Skills in Single-Session Therapy Part 4: Ways of ending the session
Windy Dryden
Citation: Dryden, W. (2024). Skills in Single-Session Therapy. Part 4: Ways of ending the session. European Journal of Counselling Theory, Research and Practice, 8, 3, 1-4.
https://ejctrap.nationalwellbeingservice.com/volumes/volume-8-2024/volume-8-article-3
Processing dates: Submitted: 2 July 2024; Accepted: 4 July 2024; Published: 8 September 2024
Abstract
This final article in this series (see Dryden, 2020, 2022a, 2024) focuses on the skills singlesession therapists need to use in order to bring the session to a satisfactory conclusion. These skills concern: i) encouraging the client to summarise the session; ii) ensuring that the client is clear about what they are going to take away from the session; iii) giving the client an opportunity to generalise their learning, if relevant; iv) reviewing the possibilities for the future and iv) taking time to answer any last-minute questions that the client may have and giving them space to say anything that want to say that they have not said. The main goal of ending the session is to have the client leave the session with their morale restored, hopeful that what they have discussed will make a difference to their life going forwards.
Key words: action plans, problems, single-session therapy, solutions
Biography
Windy Dryden is Emeritus Professor of Psychotherapeutic Studies at Goldsmiths University of London and is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society. He has authored or edited over 250 books.
His current interests are in single-session and very brief interventions within a therapy and coaching context. Relevant publications include: Single-Session Therapy: 100 Key Points and Techniques’ (Routledge, 2019) which outlines the theoretical underpinnings and practical applications of the single-session mindset and The Single-Session Counselling Primer: Principles and Practice (PCCS Books, 2020) which is a comprehensive introduction to SST for counsellors.
His book, Very Brief Therapeutic Conversations (Routledge, 2018) is focused on work he has done conducting live demonstrations of therapy/coaching in front of an audience that last 30 minutes or less. He has done more than 650 such demonstrations all over the world.
His goal is to disseminate SST/OAAT with the hope that it might help provide help at the point of need within the NHS, a form of IAPT where the ‘I’ stands for ‘Immediate’. His latest book is Dryden, W. (2022). Single-session integrated CBT (SSICBT): Distinctive features. 2nd edition. Routledge.
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5819-749X