How many counselling sessions do I need?

If you are thinking of starting your therapy journey, you might be trying to understand how many sessions you need to commit to before you see progress or feel better. Unfortunately, there is no straightforward answer to this and the number of sessions you need will depend on a few factors - one of them being what you are hoping to get out of counselling.

For clients who want to work on immediate presenting issues (such as anxiety from a job, procrastination in coursework, coping with sudden change), short-term therapy (usually between 6-12 sessions) might be enough to get to the bottom of that. If you opt for short-term therapy, your therapist will usually work with you to set some goals, and determine the main focus of your work, and help you work towards that in your sessions.

Mid-term therapy, usually between 12-20 sessions, is more helpful if you are looking to do some deeper work around attachment, grief or disorders. This work will usually involve delving into your past, your relationships and patterns of behavior, and will often involve work beyond just the present day events and emotions in your life.

Long-term therapy, usually lasting a few years, is most helpful when you want to work on challenging long-established patterns, behaviours, and thoughts - such as unhelpful attachment patterns, unhealthy coping mechanisms, trauma responses, panic attacks and disordered eating. This takes time, as it often requires changing or working through deeply embedded patterns, some that might be in the client’s unconscious awareness.

Ideally, you’d tell your therapist what you’re looking for in your first session and discuss your goals from counselling. On the basis of that, you can work with your counsellor to decide how many sessions you’d like to have, and have regular review sessions to assess how you’re feeling about your initial goals and if they have evolved. The duration of counselling you opt for is important, as having too few sessions can bring up unprocessed emotions, which can do more harm if you don’t have the space to work through them. Whereas, having too many sessions, can create a dependency on the therapist and make it harder for you to move on from therapy.

However, we cannot talk about session numbers without discussing one of the bigger barriers to long-term counselling - money. Counselling is expensive, and committing to long-term therapy is an investment, that people aren’t always able to afford or justify.

So if you’re looking to start, but unsure about how many sessions you’ll need or worried about needing to commit up-front, you can choose to go week-by-week instead. A few sessions are better than no sessions at all, and can still provide you with insights and tools to support you.

I offer both fixed number of sessions, as well as long term open-ended counselling. If you’re not sure where to start, why not start with booking a 15-minute consultation with me and we can take it from there?