How Do You Know if a Therapy Session is Useful?

Today, I had a long conversation with someone about what measurements we should be using when determining if a therapy session was useful for our clients. I thought I’d share it with you as well.

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine who happens to be a clinician at the beginning of his career, and he called me really, really excited because he had what he described as a beautiful session with the client. And I said, “What made it so beautiful?” And they do something, they do a different kind of therapy. They don’t do Solution Focused Brief Therapy. So I said, “What made it so beautiful?” And they talked about how they just knew what they were doing in the session, and they applied these techniques and these strategies and how it just felt really good to do that session.

And I said, “When did the session take place?” And they said, earlier today, a couple hours ago. And I said, “Then how do you know it was a useful session?” Because the only way we know it’s a useful session is if the client experiences change from the session.

And he was saying, I don’t know, it just felt good to do it. And we had a long conversation about, the only measurement that we should use on whether or not a session was good, beautiful, or whatever, was how useful the client experienced it. In essence, did change happen as a result of that conversation? And you can’t know that 2 hours after the session. Some [amount of] time has to take place.

And I realized, this is an important point, which is why I decided to make the video, make this video about it. Because very often, as therapists, we ourselves are anxious and or nervous about how a session is going to go, about how we’re going to fill the time in the session, and what we’re going to do in the session.

Instead of measuring the session based upon whether or not the client experienced change (which, again, is the only thing that tells us whether or not it’s a good session or not), we start measuring the session based upon how it made us feel to do the session.

And it’s very, very important to remember, we literally have one job, we have one sole solitary job in our clients lives, and that is to create desirable changes in our clients lives. That is our sole purpose for being in our clients lives. And the only purpose, it’s not to have beautiful sessions because we felt good about the techniques we were using.

If the session doesn’t produce useful and desirable changes, then it was not a good session.