Individual Therapy

What is Individual Therapy? 

There is no simple answer to this question.  Individual therapy is difficult to define because most forms of counselling have a one-on-one component. 

Basically, individual therapy is when an individual and therapist meet together.  This is often to work on personal concerns such as assertiveness, personal reactions to life events, self-confidence, growth goals etc. While individual therapy may focus on the individual - changes made often affect others that the person interacts with, thus, individual sessions usually include the reactions of others to your goals for change.

What makes defining individual counselling difficult is that no one field can lay claim to individual therapy as its own, and yet most of them include individual work.  However, the most notable and long standing contributors to individual theories come from the field of psychiatry (psychoanalysis), psychology, and theology.

Most of the individual theories have been influenced by psychoanalytic theory, often called psychoanalysis.  Some of these therapeutic approaches extended the psychoanalytic model, others modified its concepts and procedures, and others emerged as a reaction against it.  Many borrowed and integrated its principals and techniques.  Today there are over 1000 varieties of counselling, with probably 30 or so being the most popular.

Some examples of individual models of therapy are: Rogerian and Person-Centred, Gestalt, Adlerian, Psychoanalysis, Reality Therapy, NLP, and Transactional Analysis to name a few.

I've taken a course on Person-Centered Counselling techniques, is that all there is to it?

One of the most dominant methods used in counsellor education, the Person-Centred Approach, is also used in a multitude of other professions to teach people skills.  For example, tourist hosts, managers, hotel clerks, veterinarians, bankers, flight attendants, etc. are taught core skills of attending, active-listening, clarifying, and reflecting.

While it is helpful to know some person-centred techniques with "customers", it is not the same as using them in therapy.  Most people involved in the health care field, such as nurses, counsellors, social workers, and group home workers receive intense training in individual counselling techniques.