Single Session Therapy

Single session therapy (SST), often called One at a Time Therapy (OAATT) has been on the Ontario service landscape since the very early 2000’s. Often thought of as a way to address long waitlists, SST emerged as a means to get services to people in their time of need; an ethical part of a diverse service menu (Cooper, 2024). The single session pathway continues to grow nationally and internationally as feedback notes people who use SST are at least as satisfied and show as much improvement (including long-term and ripple effect changes) when compared to people who opted for longer-term therapy (Rosenbaum, Hoyt & Talmon, 1990; Hoyt, Rosenbaum & Talmon, 1992; Talmon, 1990, 1993).

Single-session therapy has been described in many ways. Some note it’s a mind-set, a methodology, or a model of practice. We understand it as a process; a way of being with people in conversation, mutually influential, dialogic, and where possibilities emerge through the interaction in one conversation and ripple out into everyday life. These conversations are hope-friendly and possibility-rich.

This process-oriented approach coheres around several key concepts: collaboration, dialogue, foregrounding local and insider knowledge, privileging story over labels, and the belief that meaningful change can spark and ripple out from even a single encounter. Rather than being tied to specific techniques, SST as a process is responsive and adaptive to the unfolding interaction in the conversation.

In short, SST involves:

• Joining with people in dialogue around descriptions of life that are significant and pressing to them.

• Engaging in meaning-making, getting onto more preferred understandings of self and life.

• Co-exploring and reflecting on those more preferred moments and different ways of being in life that might be available.

• Engaging with people in choice-making about these options that are based on their lived experience.

• Inviting people to take a look at the various proposals for action connected to all this and inviting them to contextualize them into their everyday life.

• These gatherings are ceremony; they have to do with process, migration of identity, movement, visibility, connection, tellings and re-tellings, utilizing markers of movement, tools of visibility, highlighting revised or emergent identity.

• Take-away materials are co-crafted and inclusive of the many different mediums every-day know-how can be represented by- documents, sculptures, paintings, needle work, dance, song, poetry, enactment, photography, etc.

All this is embedded within the relational ethics framework in which we give continual attention to how we do what do and the possible effects on shaping people’s real lives. How do we have conversations in which people experience themselves as able to shape and direct their lives? How do we assist people to come to know themselves in preferred ways? How do we resist assisting people to accommodate to oppression and injustice? How do we invite people to identify meaningful relationships that will be there to support their efforts and shore them up in times of distress? How do we assist conversations to live on past the face-to-face contact to be there for people when they need them?

References:

Bateson, N. (2023). Combining. Triarchy Press.

Cooper, S. J. (2024). Brief narrative practice in single-session therapy. Routledge.

Hoyt, M. F., Rosenbaum, R., Talmon, M. (1992). Planned single-session psychotherapy. In: S. H. Budman, M. F, Hoyt, S. Friedman, (Eds.). The first session in brief therapy, New York: The Guildford Press.

Rosenbaum, R., Hoyt, M. F., & Talmon, M. (1990). The challenge of single-session therapies: Creating pivotal moments. In R. A. Wells & V. J. Giannetti (Eds.), Handbook of brief psychotherapies (pp. 165–189). Plenum Press.

Talmon, M. (1990). Single-session therapy: Maximizing the effect of the first (and often only) therapeutic encounter. San Francisco: Jossey- Bass Publishers.

Talmon, M. (1993). Single-Session Solutions: A guide to practical, effective, and affordable therapy. Addison-Wesley Pub.