Individual Therapy
Therapy is not for people who can’t help themselves.
Therapy is for people who want to help themselves.
Individual Therapy (also known as counseling) is a form of psychotherapy that is meant to establish a non-judgemental therapeutic relationship for an individual to receive needed support when undergoing personal challenges or suffering from symptoms or experiencing a crisis of meaning.
Here are some modalities of counseling that you might experience while participating in individual therapy:
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
- Career Counseling
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy
- EMDR Therapy
- Existential Psychotherapy
- Interpersonal Psychotherapy
- Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy
- Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction
- Motivational Interviewing
- Narrative Therapy
- Somatic Experiencing Therapy
- Solution-Focused Therapy
- Strength-Based Therapy
- Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Individual Therapy is conducted in one-on-one sessions with a client a counselor. This form of counseling has many different aspects, including working with someone to reduce symptoms, to helping someone work through difficult circumstances, experience personal growth, and even recover from a traumatic experience. Individual therapy should be customized to the needs and situation of the person requesting the service. The counseling will also depend on the personality, speciality, skills, and extracurricular training that your therapist possesses.
In individual therapy, the therapist will work to get to know a person through an assessment and several counseling sessions. The therapist will then work with the client to set goals for counseling. At times, the goals are personal items that a client wants to achieve, and at other times, the goals may be related to helping a client reduce or eliminate symptoms, or solve problems in their relationship, work, or family system.
Once the goals have been discussed and agreed upon, the therapist will present to the client the types of interventions or therapy that they believe would be most appropriate to help the client. The client will then give feedback as to their preference for the style and type of interventions that their therapist may utilize in the counseling relationship.
From there, the therapist and client begin meeting with an agreed upon frequency and as the counseling sessions progress, the therapist and client will frequently reassess the therapeutic relationship, goals, and types of interventions utilized in therapy. Eventually, clients and therapist will collectively decide to move into maintenance mode, where a client may come in at certain times, but not as regularly as before.