You may have expected a short answer to this question? However, I cannot give you one without explaining some background to how my psychotherapy meetings work in practice.

When you engage my services as a psychotherapist you do so for a particular reason. That reason will be clarified at our first meeting and will set the focus for any subsequent meetings. The skills of a psychotherapist are best utilised to support you to tease out the issue (or issues) that brought you in the fist place.

This is maybe a different way of seeing it than you anticipated. Psychotherapy is not something that is ‘done’ to you. I come back again to the example of the dentist. You do not have dentistry ‘done’ to you – you engage the services of the dentist to perform a filling, extraction or whatever. It will always be for a specific purpose with a clear beginning and end.

Likewise with psychotherapy – you come for a specific purpose. Since life is not always straightforward, exploring one area can open others. This can be facilitated while still holding the general focus of why you have come. As this varies with each person, the length of time people devote to psychotherapy also varies considerably.

The point I want to emphasise here is that meetings do not continue from week to week ad infinitum without knowing why. In general people do not continue till they get to the bottom of every issue. The learning and skills gathered in dealing with one issue often transfer very well to other areas of a persons life.

What difference might engaging my psychotherapy service make to you? Although your life may still be difficult, challenging, or simply unfair – learning to respond differently, by not repeating old unhelpful patterns, is what makes the difference.

Often people will say ‘I thought I was doing great but I’ve fallen right back into an old unhealthy pattern.’ When we take some time with this, what is often discovered is that yes they may find themselves acting in an old unhealthy way, but this time they recognised that fact and were able to change it. So it is often in the different response times that benefits will first be noticed.

So ‘how long does psychotherapy take?’ might be better answered by taking more time at the beginning to consider ‘why I need the services of a psychotherapist right now?’ The key principle is that it is a process of collaboration. Just like the dentist – you have pain – you go for help – find the source of the discomfort – deal appropriately with it (even the parts you don’t like) - and you experience an improvement.

Please call me and I will be happy to answer any further questions you may have.
Call me on 086 8545407 or e-mail me in confidence to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it