The therapy that I practice is not designed to try to fix you (I don’t see you as broken). I believe that you are doing the best you can with what you have and my job is to be with you with empathy, genuineness and unconditional positive regard. These attitudes form the basis of our therapy and I can add in coaching, mentoring, astrology, or creative methods, if you require them. In this way, I attune to you and your needs, and you receive genuine care that helps you to let go of what no longer serves you and move towards understanding what kinds of environment help you grow as a neurodivergent person.
In contrast, the medical model uses pathology and techniques (in my experience) to try to help you to fit better into the system that wants you to work harder with less resources. With this attitude of fixing people up and sending them out to work, a lot of therapy is short term (up to 15 sessions), and ‘evidence based’, although the studies often are not on a diverse range of people, so the technique doesn’t work for everyone (I’m not sure that anything works for *everyone* though). Given that we live in a society that mirrors that fix it attitude, I’m wondering how long ‘should’ good enough therapy and coaching last? Here’s my current take on that…
Coaching
3 Months is a good amount of time for sustainable transformation to take place in a coaching relationship. This would be for a particular goal and you would co-create with your coach a strong sense of how you’d know when you’d achieved that goal, and then set about designing a series of tasks and carrying them out (or not – it’s all data) between sessions. The accountability helps you see what works and tweak the tasks/goals over time.
For a lot of people, the goal is often to try to fix themselves to fit better into a workplace or some other societal structure that’s not built for them. Ironically, we can achieve this through self understanding, knowing your limits, and behaving in ways that work for you, or getting the accommodations you are entitled to. However, this kind of coaching often dips into therapy because of the pain of internalised ableism that may bubble up and/or the resistance of family members or colleagues, so may then need to extend beyond 3 months.
Psychotherapy
For deep-rooted psychological pain (that the medical model might describe as cPTSD, for example), I’d suggest longer – about 2 years or more. The therapeutic relationship (hopefully) models the empathy, care and attention that you needed as a child. As you’re together with your therapist for only 1 hour a week (usually), it takes a while to build up, and to drop your defences to feeling appreciated or loved.
It can be hard to allow yourself to feel love if your early relationships didn’t model this for you. It can feel more threatening than welcoming. So we move slowly, appreciating all of the parts of you that helped you survive, even if it feels like they’re hindering, rather than helping, at this stage of your life. It can feel quite hard to know whether therapy is working when you’re doing deep psychological work because it just seems like everything is broken. There are also glimmers of beauty and joy and these are so precious.
I think that it’s possible to keep seeing a therapist for as long as you want and can afford to. I see it as a way of exploring the evolving self and after a while frequency can change from weekly or fortnightly to monthly. I see my therapist monthly.
Coaching/therapy/mentoring hybrid
For people who are feeling pretty okay but need a weekly check-in with a warm, empathic sounding board feel, we continue the relationship for as long as it’s needed. These sessions might include coaching or mentoring too. Sometimes people move from doing a piece of psychotherapeutic work to this kind of hybrid way of keeping on an even keel, knowing they can use the sessions for therapy if they choose.
How many sessions suit you?
That’s just 3 ways of using therapy with me. Everyone’s different and we can co-create a therapy that works for you. When people want to go ahead with therapy with me and they don’t know how many sessions they want, my suggestion is often to try 3 or 6 sessions – enough for us to build a rapport – and then book more, if wanted or needed. Basically, you can have therapy for 1 session, for months or years; it’s all about what might be good for your soul and what you can afford.
What’s your experience of therapy or coaching? What worked for you in the past? What didn’t work?
Book a free initial chat
I offer a free initial chat (click the button below) so we can explore what you would like from therapy and how I might help you with that.