My therapist does the first few sessions differently to me.
There’s nothing like going back into therapy to trigger an automatic evaluation process of your own ways of working.
I haven’t changed my assessment process much since day one: short (15 minutes) phone call to assess compatibility, find out presenting issues, answer any questions the prospective client has, then have a full 50 minute session where I have a form I’ve created that covers their life history. I will go through this mostly in order to get a broad overview of what might have informed how they came to be who they are today. This form includes questions about relationships past and present, school, work, hobbies, coping behaviours (such as drinking or eating) etc.
My therapist doesn’t do that.
Scrappy notebook
We had a twenty minute Zoom call when I first got to the top of their waiting list. They asked a bit about what I was looking for from therapy which meant I spoke a bit about relationship challenges, the stuff that had happened recently that showed me I had specific things to work on, and I asked them about their experience of autism.
This call went well so we arranged our first in-person session.
