What is Single Session Therapy

If single session therapy (SST) is not a model, mindset, or methodology, then what is it?

How we define single-session therapy (SST) shapes how we think about people, problems, change, and our role in therapy. SST has been described as a model of practice, a mindset, and a methodology. All these ideas lend important notions of what SST is. From a relational lens, life and therapy unfold in relationships. Through this lens, SST becomes a process within a planned single encounter. It’s a way of being in conversation with others, mutually influential, dialogic, and emergent.

Drawing on Michael White's connection to the metaphor of definitional ceremony, SST can be seen as a meaning-making journey (process) where people come to understand themselves in preferred ways through tellings, re-tellings, witnessing and reflection. As ceremony, identity and meaning are co-created, inviting participants to consider new or revised possibilities for their lives.

This process-oriented approach coheres around several key concepts: collaboration, dialogue, meaning-making, foregrounding local and insider knowledge, and the belief that meaningful change can spark and ripple out from even a single encounter. Rather than being tied to specific techniques, SST as a process is responsive and adaptive to the unfolding interaction in the conversation. How can I best receive what others are sharing, and how can we share in a way that is useful to the participant?