The Compassion Project
Individual Psychotherapy
What is Psychotherapy?
This is one of the most difficult questions to answer and all therapists will tell you that they dedicate the majority of their professional development to defining this term.
Therapy in this context is a facilitative process in which an individual accesses formal support from a qualified regulated health practitioner with the goal of alleviating suffering from either a mental health condition, a life transition, a traumatic incident or incidents or in some cases just simply due to the "costs of caring".
In understanding definitions of therapy it might be helpful to understand what therapy is not. Therapy is not advice giving, nor is it prescriptive. Therapists are not qualified to diagnose or prescribe medication. They do not see themselves as experts, but rather they wholeheartedly believe that you are the expert in your own recovery. If therapists were to be experts at anything it would be to truly understand what makes people recover and the processes that individuals go through in defining their recovery journey.
What is Single Session Therapy (SST)?
Single session therapy (Bloom, 2001) is a brief model of therapy, often utilized by an individual therapist or therapists with a client, couple or family. The idea behind this modality of counselling is that this "may be the only time we are meeting and therefore what can we get accomplished given there is only a brief time", thus creating a sense of urgency to develop a concrete solution.
It is a solution focused approached based on the idea that individuals are already living in ways that are helpful to them but they may need some support in identifying barriers and reinforcing what is going right.
This brief session usually lasts approximately 90 minutes and involves an interview of the problem, what the ideal solution would look like and how to get there with an analysis of barriers. This brief session can also serve as an assessment or recommendations for what future care might be needed, either with recommendations of additional therapeutic approaches or what work could be done independently from the therapeutic process.
Bloom, Bernard. (2001). Focused Single-Session Psychotherapy: A Review of the Clinical and Research Literature. Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention. 1. 10.1093/brief-treatment/1.1.75.
Couples Therapy
We recognize that your work may impact your relationships. Couples therapy is a process of working with and healing relationships. The therapist will usually meet with a couple over three sessions to understand the inner-workings of the relationship and what interventions will be helpful in strengthening the partnership.
The first session usually is an introductory session with both partners in attendance. The couple will have the chance to discuss their issues and the therapist will try to understand and mediate the partnership. The therapist will ask questions about how the couple met, what perpetual conflicts might be occurring and what core issues the couple would like to work on. The second session the therapist will ask to meet each partner individually for approximately 45 minutes to an hour. The third session is a summary session with recommendations for treatment of the relationship.
We recognize that often our work can impact our relationships. We also aim to provide therapy support to partners and family members.
We use the Gottman Method for couples therapy and the Gottman Relationship Checkup.