Bob Rosenbaum and his colleagues Moshe Talmon and Michael Hoyt first developed an approach they called Single Session Therapy (SST) in the late 1980s while working at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California. After discovering that the most common number of sessions attended by clients at their clinic was not the recommended eight—not even four, nor three, nor two—but one, Talmon decided to call up his clients who hadn’t come back after their first session and ask them why. What he learned—that the vast majority of them were happy with just that single hour—would forever alter his conception of what makes therapy, therapy.
Contrary to what he’d feared, these former clients assured him they hadn’t been turned off by him or his way of working. They hadn’t returned to therapy, they said, because they’d gotten what they needed. After having another clinic employee follow up to ascertain that they weren’t just telling him what they thought he wanted to hear, he teamed up with Hoyt and Rosenbaum to undertake a formal study comparing the outcomes of single-session clients to outcomes of clients who’d decided to come back for more. The results of the two groups were indistinguishable: an 88 percent improvement rate in the symptoms they’d hoped to address. Many reported experiencing positive life changes because of what Rosenbaum describes as “basically getting over a hump and getting on with…
