Your first therapy session is a chance for you to get to know your therapist and better determine whether he or she is a good fit for you. In that session, your therapist will also work with you to set goals for therapy and introduce some treatment approaches that could work with your particular presenting concern. You may have heard of approaches such as Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), humanistic therapy, or mindfulness, for example. Your therapist will identify approaches that have been proven to work with concerns like yours, and the two of you can decide which one(s) to use. We not only want to match you with the therapist who meshes well with you, but also with the treatment modality that does. And if, after that first session, you don’t feel like you clicked with your therapist, please let us know. Much of the success of therapy depends on the strength of the therapeutic relationship, so it’s important that you feel that connection right away.
Though we at Brentwood Counseling Associates want to tailor our approach to therapy to each individual client, we all practice “talk therapy,” meaning that we use discussion to talk through clients’ presenting concerns. However, some of us may have different emphases during the course of those discussions, or differ in the ways we challenge you to “work on” your problems outside the therapy sessions. We do all expect that, in between therapy sessions, you will either think about or try things differently out in the real world, however. After all, that’s where the majority of your life takes place, and most importantly, where you want to see change happen.