Starting Therapy
Your first session
Expect your initial experience to be similar to that of a doctor's appointment. There will be some forms to fill out; your therapist may send them to you prior to your first appointment or you may be asked to complete them upon arrival. The following videos will give you a sense of what it might be like during your first session.
Starting the first session:
Your first session with the therapist will be different from future visits. The initial visit is intended to allow you and your therapist to get to know each other, identify your specific needs, and get a sense of how to proceed. Future visits will be more therapeutic in nature where you might explore a specific issue.
Hi, if you're here for your session come right inside here, you can take a seat here on the couch. It's nice to finally meet you. My name again is Darryl McClish, I hope you're comfortable, please relax.
Today I'm gonna go a little bit about what you're gonna expect for that first session for therapy. So consent is kind of the first thing that we're gonna discuss, everything that we discuss today is you giving me your permission to talk with you through everything. So if at any point you feel as if we're moving too fast, if you want to move a little faster as well, that's perfectly okay. If you feel like we need to stop and take a break, please let me know and we'll definitely do that as well.
Next thing is confidentiality. So everything we discuss today will stay between just myself and you.
And that next thing is what we call that therapy hour. So our session's are actually only 50 minutes long, so it's not that full hour. So when you hear therapy hour that's kind of what that means.
So let's kind of talk about kind of why you're here today and you know, we can move at whatever pace you kind of feel comfortable with.
The end of the first session:
All right, so now that we talked a bit and it's getting towards the end of the session, now we're gonna have the discussion on if you want to continue with me moving forward or if you think you wanna look elsewhere. An important thing about this decision is that I don't want you to see it as you are making any attack towards me. This is something that you are deciding for yourself because if you feel as if we don't have a good connection together, or that you may do better elsewhere, you need to make that decision for yourself because this is your journey and your process that you need to kind of be in charge of.
So, take a little bit of time to think right now and just let me know your thoughts and I can help you with those next steps moving forward.