This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 11:07 am and is filed under How therapy works, therapeutic process, treatment activity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
How do you deal with a new patient that says I only can afford five or six sessions can you help me and fix me in five or six sessions?
My answer generally is that it depends upon how much energy that you have. How much energy do you have to put into this? We only have so much energy. You may not have enough energy to get it done in five or six sessions but we can certainly make a really good impact in that time. But it might take 7 to 10 sessions over a period of several months.
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Typically I do a lot of predicting for people. Even coming out of the consultation, generally have a pretty good idea of what the time lines are going to be and I’ll say to the patient, if you have the energy to put into this we can probably handle this treatment between 5 to 6 sessions or 7 to 10 sessions.
The reason why I ask how much energy you have is that I am going to assign you things to do outside of our sessions. I generally do not see people every week. This little hour we spend together every couple of weeks isn’t enough to help create the change you need as a patient. But the things we want to work on outside of session, if you have the energy to do those assignments we can make a real improvement in a short period of time.


