ONE: IT'S THE CLIENT'S TURN TO TALK
So we will continue today with the overarching guiding principles for how you do single session therapy well. No these are a little bit skill based, a little bit technical but they are all things that you just need to keep in mind overall. The one that I’m going to focus on today is that we have to allow the client to talk more than you. This seems like a very basic principle when it comes to doing therapy and being clinically effective but if we really think about time management and you think about what happens in a single session it’s so easy to take up a lot of space if we’re doing things like psychoeducation or skills training or anything like that. I think those things are valuable but I think we always need to be asking ourselves “is this the most useful, the most efficient use of the time that we have?”.
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ONE: QUESTIONS ARE THE INTERVENTION
Today we are going to continue to talk about the guiding practice principles for how to do Single Session Therapy well. We’ve already talked about letting the client talk more than you, and in my training many many years ago I was told that we were looking for approximately a minimum of an 80/20 split, where the clients talk about 80% of the time and the clinician talks about 20%. That means that there isn’t really alot of time to be doing things like psychoeducation, or teaching people how to box breathe or any of those kinds of things because that takes up alot of time and space. In Single Session Therapy we are always going in with the assumption that this might be the first and last time that we are meeting with the client so we have to maximize the time that we have. So if we are not doing psychoeducation or skills training what are we doing? In Single Session Therapy we believe that the questions are the intervention. The questions are the tools that we use to elicit change.
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ONE: EVERYBODY WANTS SOMETHING
This vlog is about how we do Single Session Therapy efficiently and effectively. I often talk about how there are five very distinct things that we need to keep in mind when we’re doing Single Session Therapy. This is part of what I call the umbrella approach. All of these things hold true no matter who you’re working with, no matter where you are, this is what we need to do. The first one thing that we have to do is base the conversation on what the client wants. This is sometimes easier said than done but I will tell you why this is so important and specifically so important when we’re doing Single Session Therapy.
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ONE: TIME IS A CURRENCY OF RESPECT
In today’s vlog I want to talk to you about time. Time is such an interesting thing because it is all about perception. What I want to talk about specifically is time as a currency of respect, which we don’t always think of. What I mean by this is that time is one of those things in life that people just don’t get back. We are only given a finite amount of it. To spend, to use in all kinds of different ways. I think sometimes that we take for granted the time that we have or the time that other people spend with us - and that’s in all relationships, not just therapeutic relationships. one of the things that I think we really need to be thinking about, especially in single session therapy is what is the value of the client’s time?
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ONE: INCREASING ACCESSIBILITY IS AN INTERVENTION
Today I want to revisit an earlier theme of “why” we would want to do Single Session Therapy, which a lot of people really question. Now I have been saying for a long time that doing Single Session Therapy is an act of resistance. It is an act of resistance against all of those dominant narratives and discourses about what mental health should be, what mental health should look like, about how people should access services, about the role of this clinician, about all of those, about all of those things. The one that I think is most important is accessibility. We know that historically speaking mental health services have not been accessible to many many people.
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ONE: IT'S NOT ABOUT YOU! REALLY.
The thing that I want to talk about today is a characteristic or a quality that I believe is absolutely essential to be doing Single Session Therapy well and it is a quality that the therapist has to hold. That quality is humility. In the world of psychotherapy it is very seductive to believe that we know what's best for everybody else. We are often taught that we can assess, we can label, we can diagnose for another person. What happens then is that we can fall into the mistaken belief that we actually have the ability to know what’s best for someone else.
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ONE: THE POWER OF A SINGLE CONVERSATION
In today’s vlog I will tackle the final, key piece in our belief system as Single Session clinicians. It’s so fundamental, it’s almost so obvious that I hate to bring it up but I’m going to do it anyway because most of us who have been traditionally trained have not been trained to believe in this. The thing that I want you to grasp and adopt is the idea that a person’s life can change as a consequence of a single conversation. This is about believing in the power of one conversation.
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ONE: NOTICE THE POWER OF THE "QUIET" STORIES
In this vlog I talk about the belief system that’s necessary to do Single Session therapy well. This is specifically the belief system of the clinician. These are the beliefs the clinician needs to work on before they even go into the room. The thing that I want to talk about today is this idea of perspective. In narrative therapy they have lovely language for things and they talk about how there are stories that live in the shadows. I love that idea and I love that phrase and it has stuck with me since I heard it many many years ago because it’s a reminder that oftentimes there are stories that are quiet. There are stories that don’t get air time. There are stories that literally live in shadows, and just because they are quiet, and just because they are not told doesn’t mean they are not powerful and strong and beautiful.
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ONE: HOW YOU SEE YOUR CLIENTS MATTERS
Today’s topic is about how we see our clients, so it’s a bit of a continuation from what we talked about last time where the belief system or the philosophy, sometimes it’s called the “guiding principles” of the Single Session clinical is so important when it comes to outcomes. These are the things that precede the doing, because what we know is that belief precedes action. Thoughts precede action. Which is why to do this well we have to do the work of training our thoughts, honing our thoughts, being in touch with our thoughts about the people we are working with prior to actually seeing them.
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ONE: WHO IS THE "EXPERT"?
Today we are going to continue the discussion about the paradigm shift that is so important when it comes to doing Single Session Therapy. Single Session Therapy is very different from traditional therapy that most of us were trained in because you literally only have one chance so do it well instead of squishing all of the things that we’ve ever known to do into one session we have to be very particular and very intentional about what we’re doing in that session. One of the things that comes up quite frequently that gets in the way of clinicians doing Single Session Therapy well is one of the things that every single clinical that I know would adopt and think that they believe is the phrase “clients are experts in their own life”.
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ONE: BUILDING CAPACITY IS THE KEY TO SINGLE SESSION THERAPY
In today’s vlog we’re going to get into the nitty gritty of what we are actually doing in Single Session therapy as clinicians. One of the ideas that I want to throw out there that I think is both different but key to being effective in Single Session is the idea of listening through problems. So I think I’ve said this before but what we’re trying to do in single session is not solve problems, what we’re trying to do is increase capacity.
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ONE: THE Homemade Holiday Edition
Welcome to ONE: The Single Session Vlog, where we’re doing the homemade Holiday edition. I’m doing this vlog today firstly to wish you Happy Holidays if you celebrate but also because I was inspired this morning. It is Christmas Eve as I film this and I was out this morning doing some last minute errands like many people and I was in a store that was totally chaotic full of people who looked very miserable as they were buying all of these last minute gifts for people. This caused me to reflect on one of the Single Session principles that we talk about alot and one really specifically about one of the questions that I think is most important not just in doing Single Session therapy but in therapy in general: “what difference will that make”. This is my favourite question of all time because I think it gets to the “why behind the want”.
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ONE: WHAT IS THE "WHY" BEHIND SINGLE SESSION THERAPY? ("WHY" #2 = NO MORE WAITLISTS!)
So in this blog I do a Part 2 about “Why in the world would we be doing Single Session Therapy?”. There are many many reasons to have this service as part of a menu of services that we’re offering to people as they engage with mental health. One of the things that is important to recognize is that I’m not saying that Single Session Therapy is the be-all end-all for everyone - that’s actually NOT how it works.
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ONE: Let's talk PARADIGM SHIFTING in Single Session Therapy
Today we’re going to talk about paradigm shifting. These are big word in the world of mental health- the idea of the “paradigm”. What does it mean? It means that we actually need to shift our way of thinking. This is very relevant to our work in Single Session Therapy because of course we are only seeing people once, and most of us are trained to see people 10, 15, up to 20 times!
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What are we doing in Single Session Therapy? It's not solving problems!
In this vlog I introduce the paradigm shifting that is essential for effective single session therapy. It’s a very exciting vlog because I get into the “meat” of what it means to do single session therapy from a mental health perspective. The first thing, and this may require a bit of stretching, involves answering the question “what are we doing in single session therapy”. Here’s a hint: It’s NOT problem solving!
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ONE: What is the "WHY" behind Single Session Therapy? (WHY #1 = SOCIAL JUSTICE)
This is a really exciting vlog for me because today we’re going to talk about the “why” behind single session therapy. Why would anyone even think about implementing this, what are the benefits of it, all of those kinds of things. This is a huge question, especially when it comes to walk-in single session therapy. There are lots and lots of “why’s” when it comes to the implementation of this kind of model, especially from a service delivery perspective, but the one that makes me the most excited has to do with social justice.
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ONE: What is Single Session Therapy?
The topic of this blog is DEFINITIONS. Specifically, “what is single session therapy?”. You would think that this is kind of an easy answer - the title “single session therapy” is self-explanatory, but in reality, when you get in to the literature, there actually is some grey area about the we’re talking about…
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ONE: The Single Session Vlog
Welcome to ONE: The Single Session Vlog - Introductions. To begin with, in this very first vlog, I thought it might be useful to tell you a little bit about how I came to be super interested, super passionate, about Single Session Therapy.
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Single Session Therapy: Change is inevitable
The existence of monarch butterflies reminds me that change is both possible and inevitable.
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Single Session Therapy: Believe in it
Learning how to do single session therapy well has been one of the greatest challenges of my professional career.
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