People who enrol on professional training courses in counselling and psychotherapy will undoubtedly be trained to see clients in ongoing counselling/therapy. If they are trained to offer brief counselling/therapy, it will usually be in the range of 4-10 sessions. The chances are that if single-session therapy is mentioned at all on their training course, it will be in passing and they will not study it extensively. This is the case even though the modal number of sessions cli

In this response, I will outline several ways of answering this question. As you will see this question has no definitive answer. Single-Session Therapy and One-At-A-Time (OAAT) Therapy are Synonymous Hoyt (2011) introduced the term ‘one-at-a-time’ into the SST literature, and some have used it synonymously with single-session therapy. That is, they both describe the practice in which the therapist and client set out to help the client in a single session, on the understandin

Single-session therapy is a way of thinking about therapy and a mode of delivering therapy services. While it may mean the client has only one session, it could also imply the client may attend additional sessions to meet their therapeutic needs. Contemporary single-session therapy was developed from the experiences of Moshe Talmon, an Israeli psychologist who worked at the Kaiser Permanente clinic in Northern California in the mid to late 1980s. During that time, Talmon foll

Introduction Single-Session Therapy (SST) is an intentional endeavour in which the client and therapist agree to meet for a single session to help the client address their chosen concern, with the understanding that more help is available if needed. It is based on research that shows that the modal number of sessions that clients have internationally is ‘1’ and that 70-80% are happy with that session given their current circumstances (Talmon, 1990; Hoyt & Talmon, 2014). One