Psychotherapy is a process of both receiving support and a look at your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviors, in a safe, emotionally supportive, and confidential relationship. Meetings with a therapist commonly last between 45 to 60 minutes. The frequency of sessions is a collaborative decision that is influenced by many things such as your level of distress, your personal desires, the kind of therapy you want, the type of issues you bring, your stage of therapy, insurance constraints, and your therapist's recommendations. Weekly sessions are common, with less frequent session as need or at later stages of the therapy process. More frequent sessions can be scheduled in times of crisis or a particularly hard time.

Sometimes people seek the services of a therapist for a one time session to ask for support and feedback with a very specific issue for which one session will meet the needs they have identified for themselves. However, often therapy services are provided on an ongoing basis. The definition of ongoing could mean participating in as few as six sessions focused on dealing with a simple and uncomplicated life transition, could mean months or years of therapy to work through a current crisis or a prior traumatic life experiences, or could be anywhere in between these. 

Psychotherapy has phases. The first stage is that of building a therapeutic relationship. Creating a safe and supportive therapy relationship that is comfortable to you is the most predictive of you feeling that the therapy is meeting your needs. Frequent therapy sessions assist in building this important therapeutic relationship. The second phase of therapy consists of working with the issues that brought you to therapy. While this phase of therapy actually begins during the first therapy session, progress on this phase is limited without the concurrent development of a good therapy relationship. The length of this second phase varies for each struggling life journey. The final phase of therapy is that of ending the therapeutic relationship when therapy goals have been met. People choose many way to achieve this final phase. Sometimes, people decided for themselves that they have reached their goals, discuss this self awareness in a therapy session, allow for a healthy disengagement of the therapeutic relationship, and do not schedule further appointments. Sometimes the therapist brings up the topic of whether the goals have been met and thus assists in disengagement from a relationship that had been important to your coping and growth. Finally, sometimes you have reached your therapy goals but it is perceived that you need ongoing support. In such cases, the frequency of therapy sessions may be increasingly reduced to as often as meets your ongoing need and until it is felt that the support is no longer necessary for your healthy functioning. 

It is important to remember that your relationship with your therapist remains an ongoing negotiation. If there is something that you would like to change in the situation or something that is unhelpful for you, it is important to discuss that within a therapy session. Your desires for your therapy experience are very important and thus both positive and negative feedback, particularly feedback regarding how your therapy needs can be better meet, are very important in a psychotherapy experience.

Sometimes, if you are asking for change therapy, therapy goals are often reached at an enhanced pace if you do some therapy work between sessions. Often this therapy work outside the therapy session simply consists of processing and reprocessing the things that were talked about during a therapy session. This processing does not mean stressing yourself with thought. I describe it as a pondering of therapy concept, and how they may play a part in your struggles, in the back of your mind while you do other things. Some people choose to do some writing between therapy sessions, for example, about a stressful situation, their emotions in that situation, and/or healthier ways of participating in or coping with whatever life presents in that situation. Others choose to pick one specific behavior to work on changing, like looking someone in the eye as they speak or like increasing their awareness of any positive things that live alongside the negative things in their life, or like being mindful or in the moment of sensations (not in thoughts) while walking.