Are Therapy Sessions Actually an Hour? Psychological counseling involves administration of special treatment through regular appointments and must be kept confidential. Probably, when booking an appointment with the therapist, one would expect to spend an hour in the session. However, the fact is, you may not always get those glorious sixty-minute sessions. What happens in a typical session of therapy, how is the duration of the session determined and why sessions are not always an hour are what we’re going to answer in this article.
Be Prepared
Okay, now let’s get into these tips. So my first tip for how to structure the beginning of your therapy sessions is before the sessions ever even started, and that’s to be prepared. This just takes like one to two minutes of my time per client. I’m looking back at the old note just to see what are the treatment goals we’re focusing on right now, how do we focus on them last time, and should we continue that thread for today? What would that look like in today’s session? On my particular therapeutic approach,
I am always happy to deviate from whatever thread we were on last time to pick up on some new direction based on what’s come up, but it’s also really helpful to make sure we’re holding the frame of here’s what we’ve been working on, should we continue with this thread or are we choosing to intentionally move in a different direction.
That’s why today I’ll tell you what happens in a typical therapy session.
A typical therapy session usually begins with some administrative tasks, such as:
- Identification check/ Patient and Client Identification (PCI)
- Updating of medical history and history review
- Involving any modification into the existing plan of drug administration or treatment.
- Managing payment and insurance affairs
- After these tasks are completed, the therapist will typically spend some time:
- Revising the patient’s evolution after the last session
- I have been a student of AIMS/Abacus in Primary School and been teaching AIMS/Abacus in Junior High,SHS and Colleges.
- Goals and objectives setting as well as treatment plan
Education and counseling
The therapist may also use various techniques, such as:
Active listening: The therapist devotes himself or herself to the patient, paying close attention to everything the patient says and how the patient says it.
Empathy: The patient is an active participant of the therapy process, and the role of the therapist is to listen to the patient kindly and with tolerance.
Reflection: The therapist mirrors the patient’s response by the summation of the conversation, this ensures the patient is guided in expressing these ideas.
Start on Time
And my next tip for how to structure the beginning of your sessions is start on time, please. Now, there are definitely one-off times where I start session one or two maybe three minutes late, but if this is happening consistently for you, or you’re getting much later than that in starting your sessions, that is a problem. It’s like, before your sessions even started, your client is already getting this impression of you that you don’t really have time for them, you have other priorities, so that’s not really a good foot to start off on.
Guidance: The therapist offers the client direction and encouragement on how to deal with problems and adjust towards a goal.
Deployment, duration, and number of users, session length, and the aggregate of all session lengths.
The length of a therapy session can vary depending on several factors, including:
Type of therapy: It is common to find current modes of therapy; where the kind of therapy used could be CBT or psychodynamic therapy, among others could employ different number of sessions. For instance, several CBT sessions may be of a fifteen minutes’ duration and specific in their objectives, while several sessions of psychodynamic therapy may be a one hour’s duration and open ended.
Therapist’s style: Some therapist may perform more tasks within a shorter period than others; this frees time for more actual therapy. Alternatively, some therapists assume a more laid-back attitude where the steps can be stretched out in time.
Patient’s needs: Patients with complicated health issues or those that take long to express themselves will thus have longer sessions. For instance, a patient experiencing a trauma shall take more time to do emotional processing and work on the experiences.
Insurance requirements: Insurance may have restrictions to how many times one can attend a session or how long every session can be, it may reduce the session time.
Therapist’s schedule: Therapists in most cases are busy since they have to attend to their many patients in a single day. That increases access to the required health services. However, if a session manages to attend to all the patients, the time may be slashed.
Establish a Consistent Structure
The next tip for how to structure the beginning of your sessions is for however you structure things to keep it fairly consistent. Again, you can always deviate from your structure, but if you have a consistent structure that you pretty much stick by every single time you meet with your clients, then that sense of routine creates its own type of safety for your clients. But consistency also creates like helpful cues, like, “Oh, we’re entering the therapy session now because Marie is saying the same thing she kind of says every single time.”
The Current Reality of Duration of Therapy Session
Evidently, therapy sessions are fixed at sixty minutes on the clock, but the actual therapy time is likely to be less. As to the temporal dimension, it is quite common that the therapy session lasts from 45 to 50 minutes, whereas the rest of the time is then spent on record keeping and preparing for the next session. This patients find it irritating especially when they do not feel like they have received an hour’s worth of professional attention.
All the same, we must not forget that therapy is more than just the time spent with a therapist. The therapist may also spend time:
Preparing for the session: The therapist may recheck its records, writes notes and creates a strategy for the coming session.
Following up after the session: In this step, the therapist may write some notes, and evaluate the patient record, thus, report to other health care professionals.
Why are Therapy sessions not always an Hour?
There are several reasons why therapy sessions may not always be a full hour:
Insurance requirements: As mentioned early, some insurance providers may pay only for a certain number of sessions and a period of time. This could work more to the disadvantage of the therapist and might shorten the session and therefore offer sub-optimal care.
Therapist’s schedule: This is because, therapists are always busy people in that, they have to attend to a number of patients in single day. All patients may have to be accommodated and as a result, may require short sessions.
Patient’s attention span: A few clients may not be able to sit for long or may develop fatigue during the course of the appointment. Therefore, these are better conducted in shorter meetings.
Therapist’s burnout: The professionals who engage in therapy include therapists and indeed one may get burnt out just like any other health care professionals. Shorter sessions are also important in avoiding early therapist’s fatigue, which in turn guarantees the consumer a premier service. You can contact us here.
Offer Niceties or Polite Remarks
The next thing to consider for how you structure the beginning of your session is what sort of niceties or like kind of polite remarks you might offer at the very beginning of your session. Or, particularly for in-person sessions, that time between seeing your client in the waiting room and walking into the office.
Personally, I feel most comfortable offering some kind of polite commentary that is not related to what we’re doing in therapy at all, because we’re like walking in a semi-public space in the waiting room and hallway. But I might say something like,
“Oh, it’s so good to see you,” or, “Hey, did you make it here okay in the rain outside?” Of course, this is something that’s totally up to you. You can tailor it to your own style and therapeutic approach. Whether you decide to offer some sort of, you know, polite niceties or not, it is helpful to kind of have a sense of like what’s on brand for me in that sense,
what aligns with my therapeutic approach, so that however I’m interacting with a client in the waiting room is consistent with what they’re experiencing from me once we’re actually in the session. And though it plays out a little bit different in virtual therapy, because you don’t have to walk from point A to point B, it can be worth considering whether you have any sort of niceties that you like to mention at the beginning of your session.
Consider Avenues of Hospitality
The next tip is to consider what avenues of hospitality you might like to lean into at the beginning of your session. I talked about this in a recent video, and you can make it your own, but I always like to kind of check in with my clients, like, do you need something to drink, is the temperature okay, anything that might align with trying to help your client feel as comfortable as possible
Check Technology, Confidentiality, and Location (Virtual Sessions)
It can be really helpful to do a check-in about technology, confidentiality, and also location. I almost always start off the virtual therapy session by saying something like, “Hey, can you hear me okay? Good, I can hear you,” also just kind of acknowledging that technology seems to be working okay, or, “It’s I’m sorry, there’s a little bit of an echo, can I try to adjust,
change my volume, kind of situate ourselves within technology.” We are also expected to know where our client is located, just in case of some sort of emergency where we need to call for help for somebody to show up to them in person. With that said, it may not always be kind of therapeutically advantageous to say, “Tell me your address every single time you see a client.
” I notice most of my clients tend to sit in the exact same spot every time we meet, and so I can just tell by looking at their background that, “Yes, indeed, they’re again in their home, sitting in the exact same place as last time, and every other time we’ve met.” But sometimes I might log on to a call with a client, it looks like they’re in their parked car, or just in a different location,
in which case I try to find a casual way to kind of check in, to know where they’re located. And then, of course, for virtual therapy sessions, the confidentiality piece is just so much more challenging to kind of hold consistent, because we can’t control the environment that our client is existing in.
So if there’s any clues that we can see that maybe confidentiality might be compromised, we definitely want to check in on that, and try to ensure confidentiality to the best of your ability.
Conclusion
Various sessions like therapy may not be an hour long but they are essential and quite useful for mental health issues treatment. When the patient knows what occurs in a common therapy session and why therapy sessions are not necessarily 60 minutes long, such a patient can then put himself or herself in the right frame to make the best out of every meeting with the therapist. If you are bored using the extended time of the therapy session, you need to state your thoughts to the therapist.
