What is Single Session Therapy

If single session therapy (SST) is not a model, mindset, or methodology, then what is it?

How we define single-session therapy (SST) shapes how we think about people, problems, change, and our role in therapy. As SST has been described as a model of practice, a mindset, or a methodology, I worry these metaphors risk holding us within individualistic understandings of ‘I do something to you’ or ‘I employee these methods’? From a relational lens, life-and therapy-unfolds in relationship. Through this lens, SST becomes a process, a way of being in conversation that we engage in together, one that is mutually influential, dialogic, and emergent. Beyond seeing SST as something we ‘do to’ people, it becomes a way of being with others in conversation, where possibilities emerge through the interaction itself.

Drawing on Michael White's connection to the metaphor of definitional ceremony, SST can be seen as a meaning-making journey where people come to understand themselves in preferred ways through tellings, re-tellings, witnessing and reflection. As ceremony, identity and meaning are co-created, inviting participants to consider new or revised possibilities for their lives.

This process-oriented approach coheres around several key concepts: collaboration, dialogue, foregrounding local and insider knowledge, 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.