forward

Depending on what you've brought to the session, we might explore different ways of approaching your situation.

This could involve looking at things from a different perspective, identifying patterns in your thinking or considering practical steps you might take. Sometimes, it can be helpful to explore what has got in the way of you making a change or what makes a particular situation feel difficult.

Rather than tell you what to do, I’ll offer space for us to work together to explore possibilities and identify approaches that feel realistic and appropriate for you. Where it would be useful, we might also practise or rehearse a particular response during the session.

6. Making a plan

Towards the end of the session, we'll spend some time reflecting on what we've explored and considering what you might want to do next. This could involve identifying a practical action, thinking about how you might approach a difficult situation or simply allowing yourself some time to reflect on what you've learned. Here, my intention is to help gather together the learning and gain from the session, so you can leave with a clearer sense of what you're taking away from the SST and what, if anything, you'd like to do next.

In my own practice offering SST, I offer a follow-up written summary of any plan you identify for yourself and next steps and can link to any resources we’ve discussed in the session.  I’ll send this written summary out to you following the session if we agree that’s something you’d value. 

Following your SST session, if we agree it feels helpful, I will email you over a summary of the support plan we developed in our session.

The plan can include links to relevant resources.

What happens after a Single Session Therapy appointment?

For many people, the benefits of the SST appointment continue after the session. You will have the scope to take time after the session in your own life to reflect on what we’ve explored in the session. This can take the form of reflecting, digesting, acting, waiting and deciding. In this, you will be autonomous and can make use of the skills, resources and strategies we identified in the session as available to you.

If you have opted for a written summary of any plan we identified in the session, you’ll have a reminder of strategies to try out and next steps to consider. You may also discover that you want to approach things differently once you've had time to think.

Is Single Session Therapy right for me?

SST may be worth considering if you have a particular issue you'd like to explore and feel that a focused conversation could help. The Single Session Therapy approach can be especially useful if you're looking for an opportunity to work through something without committing to ongoing counselling.

If you are aware that your current challenges are the result of complex trauma or if you feel you may be at risk, then an SST is not usually the most helpful therapeutic approach. If you're unsure whether SST or longer-term therapy would be more suitable, it may be helpful to discuss this with a therapist before deciding. For this reason, I am happy to offer a free intro call to people considering counselling – whether that’s longer-term psychotherapy, or a brief series of sessions of counselling, or a Single Session Therapy appointment. 

If you are unsure if an SST may be suitable for you, I welcome you booking a free intro call (via phone, or via MS Teams).

I can answer any questions you might have about the process and have a open and collaborative conversation to help identify if an SST appointment seems a helpful way forward for you.

Is SST a one-off event?

For many people, a Single Session of Therapy can be helpful as a one-off event. Other people find that accessing more than one SST, or commencing ongoing counselling at a later date after the SST can be helpful.

In this way, Single Session Therapy isn't necessarily about limiting therapy to one session. Rather, it's about approaching each session as an opportunity to make meaningful progress, without assuming that further appointments will automatically be necessary. Professor Windy Dryden, a key figure involved in the development of the SST model, describes this as Single-Session One-At-A-Time Therapy. The idea is that you attend one session, make the most of it, and then – in collaboration with your therapist – can decide whether you’d benefit from and would like any further therapeutic support. This is quite different from the idea that you must commit to a course of therapy before knowing whether it will be helpful. Instead, you have the freedom to decide what you need, one session at a time.

In my own practice, once we’ve reached the end of the Single Session Therapy appointment, and I have sent out any agreed action plan, I mark our work as concluded. However, I am open to people discussing with me options for accessing a further SST in the future, or to begin ongoing counselling. We can talk through your needs and my own availability if further therapeutic work is sought once the SST has concluded. 

Next steps?

If you're curious about whether a Single Session Therapy appointment session might be helpful, you're welcome to get in touch, with me, Claire Law. I offer SST appointments face-to-face in Preston and online to adults across the UK.

We can arrange a free introductory call to discuss what you're looking for and whether SST might be a suitable option for you. I’d be happy to respond to any questions you might have about SST appointments.

I’m a BACP Senior Accredited Psychotherapist offering professional counselling and psychotherapy in Preston, Lancashire and online for adults based in the UK.

I offer a simple, no-pressure approach to people who are considering therapy - and can chat through how I work, and to share with you my availability for new clients.

There's no pressure to commit to anything. The important thing is finding the kind of support that feels right for you.