- How long should I go to a psychologist? This question, in one form or another, is often heard in the first meetings, and sometimes arises again at the stage of reviewing tasks in therapy. My answer is I don't know. I will write my reflections here based on the experience of the therapist and the client. I’ll start with the fact that of course you want it quickly and easily, the metaphor of the “magic pill” is known to everyone. Unfortunately or fortunately, there is no such pill, or rather, I have never seen one. Different approaches have different ideas about the duration of therapy, for example, in cognitive-behavioral therapy there is an approximate number of meetings for working with phobias, if I’m not confused, then 15. This applies to short-term therapy. And of course, even one meeting can give a lot - a better understanding of the situation, maybe even insight, a feeling of shared feelings with the therapist, some support. But in general, I think that the effect will be short-term (this does not apply to crisis intervention, when certain work with the client is really necessary, after a recent traumatic experience), it may even be possible to remove the symptom, but will there be an understanding of the reasons, a change in the usual attitude that led to the state in which the client is. And won’t it manifest itself later in another symptom? I would like to give here one of the examples in my practice, when a client came to me who managed to see at our first meeting that the relationship in which she lives is painful for her, there is violence in it. After one meeting, she found strength and ended the relationship. But then, a few months later, she again asked for help, because difficulties arose in another area, because she did not choose this relationship by chance, she fell into it. To do this, it was necessary to understand what led her to this, what traumas from the past influenced her, how she feels about herself, and so on. Naturally, what she managed to understand at the first meeting was prepared by her psyche in advance, that is, this is not my merit as a therapist. I could only give her confirmation of what was already ripe at the time of the consultation. Help name it, support on the path of change. When a client comes to therapy, most likely he has been working towards his problem for a long time, forming it, and now it will take time to change it, more than a few meetings. The question often arises here: is it worth changing? After all, no matter how hard it is, you’ve already somehow adapted, learned, and coped, but you don’t know what will happen next, it’s scary. Of course, it’s scary, but everyone has these two desires, for change and preserving what is. And those who continue to work in therapy are those who have decided that they can no longer do this and the fear of the new gives way to the fear of continuing to live their lives in the old way. The suffering is so unbearable that there is an understanding that it is necessary to change, otherwise there is no other way. And it is important to talk through these fears and those feelings that will arise when obstacles, resistance, and pain are encountered on the new path. Check to see if the client is going there. And I also think that everything that arose, no matter how painful it was at the moment, was once necessary to preserve itself, the psyche took care of itself in this way, otherwise it was impossible then. This helps not to evaluate, not to try to immediately change everything without understanding the mechanism of its occurrence, otherwise it may not be very safe. How to remove several bricks from a building without putting others in their place. If we return to the question - how many? Individually. Often more than one year. It is impossible to predict the duration of therapy, because it is impossible to understand what kind of story will be told; most often, at the conscious level, the client himself does not know how his meeting with himself will go. I can say that some changes are starting to happen quite quickly. That is, you don’t have to go over and over again and come out with nothing. If there is no movement for several months, then it’s a question of wondering whether this is the right type of therapy, to what extent it was possible to establish a working alliance with the therapist, and so on. It often happens that in the first meetings there are.