What happens in the first session of therapy? More importantly, why do one-third of clients not come back for the second session? We look for answers in the research on client expectations and consider some creative perspectives on increasing first session effectiveness, including a radical idea that clients dropping out of therapy might actually be a positive outcome.

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Show Notes:

• What’s the Smallest Amount of Therapy That’s Still Effective?
• The Great Psychotherapy Debate: The Evidence for What Makes Psychotherapy Work
• The First Kiss: Undoing the Intake Model and Igniting First Sessions in Psychotherapy
• Clinician interventions and participant characteristics that foster adaptive patient experiences for psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic changes.
• Clients’ pretreatment counseling expectations as predictors of the working alliance.
• A comparison of client preferences for intervention empirical support versus common therapy variables
• A prediction of initial appointment attendance and initial outcome expectations
• Premature discontinuation in adult psychotherapy: A meta-analysis.
• How to make the most of one session
• Is Dropout After a First Psychotherapy Visit Always a Bad Outcome?
• Single-session therapy: Maximizing the effect of the first (and often only) therapeutic encounter.
• Capturing the moment: Single session therapy and walk-in services.
• The Radical Therapist #100 – Single Session Narrative Therapy w/ Michael Morar